The two surviving medieval synagogues of Toledo are among the finest monuments of Sephardic Jewry, and between them they record both the flourishing and the fall of one of the great Jewish communities of medieval Europe.
Santa Maria la Blanca
Built in the early thirteenth century, Santa Maria la Blanca is a hall of white horseshoe arches raised on octagonal pillars, built by Muslim craftsmen in the Almohad style for a Jewish congregation living under a Christian king. The building states the character of medieval Toledo, a city of three faiths in close and productive proximity, more economically than any argument about coexistence could. Its later name records its fate: it was converted into a church after the Jews were expelled, and it survives as a monument.
El Transito and Samuel ha-Levi
The Synagogue of El Transito was built in 1357 for Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia, treasurer to King Peter I of Castile. It is far richer, its walls carved with Hebrew inscriptions of psalms and praise interwoven with the heraldry of Castile, a Jewish sanctuary that displays its patron's service to a Christian crown. The building's beauty is shadowed by its history: Abulafia was arrested and tortured to death by the king he served within a few years of completing it, a reminder of how precarious even the highest Jewish position could be.
What survives
Both buildings passed out of Jewish hands with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and were used as churches; El Transito now houses a museum of Sephardic Jewish history. Together they are the principal surviving witnesses in Toledo to a community whose language, Ladino, and traditions the Sephardic diaspora carried across the Mediterranean and beyond, and they form part of the historic city inscribed as a World Heritage site.