The museum occupies the former convent of the Knights of Calatrava, annexed to the Synagogue of El Transito -- one of the finest surviving medieval synagogues in Europe. The synagogue was built around 1357 and later converted to Christian use after the expulsion of 1492, which is precisely why it survived when so many other Jewish buildings were demolished or forgotten. The convent that grew up around it preserved the structure through centuries of changing use, and when a 1964 decree formally established the Sephardic Museum, the building was waiting. Installation work began in 1965, and the museum opened to visitors on 13 June 1971, fulfilling aspirations that had been voiced as early as 1915 to gather scattered testimonies of Jewish culture from museums across Spain into a single dedicated space.

The museum's first gallery reaches back to the ancient Middle East, displaying archaeological objects dating from 2000 BCE to the 1st century CE. A Torah scroll anchors the collection, surrounded by liturgical objects that illuminate the rituals and beliefs that traveled with Jewish communities from the Levant to the western Mediterranean. Subsequent galleries trace the Jewish presence on the Iberian Peninsula itself: arrival in Roman times, coexistence during the Visigothic era, intellectual flourishing under Al-Andalus, and the complex position of Jewish communities within the Christian kingdoms of the 13th through 15th centuries. The story does not shy from its darker chapters -- the forced conversions, the Inquisition, and the final expulsion decree of 1492 that scattered Sephardic communities across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and beyond.

One of the museum's most striking spaces is the women's gallery, the upper-level room where women followed the synagogue's liturgy from behind ornate plasterwork screens. Part of the original decoration survives, intricate geometric and vegetal patterns carved into the walls with a precision that time has not dulled. Today, this gallery houses showcases devoted to daily Sephardic life -- birth customs, education, festivals, mourning rituals. The intimate scale of the room gives these objects a presence that larger exhibition halls might dilute. Jewelry, cutlery, ceramic vessels, and textiles speak to the domestic world of a people whose public life was increasingly circumscribed, and whose private traditions would travel with them into exile.

In the museum's north courtyard stands a necropolis of a different kind: sepulchral tombstones gathered from Jewish cemeteries across Spain, their Hebrew inscriptions recording names, dates, and fragments of lives otherwise lost to the historical record. Beneath the courtyard itself, archaeologists have uncovered remains of what may have been public baths belonging to Toledo's old Jewish quarter, along with the foundation of the synagogue's original Torah ark. These layers -- the carved stones above, the ruins below -- give physical weight to an absence. Toledo's juderia was once one of the most important Jewish communities in medieval Europe. What the museum preserves is both testament and elegy, a record of what was built and what was taken away.