Santa Cruz Synagogue of Seville

The Jewish community

Seville's Jewish community was old and large. The Jewish Encyclopedia names Eleazar ben Nahman ibn Ashar as rabbi of a flourishing community under the Almoravids, and says that after the Christian conquest Fernando III let the Jews live in a quarter near the Alcázar and gave them some mosques for synagogues; Alfonso X confirmed these grants and added trading privileges. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the same source estimates, six to seven thousand Jewish families lived in the city, served by three large synagogues and about twenty small ones; it records that the largest synagogue was entered through the Puerta de la Carne but does not name it. The quarter lay in what is now the barrio of Santa Cruz, between the Alcázar and the eastern city wall. After 1391 most surviving Jews had been baptised, and Seville became a centre of converso life; the Inquisition was first set up in the city. Spanish Wikipedia notes that the general expulsion of 1492 had less effect in Seville because few Jews remained after 1391.

Architecture and design

The synagogue was not built for Jewish use: all sources read agree that it occupied a former mosque taken over after 1248, as did Santa María la Blanca nearby. Juan Ruiz Jiménez summarises a later description of the church of Santa Cruz as a basilican hall of arches carried on granite columns of uneven height and thickness, and suggests that the church kept the space of the synagogue largely unchanged. Rafael Cómez Ramos's 2015 book on Seville's synagogues, as reviewed in revista PH, describes all three main synagogues as basilican in plan and reconstructs Santa Cruz from documents. Óscar Gil Delgado's 2013 article in Sefarad includes a plan of the Jewish quarter marking the three synagogues and a comparative plan of the synagogue structures in Santa María la Blanca and Santa Cruz, and discusses how the conversion walled up the Torah niches. Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza renovated the church in 1480. Three columns said to come from the building can be seen in calle de La Rábida. The capacity, dimensions and builder are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded about worship in this building. The only person tied to it by name in the sources read is its rabbi in 1391, Yehuda Alobas, mentioned by Juan Ruiz Jiménez in connection with the transfer of the building to the cathedral. Nothing is known of its cantors, its officers, its ritual furnishings or how many people it held. As one of the three large synagogues of a community of several thousand families, it was presumably among the main places of prayer and teaching in the quarter, but no source read describes its services, its school or its endowments. The comparative plan published by Óscar Gil Delgado and the conversion work he describes, including the walling up of Torah niches, are the main evidence for the interior arrangement. Ruiz Jiménez's study is concerned with the sound of the space as a synagogue and later as a church, and suggests that its basilican hall of arches survived largely intact until the building was demolished.

Destruction

The synagogue ceased to be Jewish in 1391. For about fifteen years Ferrand Martínez, Archdeacon of Écija, preached against Seville's Jews and called for their synagogues to be torn down. In March 1391 a crowd broke into the Jewish quarter; nobles who protected the Jews quelled it and nobody was punished. On 6 June 1391 the populace returned and attacked the quarter from all sides, plundering and burning houses. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives more than 4,000 dead; most survivors accepted baptism, and women and children were sold as slaves. After the massacre the synagogue was handed to the cathedral and, according to Spanish Wikipedia, converted by the city council into the church of Santa Cruz. The building itself survived as a church for four centuries. Declared unsafe in 1806-1807, it was ordered demolished in 1810, during the French occupation, by the authorities then governing the city, to widen the narrow streets around it; Ruiz Jiménez and other sources give 1811 for the demolition. No source read names the official who gave the order.

The community’s fate

The massacre of June 1391 broke the Jewish community of Seville. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia more than 4,000 Jews were killed, most of the rest were baptised under threat of death, and women and children were sold into slavery. The king later fined the city, a penalty paid over ten years, according to Spanish Wikipedia, but no one was punished for the March riot. Seville's synagogues were converted into churches or a convent: Santa Cruz, Santa María la Blanca, San Bartolomé and Madre de Dios. A small Jewish presence continued, and San Bartolomé is said by one source to have stayed a synagogue for a time, but the city became chiefly a home of conversos. The Inquisition was first established in Seville, and the Jewish cemetery later became a garden. The general expulsion of 1492 ended open Jewish life in Spain. In 1905, about 200 Jewish families, mostly recent immigrants from Tangier and other parts of North Africa, lived in Seville.

The site today

Nothing of the synagogue or the church stands. The site is the Plaza de Santa Cruz in the barrio of Santa Cruz, a square laid out in 1918 by the architect Juan Talavera y Heredia ahead of the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition, shaded by orange trees with a raised garden at its centre. In the middle stands an iron cross of 1692 by Sebastián Conde, brought here in 1921 from elsewhere in the city. A plaque on the square records that Murillo was buried in the vanished church. Three columns said to come from the building survive in calle de La Rábida. The parish of Santa Cruz moved in 1810 and since 1835 has used the former convent church of the Espíritu Santo.

Notable names