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Jeffrey Lesser is Professor of History and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Emory University.

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"This book adds an important new dimension to the worldwide history of the Jewish refugees during the Holocaust."--Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University

"Lesser's book explains the Latin American Jewish experience more than any other book I know."--Robert M. Levine, University of Miami

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Welcoming the Undesirables

University of California Press

On September 25, 1947, Oswaldo Aranha, the influential former Brazilian foreign minister and an ex-ambassador to the United States, was elected president of the General Assembly of the United Nations; one of his charges was the partitioning of Palestine. Aranha and the Brazilian representative to the United Nations, João Carlos Muniz, former director of Brazil's powerful Immigration and Colonization Council, actively supported the resolution, and two months later the State of Israel was established.1 Jews and Gentiles around the world viewed Israel's creation as a triumph of democracy in international politics. Brazil and Aranha, both crucial to the decision, were considered friends of Israel, Zionism, and all Jews. In Tel Aviv a street was named after Aranha, as was a cultural center in a kibbutz settled by Brazilian Jews.

The honors accorded to Brazil following the United Nations vote might have been tempered if it had been widely known that fourteen years earlier Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas and his policymakers, including Aranha and Muniz, had proposed to prevent the entry of Jewish refugees. Following two years of informal restriction, on June 7, 1937, five months before the establishment of the fascist-inspired Estado Novo (New State), Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Relations (known as Itamaraty) issued a secret circular that banned the granting of visas to all persons of "Semitic origin." Jewish relief organizations, many of whose leaders were important U.N. lobbyists in 1947, knew of the secret circular. The British and United States diplomatic corps were also aware of its existence. Yet all of this was diplomatically ignored in thewake of Israel's creation. Even Aranha's reported comment that the creation of Israel meant that the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Copacabana would be returned to the Brazilians passed unnoticed.2

Why did Jews, a small part of a large immigrant stream from Europe and the Middle East, cause such consternation that they were eventually banned from entering Brazil?3 And why, just one year after the ban was in place, did more Jews enter Brazil legally than at any time in the past twenty years? The answer to these two questions involved a change in the way a small but extraordinarily powerful group of intellectuals and politicians looked at Brazilian national identity and the role immigrants, and thus residents and potential citizens, would play in shaping it. They represented a new generation in Brazilian politics whose influence was formalized in 1930 following a Getúlio Vargas-led coup. While the general politics of the group ranged from far right to far left, almost all agreed with the social notion, frequently learned in one of Brazil's law schools, that social Darwinism and scientific racism formed the backbone of an appropriate analysis of Brazilian cultural and economic development.

The foreign ministers, justice ministers, diplomats, journalists, and intellectuals who provide the cast of characters for this book struggled to combine the pseudoscientific social categorizations so prominent among the educated in twentieth-century Europe and the Americas with a new nationalist sentiment. This fused with omnipresent traditional Christian motifs so that attempts to engender devotion to "a patria " (patriotism) put non-Christian groups, and particularly those who had been attacked through the ages, in a precarious position.4 No immigrant group tested the new attitudes more than Jews. Many in the Brazilian intelligentsia and political elite considered Jews culturally undesirable even while believing that they had a special, inherited relationship to financial power and could thus help Brazil to develop industrially. Jewish immigration therefore challenged policymakers who deemed Jews a non-European race but also desired to create a Brazilian society that mirrored the industry of the United States or Germany. By the mid-1930s the Jewish Question or Jewish Problem (both terms were used regularly) was high on the Brazilian political and social agenda.5

The existence of a Jewish Question in Brazil should not lead readers to assume that its formulation or application was similar to that in Argentina or Europe, where popular and official anti-Semitism ran rampant. In these cases, anti-Semitism was based on convoluted images ofreal Jews with whom the Gentile population had regular contact. In Brazil, however, influential individuals attacked images of imaginary Jews who were presumed to be simultaneously communists and capitalists whose degenerate life-styles were formed in putrid and poverty-stricken European ethnic enclaves. The harsh and unrealistic judgments were framed in an unsophisticated reading of European anti-Semitism and Jew hatred applied to an inaccurate image of Jewish life outside of Brazil. The surprise in all this, however, is that real Jews living in Brazil, were they citizens or refugees, faced few daily or structural impediments to achieving either social or economic goals. Thus Brazil's Jewish Question was really a struggle by Brazil's leaders to fit the bigoted images of Jews that filtered in from Europe with the reality that the overwhelming majority of Jewish immigrants were neither very rich nor very poor, were rarely active politically, and rapidly acculturated to Brazilian society. Unlike in thirteenth-century Europe, where Augustinian ambivalence toward images of biblical Jews clashed with Dominican and Franciscan attacks on actual Talmudic Jews, or in twentieth-century Europe, where long-held stereotypes of Jews reinforced an angry scapegoating in times of economic, political, and social crisis, in Brazil the imagined Jew, not the real one, was considered the danger.6

If the combination of nationalism and racism led to the creation of a Jewish Question by those at the very top of Brazil's political and intellectual worlds, the Vargas regime's facile use of nationalist discourse to achieve short-term political goals often led to expressions of nativism from state politicians who represented socially conservative urban middle-class constituencies that included members of the government and military bureaucracy, the clergy, and white-collar workers. Brazilian nativism in the 1930s and 1940s was not all that different from the same phenomenon occurring throughout the Americas. Those judged to have allegiances or concerns outside of some blurrily defined "brasilidade " (Brazilianness—a term regularly used by members of the Vargas regime) were a danger to society and its citizens. As was the case elsewhere, Brazilian nativism was "conscious[ly] or unconscious[ly], intimately connected with nationalism."7 Yet nationalism and nativism, for all their classic components, co-existed with a belief that racism did not exist in Brazil. Even the way the word raa was used in mid-twentieth-century Brazil included both the invidious pseudoscience so popular in Europe at the time and the fifteenth-century notion of a "population . . . of human beings who through inheritance possessed common characteristics."8 Brazilian politicians, often expressing ideas formulated byleading intellectuals, preached a kind of internal equality that allowed virtually any nonblack who resided within Brazil's borders to be "Brazilian," while judging many outside of the territorial boundaries as unwelcome...