[3] In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith attributed much of the development of Brazil's sugar industry and cultivation to the arrival of Portuguese Jews who were forced out of Portugal during the Inquisition.

Many Moroccan Jews arrived in the 19th century, principally because of the rubber boom, settling in the Amazon basin, where many of their descendants continue to live.

[2] The Portuguese Jews, persecuted by the inquisition, stript of their fortunes, and banished to Brazil, introduced, by their example, some sort of order and industry among the transported felons and strumpets by whom that colony was originally peopled, and taught them the culture of the sugar-cane.

Many Sephardic Jews from Holland and England worked with the maritime trade of the Dutch West India Company, especially with the sugar production in the northeast of Brazil.

When the Portuguese retook Recife in 1654, 23 Jews from the community escaped to the Dutch North American colony of New Amsterdam, that in 1664 would become New York City.

Brazilian families that descend from the Conversos are mainly concentrated in the states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Pará and Bahia.

[9] However, these colonization attempts all failed because of "inexperience, insufficient funds and poor planning" and also because of "administrative problems, lack of agricultural facilities and the lure of city jobs."

Despite the failure, "The colonies aided Brazil and helped change the stereotypical image of the non-productive Jew, capable of working only in commerce and finance.

In 1910 in Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul, a Jewish school was opened and a Yiddish newspaper, Di Menshhayt ("Humanity") was established in 1915.

[citation needed] Congregação Israelita Paulista ("CIP," or "Israeli Congregation of São Paulo), the largest synagogue in Brazil, was founded in by Dr. Fritz Pinkus, who was born in Egeln, Germany.

[10] Associação Religiosa Israelita (the "Israeli Religious Association"), now a member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, was founded by Dr. Heinrich Lemle, who emigrated from Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro in 1941.

Auto-da-fés took place in France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Peru, Ukraine, in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India and in Mexico where the last in the world was held in 1850.

Nearly five hundred auto-da-fés were "celebrated" by the Roman Catholic Church over the course of three centuries, and thousands of Jews met their deaths this way usually after months of suffering in the Inquisition's prisons and torture chambers.

This brutal and public ritual consisted of a Catholic Mass, a procession of heretics and apostates, many of them Marranos, or "secret Jews", and their torture and execution by burning at the stake.

[12] Auto-da-fé victims were most frequently apostate former Jews and former Muslims, then Alumbrados (followers of a condemned mystical movement) and Protestants, and occasionally those who had been accused of such crimes against the Roman Catholic Church as bigamy and sorcery.

[15] António produced his first play or opera in 1733, and the next year he married his cousin, D. Leonor Maria de Carvalho, whose parents had been burnt by the Inquisition, while she herself had gone through an auto-da-fé in Spain and been exiled on account of her religion.

Though the details of the accusation against them seemed trivial and contradictory, and some of his friends testified about his Catholic piety and observation, António was condemned to death.

[citation needed] Another notable person is Isaac de Castro Tartas (1623-1647) who emigrated to Brazil from France and Holland.

Against the wishes of his relatives there, he went later to Bahia de Todos os Santos (present day, Salvador), the colony's capital, where he was recognized as a Jew, arrested by the Portuguese Inquisition, and sent to Lisbon[16] where he died as a Jewish martyr.

[17] Research by Brazil's Virtual Archives on Holocaust and Antisemitism Institute (Arqshoah) has uncovered that between 1937 and 1950 more than 16,000 visas were issued to European Jews attempting to escape the Nazis were denied by the governments of presidents Getúlio Vargas and Eurico Gaspar Dutra.

According to the Brazilian penal code, it is illegal to write, edit, publish, or sell literature that promotes anti-Semitism or racism.

In the main urban centers there are schools, associations and synagogues where Brazilian Jews can practice and pass on Jewish culture and traditions.