The Pátio Inquisição is named that for a reason. This museum, which I expected to be a single large room and turned out to have several rooms, outlines that history.
Unlike most of the Holocaust museums and other museums dedicated to building awareness of human rights abuses that I've been to, the Judeus de Coimbra exhibit is all business. There are no personal narratives or details to try to create a sense of connection with the people who suffered.
Still, the facts are powerful on their own. I'm not familiar with the history of the Inquisition, so I can't say if they really did a good job of presenting an overview of the history. As a visitor, I can say that they seem to have done a good job of cramming several hundred years of really intense history into a coherent narrative. My one complaint is that the three images indicating the location of the original Jewish quarter (and the mikvah and potential synagogue site) are all rotated differently, making it unnecessarily difficult to make sense of.
Two (comparatively) small rooms give you a sense of the atrocities committed in the complex. It's shocking to see the bureaucratic face of genocide, although I suppose it shouldn't be.
Being used to Canadian museums, I wish they had drawn connections between the Inquisition and other genocides, including what's going on around the world today. I also would have liked more information on the Jewish diaspora, the impact of Jews being alternately expelled and banned from leaving Portugal, and the Jewish community in Portugal today (including their programs to grant citizenship to people whose ancestors left because of antisemitism). Having only a rudimentary understanding of Portuguese history, I also would have appreciated more context. I'm not sure how much more information they could have fit into a single exhibit, though, and clearly it gave me motivation to research these things on my own.
Entrance is free. It's closed on Mondays. It opens at 1pm. read more
