The Jews of Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract There are legends recounting that there were Jews in the Americas before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. However, the first documented Jews to reach the New World were those on board Columbus’s ships, most notably Luis de Torres, chosen for his knowledge of languages. There was no significant migration of Jews to the Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, as a result of the anti-Semitism of Spanish Catholicism. European Jews began immigrating to Latin America in substantial numbers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with intensifying anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe in particular, although in many cases they or their children later immigrated to the United States.