How many jews are in Mexico?
History of the Jews in Mexico
Over the colonial period (1521-1821), a number came to Mexico especially during the period of the Iberian Union (1580-1640), when Spain and Portugal were ruled by the same monarch. That political circumstance allowed freer movement by Portuguese crypto-Jewish merchants into Spanish America. When the Portuguese won their independence from Spain in 1640, Portuguese merchants in New Spain were prosecuted by the Mexican Inquisition. When the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico was replaced with religious toleration during the nineteenth-century Liberal reform, Jews could openly immigrate to Mexico. They came from Europe and later from the crumbling Ottoman Empire and what is now Syria continuing into the first half of the 20th century.