The Jews of Suriname and Brazil

Abstract This chapter considers the parallel histories of Jews and their creolization in Suriname and Brazil. Portuguese immigrants, who arrived via Amsterdam, founded the Jewish community of Brazil (1630–1654), the first in the Americas, and a number of them participated in establishing the daughter community of Suriname in the 1650s. Creolization has been a salient feature of both communities, particularly in Suriname, where forced migrants from Africa and their descendants constituted the majority population. The same phenomenon emerged to a lesser extent in Brazil, where North African immigrants in the nineteenth century established families with Indigenous women of the Amazon, and Christians of various ethnic backgrounds have recently claimed crypto-Jewish ancestry, many formally adopting Judaism. Despite the lack of overlap or continuity between the Jewish communities of Suriname and Brazil, there are striking parallels which speak to the usefulness of approaching Jewish history as “braided” rather than discrete.