Where was the medieval Jewish quarter of Madrid, and where exactly was it located? More than eight centuries after the first documented Jewish presence in Madrid, it remains an open question whether a separate and distinct Jewish quarter ever existed in the medieval city, since successive forced relocations and the scarcity of documentary sources make any historical reconstruction extremely difficult.
This article brings together all the known documents that shed light on the location of Jewish dwellings in medieval Madrid, and examines the urban patterns that the Jewish community may have followed in settling the city during the Middle Ages.
The principal difficulty encountered when attempting to trace the location of the medieval Jewish quarter of Madrid is the remarkable scarcity of documentary evidence: fewer than thirty documents and archaeological remains are currently known to provide reliable information on the subject, and these are distributed randomly across a period of three centuries. Despite the scattered nature of these references, there is at no point any clear indication that a compact and clearly demarcated Jewish quarter — a distinct neighbourhood with an identity of its own — ever existed in the medieval town: not even after the segregation orders of 1480, since the evidence from that period also contradicts such a conclusion.
It must be understood, therefore, that the successive segregation measures were never fully complied with, and that in general the Jewish population lived freely intermingled with the rest of the town’s inhabitants, although at any given time their place of residence appears to have followed certain specific patterns of settlement.
This article is a summary of a much more extensive and detailed study published under the same title in issue 37 of our magazine.
1. The Early Jewish Quarter, up to 1391
For this earliest period, the three known documents providing locational data place Jews in the parishes of San Andrés (1203, grandchildren of Daroch, probable ancestor of mosé Adaroque), Santa María (1220, mosé ben Alperriel) and San Miguel de los Octoes (1380, don Jacob Çaban, son of don Abrahen de Alcoçer, his wife doña Hermosa, and don Abrahen Guafaj), while an archaeological find (thirteenth century, a possible mezuzah in one of the dwellings uncovered at the Plaza de la Armería) places them once again in Santa María. There is therefore no reason to suppose a Jewish quarter located in the old almudena, and one might even venture, in light of what occurred in later periods, that this was the time of greatest dispersal of the Jewish population across the various neighbourhoods of the town.
2. The Dispersal: 1391–1480; the Jews’ Castle and the Synagogue
In 1391 the Madrid aljama (Jewish community) was attacked by a group led by Ruy Sánchez de Orozco, Vasco Mejía, Lope Fernández de Vargas, Diego de Vargas and Ruy García de la Torre. The Jewish community of Madrid was decimated, and most — perhaps all — of those who survived and did not flee were forced to convert rapidly. Since there does not appear to have been a Jewish quarter as such at that time, it is likely that the attack was focused on the Jews’ Castle and the synagogue (was the latter originally located within the former?), as it is known that this place of prayer and assembly had changed location by 1402, when it is recorded as standing next to the Campo del Rey.
The known documents from this period confirm that after the events of 1391 the Jewish population continued to be dispersed across several neighbourhoods of the town, though not across all of them. The Jews appear to have settled only along the west-to-east axis (or perhaps more precisely, west-to-southeast) of medieval Madrid: the parishes of San Nicolás (1449, Mosé Abençafir), San Salvador (1403, Calle de los Estelos, now Calle de los Señores de Luzón, Samuel aben Salom; 1444, Çag Çarça), San Miguel de los Octoes (1443, Abrahem Françés, son of Semuel Françés; 1471, Yudá Lerma), San Ginés (1449, Menahem Çidré) and Santa Cruz (1449, Pedro García Adaroque at the southwest corner of the Plaza del Arrabal, Fraym aben Xuxen de Toledo between the Calle de Cuchilleros and the Calle de Toledo, and Menahen Çidré toward the south side of what would later become the Plaza Mayor).
There is no evidence of Jewish settlement in the northern parishes (San Miguel de la Sagra, San Juan, Santiago and San Martín) or in the southern ones (San Andrés and San Pedro); nor is there any data placing Jews in the parish of Santa María, a location perhaps unappealing given the memory of what had occurred there, and presumably short of available plots given its small size. In any case, the limited nature of the evidence does not permit any hypothesis to be advanced regarding this apparently selective pattern of settlement.
Fortunately, the two characteristic elements of the Madrid aljama — the castle and the synagogue — can be located with some degree of reliability. The Jews’ Castle stood at the northern junction of blocks 188 and 191, abutting the town wall and in all likelihood occupying the southeast corner of the emirate enclosure, thereby coinciding with the northern half of the Palacio de los Consejos. It is only documented in 1447 (Haym Françes), 1463 and 1464, but its existence is probably far older, perhaps going back to the Islamic period (could the Jews’ Castle be identified with the Muslim castle itself, one of whose hypothetical locations is precisely that proposed here for the Jewish one?). If the two towers recorded in 1385 as having collapsed “in the Jewish quarter of the said Town” referred to this castle — indicating that it was already in an advanced state of decay by that date — one might suppose that by the mid-fifteenth century it had lost all practical function and was being cited in the documents merely as a topographical reference.
As for the synagogue, we know that in the early fifteenth century (documents of 1402 and 1403) it stood to the north of the parish of Santa María, adjacent to the Campo del Rey, perhaps toward the eastern end of the future Royal Stables built in 1556, and that it was still there in 1481 (purchase of a plot by Rabí Jacob on 20 September of that year). It is highly probable, however, that an earlier building had existed — perhaps fallen into ruin before 1385 or destroyed in 1391 — of which no record survives.
3. The New Jewish Quarter: 1481–1492
The segregation order promulgated in 1480 resulted in the designation in Madrid, in July 1481 and by agreement between the council and the royal inspector Juan Ramírez de Guzmán, of an independent Jewish quarter to be located around the synagogue — that is, in the northwest sector of the parish of Santa María, possibly extending southward as far as the vicinity of the Puerta de la Vega (according to a later declaration of 1538). This quarter was to be enclosed by a wall of just under two metres in height that would be locked at night, and which, owing to the poverty of the aljama, would be paid for by the council itself. In September of that year three Jews are recorded at that location as either existing owners or purchasers of new houses (Mosé Adaroque, don Çag Majagallos and the physician Rabí Jacob), but on 31 October the segregation had still not been resolved, as the town had to call upon the inspector Ramírez de Guzmán to carry it out; and barely a week later, on 9 November, Rabí Jacob obtained permission to live outside the Jewish enclosure in order to attend to the sick at night as well.
It is at this precise moment — between November 1481 and July 1482 — that something probably occurred of which no explicit record survives, though clear indications do remain: the designation of a new Jewish quarter, distinct from the one located in July 1481 in the almudena, and in a more remote location. There is no evidence to suggest the reasons for this move, but it may well have taken place on the occasion of the second intervention by Ramírez de Guzmán, called for, as noted, in October 1481.
Only by accepting that this relocation took place can sense be made of two pieces of evidence from immediately afterwards: first, that in July 1482 the council asked the monarchs for permission for four Jewish cloth-merchants and spice-dealers to keep their shops outside the Jewish quarter during the day, as it was situated far from the town’s trading areas and market squares; and second, that in January 1483 a petition was made to the queen for Rabí Jacob to be allowed to return to the interior of the town, to the place where he had previously lived, since the quarter in which he now resided was far from the town and its suburbs. Both pieces of evidence suggest that the Jews had been forced to move to a considerably more distant Jewish quarter, located outside the town walls: it could not therefore have been the one initially designated by Ramírez de Guzmán in his first visit of July 1481, next to the Campo del Rey. Moreover, the last two known documents from this period appear to suggest a progressive abandonment of Jewish-owned property within the town: the transfer in 1485 of a plot “belonging to a Jew” for the construction of the hospital at the Campo del Rey, and that of another in 1489 (“at the Puerta de Guadalajara”, the property of Rabí Losar, son of Ircano) for the town granary.
Where might this second Jewish quarter have been located? A first hypothesis points to the western area of the Pozacho, a steep slope used for agricultural and industrial purposes between the southern walls of the emirate enclosure and the bed of the San Pedro stream. In its northwestern zone, Jews purchased two plots in January and March 1484 (Carrión and maestre Çulema) — the only known plots outside both walled enclosures, Christian and Islamic.
The second hypothesis, however apparently superseded, must necessarily be that of Lavapiés-Barrionuevo. This should be understood not as referring to the present-day location of Lavapiés, but to a less remote area: also outside the walls, like the Pozacho, but this time pressed against the southeast side of the suburb wall, between the present-day streets of Atocha and Duque de Alba-Magdalena, or perhaps somewhat further south — though not beyond Antón Martín — an area known in the medieval period by the name of Lavapiés. This quarter would probably have been connected in some way with the significant Barrio Nuevo existing right on that boundary between the suburb of Santa Cruz and Lavapiés, although the early appearance of that name, already in 1422, might perhaps point to other earlier episodes connected with the Madrid aljama.
Be that as it may, it appears that neither of these segregation orders was strictly observed: neither the first at the Campo del Rey (recall the three plots at the Pozacho in 1484 and at the Puerta de Guadalajara in 1489) nor the hypothetical second at Lavapiés-Barrionuevo (since the late declaration of 1538 attests to a Jewish presence in the almudena between 1488 and 1495(?)).
4. The Expulsion: 1492 and Beyond
The expulsion edict of 31 March 1492 resulted in the exile or forced conversion of all the Jews of Madrid. The documents from this period are extremely scarce, largely because those who converted in order to remain in the town were obliged to adopt Castilian names, making it impossible to trace them further. Those who chose to leave sold their properties (Rabí Lezar, in May 1492, and other houses — or perhaps the same one — in 1495, though the survival of his Hebrew name in the documentary record at that date is puzzling), and some of them returned several years later, already baptised (among them, the six physicians employed by the council).