Dona Gracia Museum

The Dona Gracia Museum commemorates one of the most remarkable figures in Jewish history — a 16th-century Portuguese woman who parlayed a banking fortune into a diplomatic career that rescued thousands of Jews from the Inquisition and created what may have been history's first Jewish proto-state at Tiberias.

The museum is housed in a restored Ottoman-era building in the old city and uses documents, maps, and exhibitions to trace her extraordinary life: her origins in the Mendes banking family, her coded rescue networks across Europe, her relationship with the Ottoman court, and her vision for Tiberias as a Jewish haven. This is an underappreciated part of Jewish and Renaissance history, and the museum tells it well.

things to do museum
A story
Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi (1510–1569) was one of the most powerful women in the 16th-century Mediterranean world. Born into a converso family in Portugal, she escaped the Inquisition by using her family's banking network to move Jewish refugees from Portugal through Antwerp, Venice, and Ferrara to the Ottoman Empire. She ended up controlling much of the Levant spice trade and negotiated with sultans as an equal. Her plan to establish a Jewish autonomous territory at Tiberias — which she leased from the Ottoman sultan in 1558 — was partially implemented and predates the Zionist movement by three centuries.

Other places in Things to Do