This is the first detailed, systematic study of anti-Semitism in Brazil’s political arena during the Vargas years. By exploring the anti-Semitic leanings of the Brazilian elite in the decade of the 1930s it also examines the ways that elite saw society and the world around it. Tucci Carneiro consulted hundreds of unpublished documents and private correspondence at the archives of Itamarati (the Foreign Ministry) and CPDOC (the Center for Contemporary Documentation at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro), newspapers of the era, and an extremely complete bibliography of secondary sources. She notes, however, that much of Itamarati’s documentation remains classified and therefore unavailable.
Tucci Carneiro attacks the myth that Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha’s support of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 represented anything more than political pragmatism. Within the Vargas administration, he did oppose pro-Nazi spokesmen led by Gustavo Barroso and Felinto Müller, but privately, the author demonstrates, he shared the same aristocratic prejudices of the rest of the Brazilian elite against blacks, Masons, liberals, and Jews. He also was unsympathetic to pleas to permit victims of Nazism to enter Brazil in the late 1930s—not that many other public figures in the Americas acted out of sympathy either.
There were some exceptions: the author praises a number of Brazilian officials who attempted to aid individual refugees from Nazism as more and more doors closed—Carlos Martins Pereira e Souza, the Brazilian ambassador in Washington; Luiz Martins Souza Dantas, ambassador in Paris; and Orlando Arruda, secretary of the Brazilian legation in Warsaw. Some intellectuals (Humberto de Campos, Gilberto Amado, Afrânio Peixoto, Solidônio Leite Filho) also opposed the anti-Semitic campaign, but usually not publicly, and often in curious ways. Origines Lessa, for example, argued that he admired Jews for being good businessmen and moneymakers, and that anti-Semitism served as a kind of necessary evil since Jewish “energy” lapses in normal times. Most of the other sympathetic intellectuals, Tucci Carneiro shows, misunderstood Judaism, and accepted uncritically many of the stereotypes on which prejudice historically was based. She argues that anti-Semitic propaganda in Brazil was more widespread than previously known. Vargas took no steps to counter it, because its presence was not disadvantageous politically.
The study hears the stamp of a doctoral dissertation (University of São Paulo, 1987) in that it lacks contextual analysis beyond its basic theme and displays a certain one dimensionality throughout. But it provides a wealth of new sources and detail for future studies.
