The Synagogue of Santa María La Blanca

Phone: 925 227 257

Fax: 925 227 257

Email: info@turismo-toledo.com

Website: www.toledo-turismo.com...

Type of monument

Religious Architecture

History

Many writers consider it to be the old Great Synagogue of Toledo, built between the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th by Abraham Ibn Alfachar, a counselor and ambassador of Alfonso VIII in the Almohade court, rebuilt after 1250, when it apparently suffered a serious fire.

Other writers, however, maintain that it was called the New Synagogue, known under this name from the end of the 14th century and built by Goseg Ben Sosam, Prince of the Castilian Jews and tax collector and chancellor of Alfonso VIII, who died in 1205.

The synagogue, assaulted in the "Pogrom" of 1391, was converted into a Christian church in the 15th century, a fruit of the ardent sermons delivered in Toledo from the pulpit of the church of Santiago del Arrabal by the Dominican friar, the Valencian Vicente Ferrer.

During the following century it served to give refuge to penitent women and the three chapels decorated in Renaissance style in the east end date from this era. Also notable are the Plateresque altars and the altarpiece from the school of Berruguete.

Period

12th century.

Art style

Mudejar.

How to get there

Road transport

It has a basilical structure with five narrow naves stretching from east to west, the central one being higher than the rest and separated by arcades with large unpointed circular horseshoe arches, which suggests a certain Christian Mozarabic influence.

The arcade of large arches is supported on octagonal columns of brick with a tiled plinth. Over the arcades there are blind arcades of lobed arches decorated in plaster with vegetable motifs and geometric latticework with an unmistakeable Almohadic accent, the knots forming a Star of David.

It is covered by a classical Mudejar larch roof. The framework of the central nave is a collar-beam roof with a carved finish, clearly the product of local Toledan artistic carpentry.

In Santa María La Blanca the most outstanding feature is its thirty two pilasters, with its capitals decorated with carved pineapples and rhomboidal scrolls, where no one is the same as the other.

In the chamfered form of the pillars and the sebka or grid of rhombuses disposition of the capitals we find ourselves once again with a contribution from Almohadic art. It has been thought that there is a divergence in this work between the brick structure of the walls and pillars and the plasterwork covering it, as if they were the product of different hands, or perhaps the latter, somewhat later than the building, corresponds to the restoration work carried out after a fire that occurred in 1250. In any event, it is clear that the work was performed by Moorish stone masons and bricklayers, and is not, therefore, the work of Jews.

Whatever the case, it seems probable that it was built to satisfy the religious necessities of a flourishing community that was growing in view of the influx of Jews to the city from Al-Andalus after the Almohadic invasion.

Timetables

From Monday to Sunday, from 10am to 6pm.
Closed on 1st January and 25th December.

Fees

General: €1.90
Reduced: €1.40.
Wednesday afternoons, free for Spanish citizens.