ABSTRACT
This chapter treats the history and contemporary dynamics of Judaism in Brazil as they relate to both particular phases of Jewish immigration and current religio-cultural trends. The modernity collapsed the ultimate source of collective Jewish authority, transferring 'to individual consciousness the definition of Judaism, thereby pluralizing Judaism'. The secularization process of European Judaism that began in the late nineteenth century and was consolidated in the twentieth century formed the matrix with which Jews arrived in Brazil between the 1920s and 1950s. Although some continued to respect some precepts of the Jewish religion, most quickly distanced themselves from the religious referent. The homeland was, however, not obliterated from the collective memory of the different Jewish ethnic subunits, but continues to be invoked within complex identitarian processes by immigrants from Morocco, Germany, Poland, Syria, and other regions. In Israel, the 1970s were the backdrop that promoted important new identitarian reformulations among groups that would later gain public recognition and power.
