Jewish tradition has long held that the Sephardim — the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula — arrived in the land they called Sepharad in the most distant antiquity. The great scholar Isaac Abravanel claimed — in his commentary on Zechariah — that his family had come to the Peninsula after the destruction of the First Temple, a tradition placing them in Seville for nearly two thousand years. The Malbim identified the biblical Tarshish — the place to which Jonah fled, the westernmost point of the known world — with Tartessos in southern Spain, an identification now widely supported by archaeology, though earlier rabbinical authorities (Ibn Ezra, Rashi) had placed it in North Africa. If Jewish traders accompanied the Phoenician merchants who sailed to Gadir and the tin coast of Galicia, then the roots of Sepharad may intertwine with the very dawn of Mediterranean commerce in the Atlantic.

Yet between legend and archaeology lies a vast silence. The earliest tangible evidence of Jewish presence in Iberia is modest: a trilingual inscription — in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek — on a child's sarcophagus found in Tarragona, dating to the Roman imperial period; a mosaic at Elche from the first century that almost certainly decorated a synagogue floor; a tombstone from Adra inscribed with the name of a Jewish infant, Annia Salomonula, from the third century. In the far west, a marble slab discovered near Silves in the Algarve bearing the Hebrew name Yehiel provides some of the oldest archaeological evidence from the western Peninsula — remarkably, found in a Roman villa, evidence of Jewish life in rural Lusitania.

The Apostle Paul himself expressed his intention to travel to Hispania in his Epistle to the Romans — a passage that early Jewish commentators interpreted as confirmation that organized Jewish communities already existed there. The Council of Elvira, convened around 300 AD near Granada, issued canons specifically regulating relations between Jews and Christians — proof that by the late Roman period, the Jewish population was substantial enough to alarm the priesthood. Canon 16 prohibited intermarriage with Jews in terms more severe than those applied to pagans. The severity of these canons reveals the reality they sought to suppress: that in Roman Hispania, Jews and the earliest Christians were neighbors, dinner companions, and marriage partners — communities not yet fully separated, likely drawn from the same diaspora stock.

In Galicia specifically, the documentary trail does not begin until the eleventh century. But the region's deep integration into Phoenician and Roman trade networks — the same tin routes, the same river corridors, the same Atlantic ports — makes it plausible that Jewish merchants and settlers reached the northwest long before any parchment recorded their names. What is certain is this: by the time the medieval documents begin, the Jews of Galicia were already there, already essential, already woven into the economic sinew of the land.

In the Middle Ages, the town of Ribadavia was rich, endowed with political and economic importance in which Jewish traders played a major role. Their community supported its economy through the Ribeiro wine trade — exporting the prized white wine of the Avia and Miño valleys to the peninsular kingdoms and beyond: to Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, and England. The judería was not merely a ghetto but a thriving commercial district, and its inhabitants excelled in the administration of goods, in craft trades, and above all as the intermediaries who connected Galician viticulture to the markets of Europe.

The Jewish quarter formed around the 12th and 13th centuries, benefiting from the settlement of Jews since the 10th century in the neighboring lands of Celanova and from the presence of a powerful group of merchants following Fernando II's charter of 1164. The nucleus of the judería extended from the Plaza Mayor to the medieval wall. The main artery was the street formerly known as Rúa da Xudería — later renamed Merelles Caula — running from the Plaza Mayor to the Praza da Madalena, where the synagogue is believed to have stood. From there, through the Praza de Buxán, the quarter descended to the Porta Nova de Abaixo, the southern gate through which one reached the Miño river.

The most dramatic episode of the medieval judería came in 1386, when the Duke of Lancaster — married to the eldest daughter of the late King Pedro I — invaded Galicia, claiming the Castilian throne. Ribadavia was besieged by more than 2,000 English spearmen and archers under Sir Thomas Percy. According to the contemporary chronicle of Froissart, both Christians and Jews fought together to defend the town. The English took Ribadavia using a spectacular siege tower on wheels, and upon entering, looted the Jewish houses in particular. Froissart claimed there were quinze cens — fifteen hundred — Jews in Ribadavia.

This cohabitation — convivencia — appears to have been largely amicable. Jews and Christians shared the defense of their town. Even after the expulsion decree of 1492, many Jews in Ribadavia chose to convert rather than leave, and the community continued, transformed but not destroyed, into the converso networks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The judería of Ribadavia is one of the best-preserved Jewish quarters in Spain and a member of the Red de Juderías — Caminos de Sefarad. The Centro de Información Xudía de Galicia (Sephardic Museum of Galicia) is housed in the Pazo de los Condes on the Plaza Mayor. Every August, the Festa da Istoria commemorates the town's medieval heritage, including a reenactment of a Jewish wedding. The Casa de la Inquisición stands at 25 Rúa de San Martiño — five heraldic shields on its façade proclaim the power of the Puga, Mosquera, and Bahamonde lineages. Until recently, A Tafona da Herminia (Herminia's Bakery) sold traditional Sephardic confections from old family recipes — almond flour, dates, sesame, and cardamom.

After the expulsion decree of 1492, the Jewish community of Ribadavia did not vanish — it transformed. Many Jews accepted baptism and remained as conversos (New Christians), outwardly practicing Catholicism while privately maintaining the faith of their ancestors. For nearly a century, they lived in relative peace. The Inquisition tribunal nearest to Galicia was in Valladolid, far enough away that its reach rarely extended to the remote northwest. Portuguese conversos fleeing the persecution of the Inquisition of Coimbra in 1522 found refuge in the Ribeiro, attracted by the booming wine economy. By the 1570s, a second wave of Portuguese conversos had arrived, quickly integrating into the town's civic life. Some rose to positions of prominence — Felipe Álvarez became Procurador General of Ribadavia; Juan López Hurtado served as Regidor of the town.

This fragile equilibrium shattered in 1575, when the Tribunal of the Inquisition was established in Santiago de Compostela, bringing the machinery of persecution directly to Galicia's doorstep. Even then, two more decades passed before catastrophe struck.

In 1606, a man named Jerónimo Bautista de Mena — himself a converso, born in Ribadavia — delivered a list to the Tribunal of Santiago naming approximately two hundred people as practitioners of Jewish rites. He accused his own mother, Ana Méndez, his sister Ana de Mena (aged 17), and his brother Nicolás (aged 7 or 8). The motive, according to local tradition, was revenge — he had received a smaller inheritance than his brothers. Jerónimo Bautista de Mena was found dead in the street in 1607, assassinated by an unknown hand.

But the damage was done. On 11 May 1608, in the Plaza de la Quintana in Santiago de Compostela, an auto de fe was held. Forty-two persons from Ribadavia and the surrounding region were condemned to penalties ranging from confiscation of property to imprisonment to death. The charges were identical in every case: living according to the Law of Moses, observing Shabbat, fasting on Yom Kippur, preparing kosher meat, and reciting psalms without the Gloria Patri.

The condemned were not marginal figures — they were the civic and commercial backbone of Ribadavia. Felipe Álvarez, the town's Procurador General, was arrested alongside four of his sons. Xerónimo de Morais, a sixty-year-old councilman, endured torture without confessing. Xoán López Hurtado, Regidor and scribe, was shown leniency only because he had young children — two of them blind — while his wife Beatriz Méndez received the harsher sentence in his place. Fernando Gómez, a merchant from Vila Flor who had lived in the Law of Moses for nearly thirty years, also overcame the rack without adding to his confession. Among the women, Leonor Gómez — sixty-eight years old, widow of the lawyer Marcos López, whom the Inquisition called "the master of the judaizantes" — defeated the torture entirely. Xinebra Vázquez, seventy-two, was put on the rack despite her frailty and confessed nothing. María Vázquez, sixty, crippled, was stripped and given two turns of the wheel — and held. The Inquisition's machinery broke bodies, but it did not always break silence.

Behind the list of names lay distinct family networks, each with its own history. The Morais clan constituted a second dynasty of converso power in Ribadavia, parallel to the Álvarez. Xerónimo de Morais was a councilman; his brother Antonio "the walker" lived off his estate; his son Antonio had come from Mirandela in Portugal; his daughter Isabel, a widow of twenty-six from Salvaterra, confessed eight years in the old law, taught by her mother. Their father, Alonso Rodríguez de Morais, was already dead by 1608 — but the Inquisition opened proceedings against his memory, accusing him of having cursed a servant who invoked the name of Jesus. A separate network radiated from Vila Flor in Portugal: Marcos López, the lawyer whom the Inquisition called "the master of the judaizantes," had taught the Law of Moses with a Hebrew Bible and funded the escape of judaizantes from Spain. His widow Leonor Gómez survived him and survived the rack. Fernando Gómez and Manuel Gómez, also from Vila Flor, were merchants — the commercial sinew of the Portuguese converso migration into the Ribeiro.

Perhaps the most intimate tragedy was the household of Fernando Álvarez "the old one" and Catalina de León. Catalina, aged thirty-two, from Ourense, had taught the Law of Moses to her daughters Isabel (fifteen) and Felipa (seventeen) — and had been taught it herself by her mother and grandmother. In the second auto de fe on 22 February 1609, all three were condemned. All three had been denounced by Catalina's own husband.

Duarte Coronel of Salvaterra — aged thirty, denounced among others by his own wife, Ana de Mena, the malsín's sister — confessed three years in the Law of Moses. Simón Pereira, a medical student from Pontevedra, admitted to seven years as a public Jew in Pisa, where he had been circumcised and taken the name Isaac — and in 1609, he exchanged his sentence for immediate freedom through a financial agreement with the Holy Office. The elderly tailor Álvaro Vázquez of Valença do Miño — sixty-nine, ill — was subjected to the rack despite his condition, and received two hundred lashes on top of perpetual prison. Then, on 8 September 1610, the Inquisition staged a final auto particular: four already-dead judaizantes were burned in effigy, their memory and reputation formally destroyed. Among them was Marcos López, the man who had kept the Hebrew Bible. And among them was the malsín himself — Jerónimo Bautista de Mena — accused by sixteen former accomplices of the very rites he had denounced.

"Everything in Ribadavia proceeded normally — the crypto-Jewish community coexisted harmoniously with the other inhabitants of the town. But suddenly, the foundations of coexistence trembled, and a bolt of dread ran through the bodies of its people upon learning that the Inquisition was preparing a publication of an edict of faith." — José Ramón Estévez Pérez, "La tumba de Felipe Álvarez, judaizante" (2017)

The auto de fe of 1608 did not destroy Ribadavia's converso community — it trapped it. Most families had no choice but to stay. To flee was to invite the death penalty and to endanger every relative left behind. The condemned served their sentences, paid their compositions, and returned to a town that now watched them. Many dispersed into the villages and parishes surrounding Ribadavia — away from the Casa de la Inquisición on Rúa de San Martiño, away from the sanbenitos hanging in the churches, but never far from the vineyards that sustained them. The stigma of condemnation followed these families for generations. In a society obsessed with limpieza de sangre, a converso surname was a mark that closed doors — to cathedral chapters, military orders, university colleges, and advantageous marriages with Old Christian houses. The result was predictable: converso families married within their own networks, generation after generation, producing densely endogamous clusters bound by the same surnames, the same parishes, and the same silence.

Yet even before the Inquisition struck, some conversos had quietly maintained connections abroad. Simón Pereira, Felipe Álvarez's cellmate, had already been circumcised in Pisa, where his uncle Antonio Núñez lived. Fernando Méndez, Felipe's son, dreamed of fleeing to Turkey to live freely as a Jew under the name David. These were not idle fantasies — they were threads in a clandestine network that had long connected Galician conversos to the open Sephardic communities of Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and eventually the Atlantic world.

The most illustrious — and most genealogically tangled — example is the Senior Coronel family of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam branch descends from the brothers Duarte and António Saraiva, who upon returning to Judaism took the names David and Salomon Senior Coronel. Their family almost certainly came from the converso networks of Salvaterra de Miño and the Galician-Portuguese border, where both the Saraiva and Coronel surnames are densely documented. Among the Coronels of Salvaterra there existed a tradition of descent from Abraham Senior, the last Rab Mayor of Castile, who had converted under pressure in 1492 and taken the name Fernando Pérez Coronel. Whether the Saraiva brothers were direct patrilineal descendants of Abraham Senior or connected through the female line — or simply adopted the prestigious name upon returning to Judaism, as others in their milieu did — remains an open question. What is certain is that Duarte Saraiva reached Amsterdam by 1604, traded with Lisbon for years, and by 1636 had established himself in Recife, Pernambuco, where he owned sugar mills and leased tax farms. His son Isaac Senior Coronel even spent time in Pontevedra — suggesting the family still had direct kin in Galicia. A later descendant, Nahmán Natán Senior Coronel, emigrated to Jerusalem in 1820 and became a prominent religious author. His great-grandson, David Coren, served in the Israeli Knesset and founded the kibbutz Bet HaAravá on the Dead Sea — his roots in the border country of Salvaterra unknown to him.

The Enrique Coronel who married Ana Rodríguez — Bárbara Enríquez's sister — lived in Ferreiros, near the Portuguese border. It was there that Mariana Enríquez and Jerónimo de Morais were later documented under the care of Enrique and Ana, and from there emerged the 2,000-ducat dowry claim that Diego de Pardiñas pursued in court decades later. This places the Coronel-Rodríguez kin group at the center of Ribadavia's converso legal and property networks in the mid-seventeenth century.

The surname networks that emerge from the Inquisition records of 1608 — Álvarez, Méndez, Rodríguez, Gómez, Fernández, Coronel, Morais, Enríquez, Pereira — read like a map of the Sephardic diaspora itself. These same names appear in the Jewish communities of Amsterdam, the Azores, Brazil, the Caribbean, and colonial Spanish America. The conversos of Ribadavia were not an isolated pocket — they were nodes in a vast Atlantic network, connected by blood, trade, and the shared memory of the Law of Moses.