Portugal Jews Begin to Shed Secrecy : Religion: President Mario Soares has apologized for the Inquisition. After centuries of clandestine meetings, Belmonte Jews now gather to pray in public.

After 500 years of being Roman Catholic in public and keeping their Jewish traditions alive in private, the Jews of Belmonte are cautiously leaving their self-made ghetto of secrecy.

The community of about 300 in this hilltop village in the heart of Portugal dates from the late 15th Century.

It was then that thousands of Sephardic Jews chose conversion to Catholicism as an alternative to expulsion, torture or death at the hands of the Inquisition.

The Jews became known as Marranos, a word believed to derive from the old Spanish for pig and still an insult in the Belmonte community, and defied their Roman Catholic persecutors by practicing their religion clandestinely.

Portuguese monarchs, eager for tax revenue and Jewish talent, had protected the thriving Sephardic community in their own country and offered shelter to Jews persecuted in neighboring Spain. Sepharad is the Hebrew name for the area now comprising Spain and Portugal.

After 1496, however, King Manuel I forced about 80,000 Jews to convert to Catholicism in order to seal a royal alliance with Spain’s powerful rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. Four years earlier, Isabella had signed an edict expelling from Spain all Jews who refused to convert.

Manuel’s successor, John III, decided to hunt out heretics and hidden Jews. Portuguese inquisitors ordered the first burning of a heretic in 1543, and the last occurred in 1765.

Even 169 years after Portugal formally abolished the Inquisition, Belmonte’s Jews find it hard to be open about their religion.

They still attend Mass with their Catholic neighbors at the village church where, for so many generations, they have been baptized, married and buried under marble tombstones.

“They’ve lived on the outside like Christians. . . . On the inside, in their houses, they were not Christians, they were Jews, and they have transmitted this from father to son,” said Colette Avital, Israel’s ambassador to Portugal.

Jewish leaders still hesitate to tell outsiders their story.

Licinda Melo, a village official, said: “Jewish community leaders have asked me to tell tourists, even tourists from Israel, that there are no more Jews living here, that it’s just a legend.”

The reluctance is reflected in suspicions that remain between Jews and the 3,000 or so Catholics in Belmonte. The village is in one of Europe’s poorest regions, the mountains of Lower Beira province, and many families live on the equivalent of less than $200 a month.

Antonieta Garcia, who has worked with Belmonte’s Jews for 20 years and is married to the mayor, said other villagers resent the relative wealth of some Jewish families.

Most Jews are tradesmen at the region’s bustling country fairs and markets and some own textile factories, Belmonte’s economic mainstay.

Tumbledown, dry-wall stone houses that once formed the village’s Jewish ghetto now are occupied by employees of the factories, most of whom are Catholics.

Illiteracy and superstition, common in the region, contribute to tensions between Catholics and Jews.

An elderly villager, who would not give her name, said she often has seen Jews dressed in white dancing by the river under a full moon.

“I don’t know what they’re afraid of, what they’re ashamed of,” she said. “We Roman Catholics are not ashamed of our religion.”

Sammuel Swartz, a Polish Jew working in the area as a mining engineer, discovered the Belmonte community in 1917 and wrote: “They were completely ignorant of the existance of other Jews with different religious rites to the New Christians.”

The old women who acted as keepers of the faith did not recognize Swartz’s Hebrew prayers and rejected him.

Today, confidence is slowly growing and leaders of the community are beginning contacts with other Jews.

In 1988, President Mario Soares met Jews in an old ghetto in nearby Castelo de Vide and formally apologized for the Inquisition.

After centuries of clandestine meetings in attics and darkened rooms, Belmonte Jews now gather to pray in a small, two-story house off the main square.

Elias Nunes, elected president of the Jewish community, said plans exist to build a synagogue with financial support from Jews in Europe, Israel and the United States.

He hopes the synagogue and a cultural center will be built beside an olive grove, the probable site of a Jewish temple in the 12th Century.

Belmonte’s Jews are accustomed to their own version of Judaism and may have difficulty adapting to a more orthodox religion.

They had no rabbis or books and their Jewish traditions, rituals and prayers have been passed on by women through generations, taking on many aspects of the Catholic surroundings.

Jewish prayers and religious services in Belmonte are led by women, in Portuguese.

Late in December, they have a festival called Natalinho, little Christmas.

Younger Jews are more open in supporting a return to orthodoxy. Some young men have been circumcised, the men are taking over dominant roles in religious services and a there is stricter adherence to the Sabbath ban on work.

“What’s needed is a cemetery” for Jews, said Moises Abrantes.

Looking up at the granite crucifix above the church, he frowned. “I’m in my 80s,” he said. “I’ve not got much time left and I don’t want anybody putting any cross over me after I’ve gone.”