jews in brazil are a small but sizable population, and they include mostly ashkenazi jews (who also arrived with the post-colonial contingent of european migration), a smaller proportion of sephardi jews (mostly eastern sephardim arrived with the contingent of post-colonial immigrants from syria and lebanon, but also north african sephardim from morocco settled in the amazon, and western sephardim arrived with the dutch), and to a much lesser extent mizrahi jews. overall, the small but sizable brazilian jewish community is concentrated especially in são paulo, rio de janeiro and porto alegre, and they are accounted for without brazilian descendants of portuguese "new christians" (ethnic sephardic jews forced to convert to christianity and arrived with the ethnic portuguese during the colonial period), which if included would inflate the jewish origin population in brazil considerably. by themselves, brazilian descendants of portuguese "new christians" are estimated to account for a figure anywhere between hundreds of thousands to several million.