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CHAPTER 7 In Search of Home Abroad German Jews in Brazil, 1933–45 Jeffrey Lesser Ethnicity, no matter how narrowly constructed, is by de‹nition unstable . Internal con›icts (political, generational, or other), relations with the majority society, and international factors all create a constant ›ux. Any kind of ethnic maintenance, then, is a remarkable phenomenon : it is based on group negotiation and acceptance of myriad variables , all of which are constantly changing. The interplay of forces can be seen clearly in the formation of Brazil’s German Jewish refugee community in the 1930s, a group that sought to integrate into white elite society while emphasizing its difference from Eastern European Jews who had arrived earlier. The pattern of Jewish immigration to Brazil necessarily in›uenced the ways in which German Jewishness was created and contested. While some Jews came to Brazil in the colonial period, the creation of community in the contemporary sense only took place in the late nineteenth century when Jews from North Africa settled in the Amazon during the rubber boom. These Jews were followed in the early twentieth century by signi‹cant groups of Bessarabians, who settled in agricultural communities in southern Brazil funded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). The farming colonies were a failure, but the migration of these Jews into Brazil’s major cities set the stage for large-scale Eastern European, primarily Polish, immigration in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, in some years almost 13 percent of all the Jews leaving Europe settled in Brazil, making it one of the most important nations of Jewish relocation in the world.1 These migration patterns were markedly different from those in the United States, Argentina, and Canada, where nineteenth-century Central European Jewish migration created a corporate base against which all later migrants reacted. One historian, for example, has described 167 the Jews of Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth century as “re‹ned Western European Businessmen who were heirs to the Emancipation [and were] generally committed to the tenets of German reform and its concern for digni‹ed services, sermons in the vernacular and the termination of rules that tended to make Jews appear different.”2 Such comments would be appropriate for the U.S. and Canadian cases as well, and in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Jewish internal hegemony in communal/organizational life in all three nations can be demarcated as German Jewish based.3 Such characterizations are not appropriate for Brazil, where formal political Jewish culture was dominated by Eastern European Jews who arrived after the Russian Revolution. While the almost ten thousand German Jewish refugees (see table 1) who arrived in Brazil between 1933 and 1941 had much in common with the elite population of the country, their shared experiences with Jews already in Brazil were minimal. Thus they did not ‹nd themselves welcomed from within but ironically became outsiders anew within the Jewish community. This, and an image in Germany of Brazil as a “backward country,” helps explain why German Jewry was actively discouraged from immigrating to Brazil until the late 1930s, long after the emigration of Jews ›eeing Nazism had begun. When German Jews began to enter Brazil in the second half of the 1930s, they integrated quickly into an upper- and upper-middle-class culture, which constructed Brazil’s economic and social problems as the “fault” of the lower classes. This discourse meshed easily with German prejudices about Brazil, allowing refugees rapid entry into elite culture. Other factors also helped refugees slip easily into the upper classes. Unlike in the United States, where the slow accumulation of capital by immigrant Jews led to entrance into a burgeoning middle class, the absence of just this middle class in Brazil meant that any capital accumulation whatsoever vaulted many refugees into the upper 25 to 30 percent of the population that was not destitute. Finally, many in the Brazilian elite saw that Central Europeans were the most desirable of all immigrants. Urbanized and relatively socially assimilated German Jews with professional- and managerial-class backgrounds were thus, at least discursively, vaulted into the upper echelons of Brazilian society, even when they arrived destitute. Indeed, since German Jews began entering Brazil only ‹fty years after the abolition of slavery, they (like previous Eastern European Jewish immigrants) accrued status upon arrival simply on the basis of color. Industrialization and urbanization combined with a racial scheme designed to keep people of color 168 The Heimat Abroad at...

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