Religion in Portugal - Non-Christian

Non-Christian

Portugal's Muslim community consisted of a small number of immigrants from Portugal's former colonies in Africa, namely Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, and small numbers of recent immigrant workers from Northern Africa, mainly Morocco. In the 1991 census the number of Muslims in Portugal was under 10,000. The main Mosque in Portugal is the Lisbon Mosque.

The first Bahá'í visitor to Portugal was in 1926. Its first Bahá'í Local Spiritual Assembly was elected in Lisbon in 1946. In 1962 the Portuguese Bahá'ís elected their first National Spiritual Assembly. In 1963 there were nine assemblies. According to recent counts there are close to some 2000 members of the Bahá'í Faith in 2005 according to the Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on World Christian Encyclopedia). See Bahá'í Faith in Portugal.

The Jewish community in Portugal numbered between 500 and 1,000 as of the early 1990s. The community was concentrated in Lisbon, and many of its members were foreigners. The persecution of Portuguese Jewry had been so intense that until the twentieth century Portugal had no synagogue or even regular Jewish religious services (the Lisbon Synagogue was founded in 1904). The few Jewish Portuguese were hence isolated from the main currents of Judaism. Their community began to revive when larger numbers of foreign Jews (embassy personnel, business people, and technicians) began coming to Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s. In northern Portugal, there are a few villages where Marranos, descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity to avoid persecution and whose religion was a mixture of Judaism and Christianity, still exist (see Belmonte Jews).

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