[3] With the fall of the Roman Empire, Jews were persecuted by the Visigoths when royalty converted to catholicism and other European Christian kingdoms that controlled the area after that period.

In 711 CE, the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula was seen by many in the Jewish population as a liberation, and marked as the beginning of what many have seen as a golden age (the Islamic Al-Andalus) even if the Jews, as well as the Christians (the Mozarabs of the Visigothic rite), under Muslim rule were considered dhimmi, who paid a special tax as non-Muslims, but could openly practice their religion and live in autonomous communities.

[4] The importance of the Jewish population to the development of the urban economy can be inferred from charters Afonso granted in 1170 to the non-Christian merchants living in Lisbon, Almada, Palmela and Alcacer.

[5] King Sancho I continued to honor these charters by protecting the Jewish community from rioting crusaders in 1189 by forcibly removing them from Lisbon.

[5] King Sancho I of Portugal continued his father's policy, making Jose Ibn-Yahya, the son of Yahia Ben Rabbi, High Steward of the Realm.

The clergy, however, invoking the restrictions of the Fourth Council of the Lateran, brought considerable pressure to bear against the Jews during the reign of King Dinis I of Portugal, but the monarch maintained a conciliatory position.

[9] Those who could not afford the fee demanded from them by King John II after those eight months were declared his enslaved personal property and distributed to the Portuguese nobility.

[14] Zacuto might have an uncredited appearance in Luís de Camões's 1572 epic poem, The Lusiad, as the unnamed "old man of Restelo beach", a Cassandra-like character that surges forward just before Vasco da Gama's departure to chide the vanity of fame and warn of the travails that await him (Canto IV, v.94-111).

Tens of thousands of Spanish Jews fled Spain, including to Portugal, where King John II granted them asylum in return for payment.

Like the Spanish Inquisition, it concentrated its efforts on rooting out converts from other faiths (overwhelmingly Judaism) who did not adhere to the strictures of Catholic orthodoxy; like in Spain, the Portuguese inquisitors mostly targeted the Jewish New Christians, conversos, or marranos.

Jews and non-Catholic Christians reportedly had substantially better numerical skills than the Catholic majority, which might be due to the Jewish religious doctrine, which focused strongly on education, for example, because Torah-reading was compulsory for men.

These Crypto-Jews were known as New Christians, and would be under the constant surveillance of the Inquisition – to such an extent that most of these, would eventually leave the country in the centuries[22] to come and again embrace openly their Jewish faith, joining the communities of Spanish and Portuguese Jews in places such as Amsterdam, London or Livorno.

Known as the Marranos, some dozens have survived until today (basically only the community from the small town of Belmonte, plus some more isolated families) by the practice of inmarriage and few cultural contact with the outside world.

[citation needed] In the 19th century, with the end of the inquisition, some affluent families of Sephardi Jewish Portuguese origin, namely from Morocco and Gibraltar, returned to Portugal (such as the Ruah, Bensaúde, Anahory, Abecassis, and Buzzaglo).

[27] In 1937, Adolfo Benarus, Honorary Chairman of COMASSIS[28] and a leader of the Lisbon's Jewish Community published a book where he rejoiced with the fact that there was no anti-Semitism in Portugal.

Yad Vashem historian Avraham Milgram says that modern anti-Semitism failed "to establish even a toehold in Portugal"[30] while it grew racist and virulent elsewhere in early twentieth-century Europe.

"[31] At the outbreak of World War II, to the nearly 400 Jews that were living in Portugal an additional 650 Jewish refugees from Central Europe were granted a quasi-resident status.

More recently, in 2011, Milgram published a densely researched book, “Portugal Salazar and the Jews” where he again challenges the long-maintained but fuzzy numbers of the Sousa Mendes disobedience episode.

In total, in the eighteen months from July 1940 to December 1941, the HICEM took care of the sea transport of 8,346 Jews who left Lisbon for trans-Atlantic countries.

Other Portuguese who deserve further credit for saving Jews during the war are Professor Francisco Paula Leite Pinto and Moisés Bensabat Amzalak.

[46] The synagogue has always had a small number of members and, for much of the 20th century, has been entrusted to families in Central and Eastern Europe (Roskin, Kniskinsky, Finkelstein, Cymerman, Pressman and others), who married among themselves.

[46] The community counts among its members Jews of origins as diverse as Poland, Egypt, the United States, India, Russia, Israel, Spain, Portugal and England.

The present rabbi is Daniel Litvak, a native of Argentina, and the current vice president is Isabel Ferreira Lopes, the granddaughter of Captain Barros Basto.

In January 2019, the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, visited the Porto Synagogue, where he attended the celebration of the Shabbat Cabalat, after which he took the floor.

Upon arrival, the Head of State was received by the President of the Jewish Community of Porto, Dias Ben Zion, and by the Chief Rabbi, Daniel Litvak.

Its members are descendants of crypto-Jews that managed to preserve many of the rites, prayers and social relations throughout the period of the Inquisition, marrying inside a community constituted by a few families.

It includes a library that places special emphasis on works about the Torah, either those written by Portuguese Jewish scholars or printed in Portugal in the late 15th-century.

At present there are numerous Jewish cultural heritage sites in Portugal,[55] including five synagogues in the country, in Lisbon (Sha'aré Tikvá – Orthodox/ Ohel Yaakov – Conservative[56]), Porto (Mekor Haim), Ponta Delgada in the Azores islands (Porta do Céu – Shaar ha-Shamain) and Belmonte (Bet Eliahu), and several private places where the Jewish community meets.

The genetic signatures of people in the Iberian Peninsula provide new evidence that the number of Jews forced to convert to Christianity during Catholic rule in the 15th and 16th centuries was much greater than historians believed.

[60][61] On February 3, 2024, a housing protest in Porto escalated into an antisemitic demonstration, where participants held signs assigning blame to Jews and Zionists for economic challenges.