The Project "Portuguese Jewish Sources in Medieval Times"

In this proposal I intend to disclose some elements on the activities that have so far taken place as a part of the project “Portuguese Jewish Sources in Medieval Times”, sponsored by Rothschild Foundation, and whose grantee institution is CIDEHUS, Évora University.

This project aims to collect, analyze and divulgate documents issued by Jews, or with Jews as participants, both as individual or as a collectivity, during the Middle Ages, in Portugal.

The results of this scientific activity will allow perspectives of a kind of self-image of this group as a minority, sometimes portrayed through a vision of the “others”, in the case of Portugal, mostly the Christian religious and civil powers.

Our goal is to collect those documents in Central Archives, as well as in local archives, throughout the country, in order to cover a large information on the subject.

During this period the team collected a huge amount of images of these documents, stored in more than 20 Cds. We also intend to summarize them, and made several copies of the CDs. These copies will be stored at CIDHUS and at The Lisbon Jewish Museum, also accessible to public. Besides, we will keep a database were the images of the most important of those documents and a description of them will appear online.

I also intend in this communication to briefly summarize the type of documentation hitherto found.