“Where There is Not Even a Shadow of Prejudice”: European Jewish Immigrants and Brazilian National Identity, 1945-1955

• In Event: Inventions of Modern Jewish Identity in the Americas

Abstract

This paper explores how European Jewish immigrants in postwar Brazil used the myth of Brazil as a land free of racism to assert their own belonging in Brazilian society. While a number of historians have addressed the responses of Brazilian minorities of African, indigenous, and Japanese origins to the myth of Brazilian “racial democracy”, the unique poignancy of this narrative for European Jewish immigrants in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust has yet to be examined. Drawing upon poems, short stories and newspaper editorials written in Yiddish and Portuguese between 1945 and 1955, I argue that Polish and German Jewish immigrants used this myth to quieten their own anxieties concerning the possible persistence of anti-Semitism in postwar Brazil, to challenge anti-Jewish immigration restrictions, and to grapple with the implications of assimilation and intermarriage. However, while the myth of Brazilian racial democracy seemed to offer Jewish immigrants inclusion in the Brazilian national community, it was not entirely unproblematic, as its celebration of ethnic and racial mixture as the basis of the Brazilian nation threatened Jewish endogamy and undermined particularist notions of Jewish peoplehood. This paper demonstrates how Jewish immigrants used prevailing national narratives to address their own particular needs, investigates changing Jewish ideas about the relation between race and national identity in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and assesses the limitations of national narratives in achieving particular Jewish objectives. It intends to further scholarly understanding of Jewish ideas about race, racism and national identity in the postwar Americas and beyond.

Author

• Michael Rom, Yale University