History of the Jews in Chile

Chile is home to the third-largest Jewish community in South America, with an estimated population of 28,153 people practicing Judaism as of 2024, representing about 0.2% of the total Chilean population. Most of the community is concentrated in Santiago, with smaller groups in other regions. Local sources estimated in 2010 and 2011 that the number of people of Jewish descent ranged from 150,000 to 175,000, making it one of the largest Jewish communities in South America after Argentina and Brazil. Foreign sources, however, estimate that the total number of Chileans with Jewish ancestry is roughly 18,300 as of 2019.

History

Spanish colonization and settlement

The first Jews arrived in Chile with the Spanish conquistadors, seeking to flee the religious persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. Many had converted to Catholicism to hide their Jewish origins. The majority of Jews immigrated to the Americas in the early years of the conquest because the Inquisition had not yet reached there. Diego García de Cáceres, faithful friend and executor of the founder of Santiago, Pedro de Valdivia, was one of them.

In colonial times, the most prominent Jewish character in Chile was the surgeon Francisco Maldonado da Silva, one of the first directors of the San Juan de Dios Hospital. Maldonado da Silva was an Argentine Jew born in San Miguel de Tucumán into a Sephardic family from Portugal. He was accused by the Inquisition Tribunal of attempting to convert devout Christians nurses to Judaism. Maldonado openly declared that he was a Jew, and was sentenced to be burned at the stake - auto-da-fé - in 1639.

Entire Crypto-Jewish families, who had publicly converted to Catholicism but privately remained Jews, arrived. Like in the rest of Latin America, the original Jewish settlers did not retain their identity over the generations and were eventually assimilated into the broader majority of the Chilean Catholic society. As such, the Jewish community of Chile today only really begins with the Jewish immigrations of the 19th century.

Jewish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries

From 1840, decades after the abolition of the Inquisition in Chile, began the Jewish immigration to the country. The first Jews who arrived in Valparaíso were from Europe, especially from Germany and France. One of them, Manuel de Lima y Sola, was a man who became one of the founding members of the Fire Department of Valparaíso in 1851 and one of the founders of the Chilean freemasonry to create the first Masonic lodge, the "Unión Fraternal" two years later.

In the late 1800s, Chile experienced small-scale Jewish immigration from Europe and the Levant. Russian Jews sought refuge in Chile following the 1881–1882 pogroms. The southern mining districts also saw the arrival of Eastern European Jews, as well as Sephardic Jews from Smyrna, Istanbul, Monastir, and Salonika, due to economic hardship and discrimination. Valparaíso and Santiago also received Sephardic Jews, along with Jews from Jerusalem, Beirut, and Damascus.

In 1909, the Israelite Union Society of Chile (in Spanish: Sociedad Unión Israelita de Chile) was founded as the first Jewish institution in Chile.

Many Jews left Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1961, the Jewish population was about 30,000, but by 1997 the population had dwindled to 15,000.

21st century

The first-ever Jewish chaplain of the chapel at La Moneda Palace, rabbi Eduardo Waingortin, was appointed in 2012 by President Sebastián Piñera.