"CONVERSAS ABERTAS", 03/22/2024, at 6:00 pm, with speaker Prof. Doctor Pedro Proença e Cunha (DCT-FCTUC)

A lecture will take place on March 22, 2024, at 6:00 pm, as part of the "Open Conversations" program, in the Arquivo da Universidade de Coimbra, led by Prof. Doctor Pedro Proença e Cunha entitled: "THE MIKVEH OF DOWNTOWN COIMBRA (~1360 to 1496): contribution of geo-archaeology to the knowledge of the medieval Jewish community".

A multidisciplinary research team competent in Geo-Archaeology and Art History, led by the University of Coimbra, obtained relevant data on the geological context, as well as on the architecture and age of construction of the mikveh (Jewish ritual purification baths) located in Downtown Coimbra.
It is located inside a cave, with a perennial spring fed by karst circulation in the dolomite massif of Alta Coimbra.
Inside the water mine, laterally close to the ceiling, we identified and dated a gray silty-clay layer, containing bivalve shells, as well as bone fragments from non-Jewish food animals and utilitarian ceramics. This unprecedented stratigraphic level is very relevant, as it marks the deposition of food waste by the local Christian community, prior to the construction of the mikveh. Thus, C14 dating determined that this mikveh was built in ~1360, when the king forced the Jewish community to abandon the Old Jewry (where it had an ancestral synagogue associated with a mikveh) and build a new Jewry (that of Arrabalde or de Samsão), immediately NW of the Monastery of Santa Cruz.
We identified a remarkable set of hydraulic and bathing structures, built in a karst cavity with a permanent water spring, with typical characteristics of a mikveh associated with the experience of the Jewish community of Coimbra, in the period between ~1360 and the end of 1496 (date of the notice for forced reconversion to Christianity or expulsion).
Other material and construction elements from more recent periods were identified, resulting from the successive occupations of the building.