Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca

Toledo in the Middle Ages was a city of three faiths, and this small building in its old Jewish quarter is one of the clearest traces of that mix. It was built as a synagogue for the Jewish community of the Christian kingdom of Castile, most likely around 1205 — a wooden tablet found nearby carries the date 1180, and the exact year is still argued over. A probable patron is Joseph ben Meir ben Shoshan, whose father handled the finances of King Alfonso VIII and whose epitaph records that he built a synagogue. The builders were Jewish, the craftsmen worked in the Mudéjar manner, and the form they chose was borrowed from Almohad mosques rather than from any synagogue tradition.

The effect inside is startling for so modest an exterior. A brick hall roughly 27 metres long is divided into five aisles, the central one slightly wider, by rows of octagonal piers — twenty-four free-standing and eight set into the walls. They carry long ranks of horseshoe arches, and everything is washed in plain white, so that the eye goes straight to the capitals: finely carved pine cones, scrolls and leaves in pale plaster, each slightly different. With its forest of arches the space reads more like a small mosque than a house of Jewish prayer, and that ambiguity is its beauty.

Its later history follows the fate of Spanish Jewry. After the pogroms of 1391 and the anti-Jewish preaching that followed, the building was taken over by the Church and consecrated as a church in the first decade of the fifteenth century, later passing to the Order of Calatrava. It took its present name, "Saint Mary the White", from an image of the Virgin kept inside. Over the following centuries it served as barracks, a warehouse and even a dance hall, until it was declared a national monument and restored in 1856. It belongs today to the Archdiocese of Toledo and is kept as a museum, one of the most visited monuments of the city, and it is counted among the oldest synagogue buildings still standing in Europe.

Getting there

Santa María la Blanca is in the old Jewish quarter of Toledo of the walled old town, less than a kilometre from the city centre. Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD) is about 81 km away. Renfe Avant high-speed trains run from Madrid Atocha to Toledo in about 35 minutes.