If someone asks where Seville's synagogue is, there is no simple answer. None is standing. There were three — and there was very nearly a fourth — and all three are Catholic churches today. What is striking is that none of them was born a synagogue: all three had been mosques. Three buildings that changed religion twice in a century and a half, and whose history can be reconstructed almost in full from documents.
1248: three mosques for the aljama
Ferdinand III took Seville in 1248 and his son Alfonso X shared out the city. In that Repartimiento the crown's Jewish officials — tax collectors, jurists, physicians, scribes — received houses and orchards, and the aljama received **three mosques to turn into synagogues**, in what are now Santa Cruz and San Bartolomé. It is no small grant: it is the founding act of the Judería. Before that date there is no evidence of a Jewish quarter of its own in the city, as we set out in what remains of the Barrio de Santa Cruz.
Santa María la Blanca — the only one with remains
It is the one everybody visits, and rightly so: it is **the only Seville synagogue with surviving remains**. The present building is baroque inside — spectacular seventeenth-century plasterwork — but the plan and some elements come from earlier. Directly opposite stood the shops Alfonso X granted to the rabbi Yuçaf Cabaçay, which the document itself describes as the ones that already existed “in the time of the Moors”: this exact spot, in other words, was Jewish life before and after the conquest.
San Bartolomé — the other half of the quarter
The quarter was not only Santa Cruz. San Bartolomé was the other half, and the second synagogue stood there. It is the part of the quarter tourism skips: fewer orange trees, fewer postcards, more houses. That is exactly why it preserves the street scale of that world better — narrow lanes, courtyards, blind corners — even though nothing identifiable remains of the synagogue itself.
Santa Cruz — the main synagogue, and the square that erased it
The third gave the parish its name and was the main synagogue. It stood where the Plaza de Santa Cruz is today — that square with the Cruz de la Cerrajería in the middle, one of the most reproduced images of Seville. The irony is complete: the whole quarter is named after that building, and of the building nothing remains, because the open space we admire today was made by pulling it down. You are literally standing on the spot, with nothing to say so.
The fourth synagogue a king asked for
By the middle of the fourteenth century the community had grown so much that **Alfonso XI asked the pope to authorise prayer in a fourth synagogue**, citing the large Jewish population that had arrived with the conquest. It is a detail that says more than any statistic: a Castilian king negotiating with Rome so that his Jewish subjects could have another house of prayer. That fourteenth century is the high-water mark of Seville's Judería. Forty years later it would begin to come apart.
1391: the year they stopped being synagogues
After years of preaching by archdeacon Ferrán Martínez, the assault of 1391 undid the community: whole families died, emigrated or were baptised. The synagogues became churches, and with them the cycle closed: mosque, synagogue, church. The full story of that year is in 1391: the year that changed the quarter. What was left of that world — the documents, the trades, the names — is gathered in the room Life in the Jewish quarter of the virtual museum.
