“We have informed the prime minister that we want the Ministry of Education to proceed to the revision of the programmes and curricular targets for the 5th and following years so that history textbooks come to cover the presence of Jews in Portugal,” Isabel Ferreira Lopes, vice president of the community told Lusa News Agency.
That presence, she noted, dates back to before the formation of Portugal as a country.
In the document sent on 27 May, the Porto Jewish Community (CIP) ask that history textbooks include the presence of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula.
It cites the example of fifth-year textbooks to argue that “Jews are completely wiped from the history of the territory that today is Portugal”.
“The primitive hunter-gatherer communities are referred to, the agricultural and pastoral communities, the Celts, the Iberians, the trading peoples (Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians), the Romans, the Visigoths, the Muslims, well… everyone except the Jews,” it states.
The document also recalls the events during the reign of Dom Manuel I, noting that in the textbook in question there is “no reference to the Edict of Expulsion of 1496, one of the most important decisions in the history of Portugal and the world.”
It also notes that, “in the context of the benefits of the Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula, Maimonides is quoted, as if he were a Muslim, when in reality he was one of the most renowned figures in medieval Judaism.”
The CIP also requests that it be consulted in the process of improving school curricula and in the “compulsory content in school textbooks”.
The Ministry of Education has so far failed to comment on the matter.