Jewish settlement in Latin America in the 19th century
« Histoire universelle des Juifs », Élie Barnavi, Hachette, 1992
When Latin American states become independent from Spain, they allow non-Catholics to settle on their territory. The first Jewish immigrants originated either from the so-called Portuguese communities of the Antilles, or from Germany, France, England or Morocco. Members of the small community of Curaçao settle in Coro in northern Venezuela: it is where on July 13, 1829, the first Jew is granted, by Simon Bolivar, citizenship of a Latin American country; it is also where the oldest Jewish cemetery of the world is preserved continent, inaugurated no later than 1837.
Arrived individually, scattered across the continent and devoid of community links, European Jews are little different from their compatriots who arrived at the same time as them. It is known that Jews from these countries have been in Brazil since 1808, Mexico since 1830, Peru since 1833, Argentina since 1834 or Chile since 1842. Jewish organizations are created late, and only in large urban centers as in Buenos Aires in 1862.
Young Moroccan Jews migrate to the Amazon at a time of booming rubber production. The first Brazilian synagogue was founded in Belém in 1828.
From the 1880s the immigration of Jews from Russia began. The movement gained momentum in 1891, when the colonization business launched by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Argentina made Latin America one of the main homes of Jewish immigration. Argentina and Uruguay became important centers of Ashkenazi Judaism until WWI.
The decomposition of the Ottoman Empire causes the migrations of Sephardic populations: Smyrniotic Jews in Buenos Aires (1904, 1910), Macedonian Jews from Monastir in Temuco, Chile (1916).
At the end of WWI, the Latin American diaspora has some 150,000 Jews whose largest community is in Argentina.