The building now occupied by the Museo Sefardí was created during a remarkable period of Jewish cultural life in fourteenth-century Toledo. Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia, treasurer and influential courtier to King Pedro I of Castile, commissioned the synagogue around 1357. Its construction required royal favor because medieval restrictions generally limited the erection of new synagogues. The restrained brick exterior concealed an exceptionally rich prayer hall, where Hebrew inscriptions, vegetal ornament, heraldic emblems, and intricate plasterwork combined Jewish texts with the Mudéjar artistic language shared by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish craftsmen.

Samuel ha-Levi’s career also demonstrates the dangers of court service. He accumulated wealth and authority while managing royal finances, but in 1360 he fell from favor, was arrested, and died under torture. The synagogue nevertheless continued to serve Toledo’s Jewish community for more than a century. It stood in the city’s Jewish quarter during an era marked by scholarship and commerce but also by escalating persecution. Anti-Jewish violence in 1391, forced conversions, and inquisitorial scrutiny weakened Jewish institutions across Castile. In 1492 the Catholic Monarchs ordered Jews who would not convert to leave their kingdoms, ending the synagogue’s original use.

After the expulsion, the Crown granted the building to the military Order of Calatrava. It became a Christian church dedicated to Saint Benedict and later was associated with the name El Tránsito, probably referring to the Dormition or Assumption of the Virgin. Conventual rooms and burials altered the complex, yet the main hall’s Hebrew inscriptions and stucco decoration survived beneath its new identity. During the Napoleonic occupation in the early nineteenth century, the former synagogue was used as a barracks, another abrupt change that placed its fragile interior at risk.

Growing interest in medieval art and Spain’s Jewish past led to official protection in the later nineteenth century. The building was declared a national monument in 1877, and conservation work attempted to stabilize and recover its decoration. In the early twentieth century it was adapted as a museum setting, initially linked with broader artistic collections in Toledo. The Spanish state formally created the Sephardic Museum in 1964, named the synagogue as its home in 1968, and opened the institution as an independent national museum in 1969. Displays gradually expanded beyond art objects to address worship, domestic life, language, diaspora, and memory.

The Museo Sefardí therefore occupies a monument whose successive uses embody Spain’s contested history. Its prayer hall recalls a flourishing community and the patronage networks of Pedro I’s court; its conversion records the rupture of 1492; its military use reflects invasion; and its preservation marks a modern, incomplete effort to acknowledge Jewish heritage. Rather than presenting Sephardic culture as a vanished curiosity, the museum connects medieval Toledo with communities carried across the Mediterranean, Europe, North Africa, and the Americas after expulsion.

Conservation has required difficult choices because Christian additions and Jewish fabric both belong to the building’s history. Restorers have uncovered plaster, stabilized timber, and rearranged displays, sometimes according to the assumptions of their own period. The museum now treats the synagogue itself as its most important object, encouraging visitors to notice how survival, reuse, and interpretation can preserve a monument while also changing its meaning.