Tortosa (Lat. Dertusa or Dertosa, Ar. Ṭurṭūsha) is a commercial town in the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, near the Mediterranean estuary of the Ebro River, in today’s province of Tarragona, in Catalonia. Jews were living in Tortosa long before the Muslim conquest, for it was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Iberia, as evidenced by a sixth-century inscription in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek on the gravestone of a Jewish woman named Meliosa. After the Islamic conquest, when Christians from the Frankish kingdom reached as far as Tarragona, …