See Sephardic Spain; Jewish landmarks are enjoying a dramatic comeback.(Country overview)

Byline: Michael Levitin

Toledo, Spain's mythic city on a hill, has sold its cultural lucre to tourists for years: the Roman Catholic past, the Arabic past, the Visigoth past and El Greco past. Now travelers are coming to embrace another long-lost heritage: the Jewish past. They are flocking to El TrAnsito, the majestic 14th-century synagogue with ornate rafters and Biblically inscribed walls that many never even knew existed. It's part of the sightseeing rage taking hold across Spain as locals and visitors alike set out to rediscover the country's Sephardic history. "There's greater interest now in learning about Jewish culture," says Ana Maria Lopez, director of the Sephardic Museum that adjoins El TrAnsito Synagogue. Lopez has seen the number of annual visitors double to 300,000 over the past decade. "Practically everything remained unknown about the Jews for so many years," she says.

From Noah Gordon's international best seller "The Last Jew" to the 2005 hit Spanish comedy "Only Human," Sephardic culture is enjoying a curious comeback in the country that converted, expelled and murdered its Jews more than five centuries ago. Since the late 1990s, restaurants serving Sephardic cuisine have mushroomed. Ar-cheologists are digging for Sephardic remains as conferences delve into Sephardic history, festivals host Sephardic music and language schools increasingly offer Ladino, the medieval Sephardic language. But perhaps the most notable addition is the government-sponsored initiative Caminos de Sefarad, or Sephardic Routes, a network linking 15 medieval Jewish cities on the first-ever travel itinerary through the Diaspora in Spain.

Why now? Unlike in Berlin, Prague and other European cities where a lost Jewish heritage is still visibly felt in the culture, in Spain that history has been largely buried. In 1995, Assumpcio Hosta helped found Sephardic Routes in the medieval Catalan city of ...