Portugal probes antisemitism at University of Coimbra

Portugal’s government last week asked its prosecutor general to investigate allegations of antisemitic hate speech and intimidation at the University of Coimbra, one of the country’s most prestigious institutes of higher learning and a symbol of resistance to the Inquisition.

The request by the office of Portugal’s secretary of state for higher education, Cláudia Sarrico, to Prosecutor General Amadeu Guerra concerns cases between July 2024 and May 2026 in which posters, stickers and graffiti containing antisemitic material and incitement against Jews, Israelis and Zionists were displayed at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology and other university faculties, including law, medicine and chemistry, the Lusa news agency reported on Aug. 13.

The embassy of Israel in Lisbon welcomed the investigation.

“We are pleased to learn that the Portuguese authorities have decided to open an investigation into antisemitism at the University of Coimbra,” an embassy spokesperson wrote on X.

One of the posters read: “Zionists should carry a certificate to prove they’re human.” Another read: “Beware of Zionists,” JNS has learned. One doctoral student, Bar Harel, who holds U.S., Portuguese and Israeli citizenship, was subjected to death threats and a physical assault for displaying a small Israeli flag on his backpack, according to the report sent to the prosecutors by the state secretary’s office.

The University of Coimbra is among several prestigious universities in Europe and beyond where anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric and intimidation exploded after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, unleashing a regional war.

Founded in 1290, the University of Coimbra is Portugal’s oldest, and seventh oldest in the world. Its story is intertwined with one of the most traumatic events of the Jewish People in Europe: the Inquisition.

Throughout the Inquisition, which began in Portugal in 1536, the same year that the University of Coimbra moved to that city from Lisbon, scholars from the university hid Jewish manuscripts that the state-led Inquisition authorities had banned and collected to destroy, according to António Eugénio Maia do Amaral, the university’s senior librarian and deputy director at its General Library. This left the university in possession of a collection of rare, pristine Jewish manuscripts found nowhere else, including the 15th-century Abravanel Hebrew Bible. It is kept in a climate-controlled vault built for the most valuable and rare specimens in the university’s vast collection.

Outside of Lisbon, the University of Coimbra is the largest owner of Portuguese Inquisition verdicts, including the minutes of a 1729 trial against Manuel Benosh, a Portuguese Jew murdered for his faith.

Coimbra housed one of the three principal regional Inquisition tribunals—alongside Lisbon and Évora—and exercised jurisdiction over much of central and northern Portugal from 1541 to 1821, when the Inquisition was abolished. The former seat of the tribunal was named “Inquisition Patio” by the municipality in memory of the many victims sentenced to death there.