The Jews in Spain and Portugal

Although the Hebrew place name Sefarad originally may have referred to the city of Sardis, in Asia Minor, it has come to be associated with the Iberian Peninsula. Therefore, Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origins are called Sephardim. While they may have arrived on the peninsula alongside the Phoenicians in the eleventh century B.C.E., we know for sure that Jews were living in Spain at the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., and their numbers increased after the Diaspora. The first written record in which Jews are mentioned is a resolution of the Council of Elvira dated 306. It prohibited Christians from marrying Jews and forbade rabbis to bless fields owned by Christians. Sephardic historians also have discovered that the names of many Spanish towns had Hebrew origins: Maqueda was from Masada, Escalona from Ashekelon, Joppes from Jaffa, Barcelona from Bar-Shelanu, Seville from Shevil-Yah, and Toledo from Toledoth.