Latin America’s Sephardi story spans five centuries. Conversos sailed with the first Spanish and Portuguese colonists, the first synagogue in the Americas opened in Dutch Recife in 1636, and Moroccan Jews built communities along the Amazon in the 19th century. After 1900, Jews from Syria, Turkey, the Balkans and Morocco founded congregations from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, and today Sephardim are the majority of Jews in Panama, while Syrian Jews form one of the largest Jewish communities of Mexico City. See also Curaçao Jews, Bnei Anusim and Jews of Ecuador.
Conversos in the colonies
Although Jews and recent converts were barred from the Spanish colonies, New Christians reached Mexico, Peru and the Río de la Plata from the 16th century, many of them Portuguese merchants. The Inquisition followed them, with tribunals in Mexico City, Lima and Cartagena. In New Spain the Carvajal family, most of them secret Jews, settled the New Kingdom of León in the 1580s; Luis de Carvajal the Younger, burned in 1596, left memoirs that are the earliest known writing by a Jew in the Americas. See Bnei Anusim.
Dutch Brazil
When the Dutch held northeastern Brazil, Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam and local New Christians could live openly. In Recife they founded Kahal Zur Israel in 1636, the first synagogue in the Americas, serving some 1,450 Jews, and in 1642 Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca arrived as its rabbi, one of the first rabbis in the New World; see also a Hebrew poem from the siege of Dutch Brazil. When the Portuguese retook Recife in 1654, the Jews left, for Amsterdam, the Caribbean and New Amsterdam, where 23 of them founded the first Jewish community in North America. A museum, the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, opened on the excavated site in 2001.
Moroccan Jews of the Amazon
After Brazil opened to foreigners in 1808, Moroccan Jews from Tangier, Tetouan and other towns began settling in the Amazon around 1810, trading along the river from Belém to Manaus and as far as Iquitos in Peru; the rubber boom drew many more. In Belém they founded two synagogues, Eshel Abraham (1824) and Shaar Hashamaim (1826), and a cemetery in 1842. Many families intermarried, and a rabbi sent from Morocco, Shalom Emanuel Muyal, who died in Manaus in 1910, is still venerated at his grave by Jews and non-Jews alike. Today about 25,000 people count themselves Amazonian Jews, and hundreds of descendants in Iquitos have formally converted, most of them moving to Israel. See Moroccan Jews.
The 20th-century communities
- Mexico. Jews from the Ottoman Empire arrived from the 1890s. The Damascene community founded Monte Sinaí in 1912, the first Jewish organization in Mexico, and the Aleppo community the society that became Maguén David in 1938; a separate Sephardic community serves descendants of Ladino-speaking Jews from Turkey and the Balkans. Mexico has 90,000 to 100,000 Jews, most in Mexico City.
- Panama. Panama’s first congregation, Kol Shearith Israel, was founded in Colón in 1876, and after World War I Syrian Jews became the largest group. Most of Panama’s Jews are Sephardi; Congregación Kol Shearith Israel still leads the Spanish and Portuguese tradition there.
- Argentina and the Southern Cone. Moroccan and Ottoman Jews arrived in Argentina alongside the much larger Ashkenazi migration; Sephardim are about a fifth of Argentina’s roughly 180,000 Jews, with congregations such as ACISBA in Buenos Aires and the Templo Maguén David in Santiago de Chile. The 1994 bombing of the AMIA center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people.
- Colombia, Venezuela and the Caribbean coast. Families from Curaçao settled in Coro, Barranquilla and other ports in the 19th century, and Moroccan Jews built communities in Caracas. See the Sephardic Hebrew Community of Bogotá.
The community today
Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are a minority of Latin American Jews overall but a majority in several countries, and their communities, especially the Syrian ones of Mexico City and Panama, are among the most observant in the region. Find congregations in our Sephardic synagogue directory.
Notable people
- Isaac Aboab da Fonseca 1605–1693 · Castro Daire Rabbi of Kahal Zur Israel in Recife from 1642, one of the first rabbis in the Americas; later chief rabbi of Amsterdam’s Portuguese community.
- Baruj Benacerraf 1920–2011 · Caracas Immunologist of a Moroccan and Algerian Jewish family; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1980.
- Eric Arturo Delvalle 1937–2015 · Panama City President of Panama, 1985–1988, and a member of Kol Shearith Israel; his uncle Max Delvalle had been the first Jewish head of state in Latin America.
Sources and further reading
- Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of Latin America (3rd ed., Lynne Rienner, 2014).
- “Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue”, “Amazonian Jews”, “History of the Jews in Mexico”, “History of the Jews in Panama” and “History of the Jews in Argentina”, Wikipedia.
Published October 2026.
