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The History of the Jews of Brazil — the Oldest Jewish Community in the Americas
The Estaiada Bridge in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
It’s not New York, Cincinnati, or Philadelphia. The oldest and first Jewish community in the Americas was established in Brazil, where Sephardic Jews founded the first synagogue in Recife in 1636. This is the fascinating story of the Jews of Brazil.
Following a century of successful discovery and colonization, the Portuguese monarchy told Pedro Alvares Cabral in the year 1500 to take his ships as far west as he could to see if he could find an alternate route to India. Accompanying Cabral on this trip as the interpreter was a Jew, Gaspar da Gama.
Gaspar was “discovered” by famed explorer Vasco da Gama in India, where Vasco da Gama was shocked to find a white man serving as an advisor to one of the local rulers. Vasco da Gama decided that he could use someone who spoke the Eastern languages, so he decided to take this man back with him to Lisbon. He had the Jew convert to Catholicism and adopt the name of Gaspar da Gama in deference to the explorer.
When Cabral traveled to the West, he thought it would be helpful to have Gaspar with him to converse with the natives. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, they arrived at the land that would eventually be known as Brazil. The first man to set foot on this new land was Gaspar. Unfortunately, his knowledge of Indian dialects was of no value in trying to talk to the Brazilians, and it was then that the Portuguese settlement in Brazil began.
After discovering Brazil, the Portuguese settlers moved westward, hoping to discover gold and silver and extend their landmass. They were known as the Bandeirantes because they carried a bandeira (flag) with them. Based on their names, records suggest that many of them were conversos, hidden Jews. One of the most important Bandeirantes was Fernando de Noronha, a Portuguese converso with many contacts in the Lisbon court. He convinced the crown to lease him the land, and that in exchange, he would give them a wood named Pau Brazil that provided a dye and other precious items he would find. The wood that he sent gave the land the name Brazil.
Historians suggest that his leasing scheme was an effort to help Portuguese Jews by creating a place for them to live away from the growing threats of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition. This was crucial because after they were expelled from Spain in 1492 by the infamous Alhambra Decree, many Jewish Spaniards moved to nearby Portugal where they were far more tolerant of Jews.
But this haven came to an end in 1497 when Portugal expelled its Jews. At this point, some Jews moved to the Netherlands, and others tried to move to the far-flung colonies, hoping to get as far as possible from the centralized government and its Inquisition. Thus, many New Christians or conversos settled in Brazil, where they would benefit from Fernando de Noronha’s settlement.
Dutch Brazil 1624-1654
In 1600, the Dutch’s East Indies Company that imported spices and exotic products from the Far East was highly successful. So the Dutch decided to create a West Indies Company that would import natural resources from New York, the Caribbean Islands, and Brazil, a major producer of sugar.
The Dutch defeated the Portuguese in Northeastern Brazil and began to establish a Dutch settlement there, called New Holland. The Dutch allowed religious freedom in New Holland. As a result, many Portuguese conversos who lived in the Portuguese-controlled areas of Brazil moved to there to become full-fledged Jews once again. Two hundred Dutch Jews were also part of the original Dutch settlement. The Jews established a variety of businesses in New Holland and were particularly involved in the development of Brazil’s sugar industry.
The Street of the Jews in Brazil. Photo: provided.
Most of these Jewish merchants lived on the Rua dos Judeus — Street of the Jews. It was on this street that the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere was built in 1636. It was called Kahal Tzur Israel, the Rock of Israel.
Synagogue records show a well-organized Jewish community with high participation, including a Talmud Torah school, a tzedakah fund, and an overseeing executive committee. In 1642, Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, a well-known Amsterdam rabbi, and Moses Raphael d’Aguilar came to Brazil as spiritual leaders to assist the congregations of Kahal Zur in Recife and Magen Abraham in Mauricia.
For years, the Dutch settlement prospered, but then the West Indies Company began to lose interest in the colony, as the profits were less than other areas under its control. The Portuguese successfully drove the Dutch out of Brazil in 1654, following a nine-year war.
In the Treaty of Guararapes, the Portuguese promised to respect the religious freedom of those who chose to remain in Brazil under Portuguese control. However, in the coming years, the Portuguese went back on their word and accused the Jews of heresy and persecuted them.
At that point, 150 Jewish families chose to return to Amsterdam, but others moved to Dutch-controlled areas of the Western Hemisphere. Twenty-three of these Dutch Jews traveled to New Amsterdam, today’s New York. Peter Stuyvesant was the governor of New Amsterdam and did not like Jews. He asked permission from the West Indies Company to expel them, not realizing that a percentage of the shareholders were in fact Jews. He received a response from Amsterdam telling him to treat “our shareholders” with consideration.
The Inquisition in Brazil
Despite the Jews’ hope that distance would protect them from the long arm of the Inquisition, Portuguese persecution followed them to the New World. In 1647, Isaac de Castro was arrested for teaching Judaism in Portuguese-controlled Brazil. He was deported to Portugal, where the Inquisition sentenced him to death and burned him at the stake. Recognizing the danger, Jews hid their Jewish identities, immigrated to Dutch-controlled areas, or moved to the interior of Brazil where there was less oversight.
Historians have recently come across populations in Brazil’s interior that have seemingly Jewish practices. These groups can’t explain why but they light candles on Friday, read only the “Old Testament,” do not eat pork or shellfish, and refrain from eating bread during Easter.
One of the most famous cases regarding the Inquisition in Brazil was that of Antonio José da Silva. Da Silva was a law student living in Rio de Janeiro, and he also wrote several successful plays. He was denounced to the Inquisition and arrested and sent to Portugal. He refused to recant and was burned at the stake on October 19, 1739. His courage inspired Jewish and non-Jewish Brazilians and in 1996 his story was made into a Brazilian film called O Judeu — The Jew.
The End of Official Persecution and the Moroccan Community
In 1773, a Portuguese royal decree abolished persecution against Jews. As a result, Jews gradually settled in Brazil, although nearly all of the original Brazilian conversos had assimilated by then.
In 1822, after Brazil gained its official independence from Portugal, Moroccan Jews began moving to Brazil. In 1824, they founded a synagogue in Belem (northern Brazil) called Porta do Cebu (Gate of Heaven). By World War I, the Sephardic community of Belem, composed primarily of Moroccans, had approximately 800 members. In the 1950s, an additional wave of Jewish immigration brought more than 3,500 Moroccan Jews to Brazil.
Porta do Cebu (Gate of Heaven) in Belem, Brazil. Photo: provided.
Ashkenazi European Jews began arriving in Brazil around 1850. Brazil was not the preferred destination of European Jews seeking a new life in South America. Jewish and non-Jewish Europeans tended to prefer the more cosmopolitan Argentina. At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina had one of the highest standards of living in the world. It is possible that the immigrants who chose Brazil did so because the fare was far less than traveling by boat to Buenos Aires, which was 1,500 miles to the south.
Almost 30,000 Western European Jews, mainly from Germany, came to Brazil in the 1920s to escape European antisemitism. By 1929, they had established communities to the extent that there were 27 Jewish schools.
Rise of Antisemitism in Brazil
In the 1930s, Brazilian intellectuals began slandering the Jews, portraying them as non-European, impoverished communists, greedy capitalists, and detrimental to progress. The Nazi Party also encouraged antisemitism among the German diaspora, though they were far more successful in nearby Argentina.
In 1938, Brazil began an active assimilation effort and closed Yiddish newspapers and the Jewish organizations, both secular and religious. A wave of antisemitism followed, including several printings of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With the outbreak of World War II, Brazil adopted an immigration policy that banned any more Jewish refugees from entering the country.
Yet, the Brazilian ambassador to France, Ambassador Luis Martins de Souza Dantas, saw things differently and heroically chose to ignore the Brazil ban on Jewish immigration. Seeing what would happen to the Jews should they remain in France, he granted immigration visas to hundreds of French Jews, saving their lives from the Holocaust.
After the Holocaust, Brazil adopted a new, more democratic constitution, and antisemitism decreased. Jewish immigration strengthened the community with increasing numbers, and by the 1960s, Brazilian Jewry was thriving. In the 1966 parliamentary elections, six Jews representing various parties were elected to the federal legislature. In addition, Jews served in state legislatures and municipal councils.
Horacio Lafer was the Jewish Minister of Finance in the 1950s and 1960s. He was instrumental in arranging for thousands of displaced Jews from Syria, Lebanon, and other Middle Eastern countries to be able to settle in Brazil.
Modern-Day Brazilian Jewish Community
Today, Brazil has the ninth largest Jewish community in the world, and the second-largest Jewish population in Latin America after Argentina. The Jewish population totals about 130,000. About 70,000 Jews live in Sao Paulo, which is the commercial and industrial heart of Brazil, and another 30,000 live in Rio.
The remaining 30,000 Jews are distributed throughout the other towns in the country. In fact, there is a saying in Brazil that “if a town doesn’t have a Jewish merchant, it doesn’t deserve to be called a town.”
Sao Paulo Jews are particularly proud of their support of the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, considered by many the best hospital in all of South America. It was the first hospital outside of the United States to be accredited by the Joint Commission.
In present-day Brazil, the Jewish community lives in peace and stability and is able to practice their religion freely. In contrast to the antisemitism that marred its history, today the greatest threat to Brazilian Jewry is intermarriage and assimilation.
At the same time, due to the efforts of many individuals, Jewish schools, adult education classes, and kosher establishments have begun to flourish.
Incredibly the Kahal Zur synagogue in Recife, the first shul ever built in the Americas, was reopened in 2002, 347 years after it was closed by Portuguese colonial rule.
The Kahal Zur synagogue in Recife, the first shul ever built in the Americas. Photo: provided.
The synagogue had not been used since the mid-17th century when the Portuguese defeated the Dutch at Recife and expelled the estimated 1,500 Jews and banned Judaism. The synagogue is now open once again thanks to the generosity of the Safra banking family.
After World War II, Binyomin Citron was a builder and communal leader in Sao Paulo. In the early 1950s, he met with the leading American sage, Rabbi Aharon Kotler, and proudly told him about a beautiful building that he had built for use as a yeshiva, describing how he was going to produce strong educated Jews just like a great American yeshiva.
With great insight, Rabbi Kotler responded to him, “Buildings don’t create strong educated Jews, people do. If you have the right rabbis as teachers, you can produce great strong educated Jews. We will send you the best rabbi in the system to help build Torah in Brazil.” Rabbi Kotler sent Reb Zelig Privalsky to Brazil, where he and many others helped create a Jewish future for thousands of Brazilian Jews — a future for the oldest Jewish community in the Western Hemisphere.
Rabbi Menachem Levine is the CEO of JDBY-YTT, the largest Jewish school in the Midwest. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, CA, from 2007 to 2020. He is a popular speaker and writes for numerous publications on Torah, Jewish History, and Contemporary Jewish Topics. Rabbi Levine’s personal website is https://thinktorah.org
A version of this article was originally published at Aish.
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US Senate Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel Fails — but Raises Questions About Future Democratic Support
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A failed Senate vote to block US arms sales to Israel has further exposed a deepening divide within the Democratic Party, one increasingly defined by younger voters and liberals whose views on Israel are shifting rapidly.
The Senate on Wednesday rejected two resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have halted roughly $450 million in weapons transfers to Israel, including bombs and bulldozers. The measures failed, ensuring the sales will move forward. But the margin, and who supported the effort, marked a significant political inflection point.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs. The failed vote represents the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Further, many traditionally stalwart supporters of Israel, such as Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Cory Booker (NJ), voted in favor of Sanders’s resolution, signaling that anti-Israel sentiment has migrated from the far-left fringes of the party into the mainstream.
That change is closely tied to evolving public opinion, especially among younger Americans.
Recent polling, including newly released data from the Yale Youth Poll, shows that younger voters are far more critical of Israel than older generations. Large shares of voters under 30 now support restricting or even ending US military aid, a position that departs sharply from the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington. Polls show that a supermajority of Democrats believe that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza, an assertion which lacks little evidence and has been boosted by foreign entities tied to Iran.
Data also suggests that increased social media consumption aligns with more skeptical attitudes toward foreign policy regarding Israel. Those who receive their news from social media, especially youth-centric platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are far more likely to exhibit anti-Israel animus than those who consume traditional broadcast news media.
The Senate vote reflects the increasing pressure of Democratic lawmakers to stake an aggressive stance against Israel. Several lawmakers who backed the resolutions argued that continued arms transfers should be reconsidered amid the expanding regional conflict involving Iran and mounting humanitarian concerns. They argued that the Trump White House has not sought out appropriate congressional approval for the ongoing war in Iran. Many also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, suggesting that he has escalated hostilities in the region rather than acted in self-defense from existential threats. These same voices expressed dismay at civilian casualties in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
The lawmakers largely framed their votes not as opposition to Israel’s existence, but as a challenge to current policies and the use of US-supplied weapons.
Opponents, including most Republicans, maintained that US military support remains essential to Israel’s security, particularly as tensions with Iran escalate. They warned that blocking arms sales could weaken a key ally in a volatile region.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization dedicated to increasing support for the GOP among Jews, framed the vote as reflective of a broader anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party.
“There is only ONE pro-Israel party, and it is the Republican Party,” RJC wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the group J Street, endorsed the vote as an “encouraging” sign of progress.
“It’s encouraging to see a growing number of senators recognize that unconditional US military support for Israel is no longer tenable in light of the Netanyahu government’s policies. The work now is to translate that shift into action: alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, stopping violence on the West Bank and pursuing paths to end the ongoing fighting across the region,” Ben-Ami wrote.
A self-proclaimed “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying organization, J Street has come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism or anti-Israel narratives within liberal political circles.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the most strident defenders of Israel in Congress, criticized his party’s turn against Israel, saying in a new CNN interview that they have “boxed themselves in” by supporting Sanders’s resolution. He dismissed the notion that Democrats would become more likely to support Israel with a change in Israeli leadership.
“When Netanyahu goes, and you’re now on record with this, you’re going to revert back and say that now that he’s gone, I can now start sending offensive weapons?” Moskowitz pondered.
Despite the failure of the resolutions, the size of the Democratic vote in favor underscores how quickly the political landscape is changing ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
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Duke University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Over Antisemitic Political Cartoon
Aerial view of Duke University on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Duke University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and impounded its money for posting an antisemitic political cartoon on social media, The Duke Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
According to the student paper, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. The image was created in 1970 by political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
The Chronicle said the image elicited no fewer than 10 formal complaints from Jewish students for showing a blatant antisemitic trope. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further into history, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
In a statement to the Chronicle, SJP denied that it intended to endorse the cartoon’s antisemitic messaging, saying it “was never intended to be antisemitic” and that anti-Zionist activism is “not the same as targeting Jewish people.”
This was not the first time that the anti-Zionist group posted antisemitic imagery. In 2024, the Harvard chapter of its faculty spinoff, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP), posted a political cartoon of a Jew lynching an African American and an Arab. In the illustration, a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David and containing a dollar sign at its center dangles a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. In its posterior, an arm belonging to an unknown person of color wields a machete that says, “Liberation Movement.”
Such activity is an integral part of the playbook of anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging on social media, scholars have found.
From 2013 to 2024, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University studied over 76,000 posts created by Students for Justice in Palestine and its affiliates, finding that over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.
“In contrast, Reels (5.3%) and Videos (4.9%) are used far less frequently,” the institute said in a report based on its research. “Based on these descriptions, we see a strong preference among campus-based anti-Israel groups for static visual formats, suggesting that this type of bimodal content represents the highest form of shareability within activists networks.”
To boost their audience and reach, pro-Hamas groups also post together in what ISCA described as “co-authored posts,” of which there were over 20,000 between 2013 and 2024. Their content set off strong emotions in the individual users exposed to them, inciting incidents of antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and violence. Such outrages, it added, increased in proportion to the concentration of anti-Israel groups on a single campus, evidence of “particularly strong” correlation.
ISCAP’s conclusions can be found in the real world, as SJP and its network of student groups have helped fuel a historic wave of antisemitic incidents on college campuses over the past two and a half years — from spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew” to gang assaulting Jews at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
SJP has also expressed its hope of inciting insurrection in the US and amassing a jihadist army.
In 2024, the national SJP organization proclaimed on X that the anti-Zionist student movement is a weapon for destroying the US, saying that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of initiating “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued the statement, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff, created after SJP was suspended, was reported to have distributed literature which called for “popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to a previous event. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Netherlands Reports 867 Antisemitic Incidents in 2025 as Cases Remain at Alarmingly High Levels
March 29, 2025, Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands: A pro-Palestinian demonstrator burns a hand-fashioned Israeli flag. Photo: James Petermeier/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in the Netherlands remained at alarmingly high levels last year, according to newly published figures, as Jews and Israelis across Europe continued to face a persistently hostile environment marked by harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
On Wednesday, Dutch authorities released a new annual antisemitism report showing 867 registered cases in 2025, a figure that remains at deeply troubling levels and virtually unchanged from the 880 antisemitic incidents recorded the previous year.
Even though Jews make up less than 0.3 percent of the Dutch population, anti-Jewish hate crimes account for 26 percent of all discrimination cases.
Eddo Verdoner, the Dutch national coordinator for combating antisemitism (NCAB), said the data reflects a worrying normalization of antisemitic incidents and called for sustained, coordinated action to address them.
“We have been recording hundreds of antisemitic incidents each year for years now. What I fear is that we are slowly getting used to figures that are unacceptable, that hatred is becoming the new normal,” Verdoner said in a statement.
“The figures once again paint a worrying picture, underscoring the need for decisive action in schools, online, and in the courtroom,” he continued.
The newly released report shows a decrease in violent antisemitic incidents, with 34 cases compared to 42 in 2024. However, local police registered an increase in antisemitic threats in 2025, with 93 cases compared to 88 the previous year.
Of the 867 registered incidents, more than 400 involved Jewish individuals or institutions in everyday settings, including residential neighborhoods, public streets, and areas around Jewish buildings and cemeteries.
In light of these figures, Verdoner called on authorities to strengthen enforcement and prevention efforts, prioritizing higher detection rates, expanding Holocaust education, and placing greater emphasis on Jewish life as a way to counter ignorance and prejudice.
“At the moment, Jewish life in the Netherlands can almost only continue thanks to the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the police, and interventions such as cameras and bulletproof glass,” he said.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, the Netherlands has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In one of the most controversial incidents, local authorities opened an investigation last year into Batisma Chayat Sa’id, a nurse who allegedly stated she would administer lethal injections to Israeli patients.
In another instance, Amsterdam-based Jewish columnist Jonath Weinberger publicly denounced rising antisemitism in health-care settings, saying she was denied medical care by a nurse who refused to remove a pro-Palestinian pin shaped like a fist.