Address
C/ del Call, 1
08002 Barcelona
In the year 70 C.E., after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans, thousands of Jews fled to several countries in Europe, Asia and Northern Africa. In those remote times, some of them arrived in Barcelona.
The Call was the first specifically Jewish settlement in the city, some centuries-old stones are witnesses of this district, some old houses owned by Jewish families, telling of mezuzot, the alchemist's house, interpretation center of the neighborhood, an old tombstone found in the nineteenth century and the remains of which may be the earliest synagogue.
The thirteenth century was the most prosperous period for the Jewish community throughout what we now refer to as Spain. The size of Barcelona's Call (Jewish quarter) reached 4.000 inhabitants or about 15 percent of the city's population. Versed in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Spanish, Catalan or Arabic -depending where they lived-, Jews acted as cultural liaisons between Eastern and Western civilizations, and helped transmit the latest advances in science and the most recent works by Arab philosophers.
