Spanish City of Toledo Opens Program on Jewish History for Tour Guides
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
The City of Toledo, Spain, has opened an advanced studies of Spanish Jewry course for 50 tour guides.
The program, which is the city’s first initiative of its kind, began on Oct. 14 and will offer two weekly classes until February, Silvia González Plaza of the Toldeo Municipal Tourist Office told JTA.
Titled “The Toledo Master Program on Jewish History,” the course teaches about the city’s prominent Jewish families prior to their mass deportation after the 1492 Spanish Inquisition.
In 1391, there were five Talmudic schools and 10 synagogues in Toledo – once home to one of the Iberian Peninsula’s largest Jewish populations. Today, fewer than 100 Jews live in Toledo.
“The idea is to offer more courses in the future to really strengthen the tourist guides’ knowledge base,” Plaza told JTA.
The courses, which were initiated by the Sephardic Museum and the municipality of Toledo, are given by Hebrew and Arab philologist Carmen Gomez Gomez, a PhD candidate researching the Jewish presence in Toledo during the 15th century.
The director of the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, Santiago Dovecote, told the news site ABC.es that the course will shed new light on the expulsion of Jews in 1492 and the process of “Christianization” in cities like Toledo.
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