“Now three marvellous religions come out to welcome me,

The Christians with their crosses; the Moors with their Moorish garb

And the Jews with their vihuelas that make the city ring”

These words are taken from La expulsion de los judios de Portugal, a Hispanic-Jewish romance of the 16th century. To this day, they are chanted by the Sephardim of North Africa encapsulating the melting pot of religious faiths which characterized the people of Iberia (including the territory that we know now as Portugal) during the medieval period of 500 to 1500 AD.


Judaism was the first of the Abrahamic rites to appear in Iberia. Some historians speculate that the destruction of the first Temple of Jerusalem in 586 BCE brought migrants but it seems more likely that the first Hebrews (possibly the Dan tribe) sailed as merchant adventurers with the Phoenician fleets and founded small colonies at ports on the east coast. What is certain is that they accompanied the Romans in their later conquest of the peninsular and performed their traditional duties as administrators and tax farmers.


Following the fall of the second Temple in 70 CE, a diaspora of Jews spread westward to Iberia and included many apostles and believers in Christianity who sought to make converts of the indigenous peoples and their Roman overlords. Their efforts were subject to persecution until, in 323, the Emperor Constantine made what had previously been considered as Reform Judaism the official religion of a crumbling Empire.


The Visigoths then over-ran most of Iberia by taking control either by negotiation or by conflict from the Romans but they brought the austere Arian rite of Christianity until, in 587, they joined with Roman Catholicism by adopting the Nicene creed for the basis of their worship and law. The Jews were tolerated by the Visigoths because of their utility as administrators and expertise in commerce. Despite some outbursts of persecution, all went reasonably well with this uneasy relationship until everything changed in 711 when Umayyad armies invaded and rapidly conquered nearly two thirds of Iberia.


The invaders were drawn from Arab, Berber and other North African tribes who advanced under the banner of Islam. However, some of the Berber leaders were linked with Judaism and had a history of converting into or out of various beliefs depending on the direction of the religious winds of fortune. Some historians recount that the Hispanic Jews welcomed the arrivals and readily transferred their loyalties by aiding the new civil administration.


The Islamic conquerors proved to be benevolent when it suited them and permitted the Christian communities to continue living in their particular cultural environment by maintaining churches, commerce and law-courts intact with a status as dhimmi which required the payment of a heavy jizyah tax. However, as time passed, many of the Andalusi Christians, known as the Mozarabs, realized the benefits of living under Islamic rule and, by interaction through a shared culture and language, connected to the new environment. Within two centuries, it is estimated that one third of the population fully converted to Islam while the remainder adopted the lifestyle of the Maghreb. This relationship is reflected in the changed architecture of churches the towers of which often featured a minaret and in social mores such as diet and dress.


The Mozarabs showed a distaste for trade; few of their merchants were present in commerce to compete with Muslims and Jews. Instead, they preferred an agricultural economy and large numbers were present in the countryside of western Iberia below the river Tejo. Following the reconquest which began in the 12th century with the recapture of Lisbon and Sintra, the Moors were pushed gradually south until all of what is now the Alentejo/Algarve was freed of their armed control. This left the Mozarabs in a most unfavourable position whereby the liberators from the North considered them to be nearer to Islam than Christianity either by actual conversion or by association.

Credits: Wikipedia;

Whereas, in 1497, the Sephardim were given the choice between baptism and expulsion the followers of Islam were told to return to North Africa. This regulation was also applied to those Mozarabs who continued to worship Allah despite their having Christian ascendants with Visigothic or indigenous bloodlines.

Thus, the kingdom of Portugal entered, in 1500, the early modern period of history with Roman Catholicism being a State religion to the exclusion of all others. This religious apartheid was enforced by the institution of the Portuguese inquisition in 1536 which for nearly three hundred years, hounded, punished and burned unbelievers.

The efficacy of music as a healer of societal delinquency has often been demonstrated; particularly so by Marcel Pérês and his Ensemble Organum which recently completed a study (begun in 1997) of the Mozarabic Latin chant and the Samaa rites of Morocco. Although there is little left of medieval manuscripts with notation to guide performance, persistent research of oral traditions produced an astonishing similarity with texts being taken from the Koran, Bible and profane literature and the male voice styles employed to recite them.

To extend this comparison, I recommend listening to the “Chants of the Templar Knights” as recorded by Ensemble Organum on CD HMO 8905302 which is based on a manuscript recently discovered at the Chateau de Chantilly. This gives in plain-chant almost the entire Office of the Holy Sepulchre dating from the late 12th century. It is uncanny to hear the singing of psalms in almost identical format and demonstrates the unity of the spirituality of the three Abrahamic faiths as harmoniously described in the caption verse of this essay.

Roberto Cavaleiro Tomar 08 July 2024