The Brazilian Jewish community is the second largest in South America and one of the ten largest in the world. In 2020, the estimated population was around 120,000. The history of Jewish immigration and life in Brazil may be divided into two major periods: the colonial, from 1500 to 1808, and the independent period, from 1808 to the present. 

The presence of New Christians (Jews who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal) in the territory dates from 1500 and the existence of the esnogas (the space used by the New Christians to assemble and pray) is mentioned in the testimonies, denunciations, and confessions collected by both the First Visitation (1591–1595) and the Second Visitation (1618–1619) of the Holy Inquisition. The martyrology of a large number of New Christian women, including Branca Dias (c. 1515–c. 1588), whose descendants were also victims of the Inquisition, serves as testimony to their role in maintaining Judaism. 

Due to the oppressive presence of the Inquisition under Portuguese rule, Jews were only able to enjoy a tolerant regime and to establish their communities during the short period of Dutch rule in the northeast coastal areas of the country (1624–1654). There is evidence that the communities later known as Zur Israel and Maguen Abraham were already organized by 1637. 

After the military defeat of the Dutch armies by the Portuguese in 1654 and the resulting destruction of the Jewish communities in that region, the Inquisition accelerated its activities throughout the eighteenth century. Many Brazilians were sent to the auto da fé (the ceremony that preceded the sentence of execution), which was abolished only in 1794. In 1810, two years after the arrival in Brazil of the Portuguese royal family, Portugal signed a treaty of trade and navigation with England, which stipulated that foreigners living in Portuguese possessions would not be persecuted or harassed. From then on, new waves of Jewish immigration arrived in Brazil. The first of them, beginning between 1808 and 1822 and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, consisted of immigrants from North Africa, the so-called Moroccan Jews. These immigrants initially settled in the north of the country and began establishing small communities along the Amazon River, dealing with all sorts of merchandise that was exchanged for rubber, the main product of this vast area. Their first organized community, Shaar Hashamaim, was established in 1824 in the city of Belém, and the second, Essel Abraham, in 1889, along with elementary schools and self-help institutions.

In the first decades of the twentieth century these communities began to suffer not only because of the low demand for rubber but also because of the isolation caused by the vast distances between Jewish communities. As a result, Jews began moving towards the larger urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the south of the country. A wave of Alsatian immigrants followed, after the annexation by Germany of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. The French Jews, who settled mainly in the major cities in the south of the country, brought with them Western European cosmopolitan culture, which attracted the Brazilian elite. Besides establishing fashion houses, stores for household equipment, and importation enterprises, they were very much engaged in the modernization of urban centers such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and involved in the parceling and creation of neighborhoods, as well as the development of urban infrastructure facilities such as transportation or water and electricity systems. 

Jews of European origin and their descendants, including most of North and South American Jewry.Ashkenazi immigration from Eastern Europe began in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1891 a large group fleeing the Tsarist Empire arrived in Brazil. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Ashkenazi immigration increased rapidly, constituting a majority that took a leadership role that endures to the present. As in Argentina, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) in 1904 initiated a colonization program in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, with the foundation of the Philippson settlement, followed in 1911–1912 by that of Quatro Irmãos. But the failure of the agricultural colonization promoted by JCA led many settlers to leave for urban centers where they joined the existing Jewish population. At the same time, in 1905, the government of the State of São Paulo promoted a program of agricultural colonization in the hinterland that also received Jews from Russia who settled in Nova Odessa and other colonies. 

In the 1910s the Ashkenazi immigrants established organized communities in Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and São Paulo, creating models of community life to foster their social, cultural and religious needs, independent of the organizations established by the Moroccan and Alsatian immigrants of the previous century. However, this was a slow process, and although community associations sprang up as early as 1905, they were initially based on the landsmannschaften or groups defined by origin. A wider immigration wave from Eastern Europe took place between 1914 and 1933, resulting in an increase in the number of Jewish societies and institutions. Between 1933 and 1945 a large number of German Jews flocked to Brazil, where they organized their own independent societies. During the same period virulent anti-Jewish sentiment among government officials led to the adoption of a restrictive immigration policy with regard to what was called the “Semitic element.” Secret instructions were sent to the Brazilian diplomatic representatives abroad to discourage Jewish immigration precisely when the situation of European Jews became desperate. At such a crucial moment, when Jewish survival became a world problem and the fate of those who wanted to emigrate from Europe was discussed at the 1938 Evian Conference, Brazil and other Latin American countries closed their doors to that immigration, making entrance conditional on conversion to Catholicism.

 After the stormy war years, new immigrants began to arrive, mainly Holocaust survivors from Europe who gradually merged into the existing Jewish milieu and adapted themselves to the new surroundings. Beginning in the 1950s Brazil welcomed refugees from the Middle East and North African conflicts, from Nasser’s Egypt in 1954, and from the politically unstable countries under communist rule, like the Hungarian Jews fleeing the anti-Communist revolt in 1956. Later the country also received fugitives from endangered Jewish communities in Latin America, such as those living under dictatorships in Argentina and Chile. 

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