With Brazil’s abolition of slavery in 1888, powerful southern coffee planters turned to a white immigrant work force, using private and then public funds to underwrite the costs of transporting Europeans to southern Brazil. An estimated 4.5 to 5 million immigrants arrived in Brazil during the period 1820 to 1930, of whom roughly 3.5 million remained. The number of immigrants quickly matched the number of African slaves forced to migrate over a period of three hundred years.
This massive, state-sponsored immigration met two objectives of Brazil’s elites. First, it was a way to impede the entrance of the freed slaves and their descendants into the most dynamic regional sectors of the emerging wage economy. Second, it furthered a general policy of “whitening” what was considered a degenerate black and mixed-race culture. Influenced by European eugenics, the elites were optimistic that an influx of European immigrants would provide a compliant labor force while changing the culture and race of the nation.
It is against this backdrop that Jeffrey Lesser chronicles Brazil’s immigration policies toward European Jews. He traces the ideology that elites—foreign ministers, justice ministers, diplomats, journalists, and intellectuals—used to define who was a Brazilian and what role immigrants would play in modern Brazilian society. Ideology, however, like most things Brazilian, was often fluid, with the result that the official positions on Jewish immigration were always in flux and often contradictory. For example, European Jews were viewed as culturally undesirable, but simultaneously seen as model citizens and as crucial to Brazil’s economic development. Similarly, Lesser documents the contradictory dialogue and rampant anti-Semitism among Brazilian intellectuals and federal policymakers while showing that prejudice was not always acted on. Despite the anti-Semitism in national discourse, Jewish immigration was not stopped, nor were the migration patterns changed (p. 21). Indeed, in 1939, when secret orders to restrict Jewish entry existed, more Jews entered Brazil than at any one time in the previous ten years (p. 175).
Brazil has long been a testing ground for theories of race relations. Lesser joins this tradition by raising many interesting questions about the relationship between the Jewish question and racism toward Brazilians of African descent. In particular, he challenges the white-nonwhite dichotomy used by many scholars of Brazilian race relations, which “assumes that all those judged as not black were considered white, and vice versa” (p. 5); the presumption being that those of European descent were universally privileged. Lesser’s work (similar to historical analyses of European immigrants in the United States) successfully demonstrates that immigrants to Brazil were differentiated on the basis of ethnicity; Jews suffered selective enforcement of immigration policy. Lesser’s findings, furthermore, are consistent with other Brazilian studies that have examined the exclusionary experiences of Japanese and Chinese immigrants.
Lesser’s analysis of elite discourse on immigration is richly documented. He is less successful, however, in accomplishing his goal to “challenge a number of general assumptions about race in Brazil” (p. 175), specifically the historical importance scholars have given to skin color. Lesser asserts that because Jews were categorized as nonwhite before their immigration, Brazilian construction of racial identity can no longer be based exclusively on skin color but must be broadened to include ethnicity, language, nationality, and religion. Yet Lesser is unable to challenge the primacy of skin color in Brazil. Instead, he argues that once Jewish immigrants arrived in Brazil they were accepted as nonblack, and they “prospered in the same way that many other white, European groups did” (p. 176), and certainly as black Brazilians never have. This was because, as Lesser notes, their Jewish background was not always self-evident, given their “Caucasian racial background” (p. 176).
Lesser’s findings agree with an overwhelming body of historical, statistical, and ethnographic evidence that has consistently demonstrated that net of all else (social class, region of residence, for example), skin color has always mattered in Brazil. Dark-skinned individuals across all social strata suffer prejudice and, more important, discrimination. On the Brazilian color continuum, shades matter; and Eastern European Jews from Poland, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Romania, and other European countries were much closer to the white end of the spectrum. Intriguing questions for further research include how, in the face of such anti-African prejudice and discrimination, Jews, preclassified as nonwhite, came to be reclassified as nonblack once they settled in Brazil. Did the “whiteness” of Jews influence their acceptance, assimilation, and prosperity, which Lesser documents?
Welcoming the Undesirables is an important analysis of the Brazilian elite’s discourse on immigration and national identity and the fate of refugee Jews. Latin Americanists will appreciate Lesser’s documentation of the often contradictory Brazilian politics of immigration, while students of the Jewish diaspora will welcome this addition to the small but growing body of literature on Jewish immigration to Brazil.
