Peddlers and Prostitutes

Most Jews arriving in Brazil in the 1920s came from Eastern Europe, primarily from Poland. Comprising a little over 10 percent of Poland's population, Jews were relatively urbanized, and were concentrated occupationally in manufacturing and trade.^[40] Those with experience and skills—such as tailors, mechanics, and shoemakers—were needed, especially in the industrializing cities of the south, but Jewish immigrants rarely had the capital to purchase a shop or factory upon arrival in one of Brazil's urban centers. These immigrants were often aided by laispar kasses , loan societies that provided peddlers with the initial funds to purchase goods or help open a small shop or factory. Although each Jewish loan society functioned differently, all allowed an immigrant to form a cash base.^[41]

About 35 percent of the Jews arriving in Brazil had no profession or salable skills and thus entered the life of the clientelchik (Brazilian Yiddish for "peddler"; the Brazilian Portuguese equivalent term was mascate ), an occupation that did not demand a large initial capital investment.^[42] Peddling, although hard work, was a prototype of Jewish economic integration in Brazil. Jewish store or factory owners would sell piece goods or housewares on credit to the newcomers, often choosing agents who were relations or townspeople in their countries of origin. In cities with small Jewish populations, as many as 80 percent of the new immigrant males worked as peddlers, although the percentages

were considerably lower in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.^[43] The willingness of Jewish immigrants to work intensely as peddlers proved so lucrative for them that it often led to their owning small shops or factories and an even more rapid accumulation of capital. With a niche carved out, Jews began to ascend the economic ladder, especially in the textile industry.^[44]

Brazil was fertile ground for peddling.^[45] Some European immigrants peddled clandestinely in the mid-nineteenth century, but legal peddling began on a large scale in the very late 1800s with Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who arrived to the wider markets created by abolition. When more Syrians and Lebanese immigrated during the coffee boom, they also entered the field, often carrying their goods on mules throughout the interiors of São Paulo and Paraná.^[46] This set the stage for the acceptance of Jewish peddlers a generation later as Brazil experienced significant population growth. By the 1920s a middle class had formed, and with it came a desire for previously unavailable goods. Yet product distribution did not progress as efficiently as industrial growth and capital redistribution. In cities and rural areas, peddlers picked up the slack, distributing products in an efficient and inexpensive manner.

Jewish clientelchiks often purchased goods wholesale from Syrian and Lebanese former peddlers who had become wholesalers.^[47] Like these earlier immigrants, Jews "habitually travelled in groups of two, in part because of the dangers in some places, but also to help business."^[48] An experienced peddler helped the newcomer earn some income while teaching him Portuguese phrases and a sales pitch, and "little by little, the neophyte acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the language, the money, [and] how often to frequent the streets."^[49] Since many Jewish immigrants had experience in textiles prior to migration, they gravitated to the peddling of cloth, clothing, and sewing implements, something that often drew negative comments from the press.^[50] By the late 1930s, 54 percent of the industries in Luz, a São Paulo district with a high Jewish population, produced clothing and cloth articles.^[51]

Peddling was such an important part of immigrant life that Brazilian-Jewish humor of the era even included "clientelchik stories." One of the most popular folk tales told of Natanson:

One day Natanson visited a client named Kalmanovitch in order to sell him some goods, and the following conversation was reported to have ensued:

K: Thank you, my friend, but I don't need anything.
N: Cotton? Are you sure you don't need some?
K: No.

N: And silks?
K: No.
N: And belts?
K: No.

After responding "no" to all of Natanson's questions, Kalmanovitch asked the clientelchik to leave so he could go on with his work. As Natanson was leaving he suddenly stopped and in a loud voice began reciting the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

K: But, why are you doing this? Why are you saying Kaddish?
Natanson the clientelchik shot back, "Because, my friend, for me you died."^[52]

In cities across Brazil, from Curitiba in the south to Natal in the northeast, Jewish immigrants worked as peddlers.^[53] Saúl Givelder's story is typical. Born in 1906 in Moguilev, Russia, near the Dniester River, Givelder moved with his parents to Bessarabia when Saú1's father became manager of a small nail factory. Saú1 attempted to immigrate to Palestine in his late teens but was unable to procure the necessary emigrant visa from the Soviet government. Givelder first considered moving to Brazil because he "had many friends [there], and I had heard they became rich because [it] was a country where you could earn a lot of money."^[54] In 1930 he made his way to Marseille, where he purchased a passage with an advance from the Jewish Colonization Association. Upon arrival in Rio de Janeiro, he became an urban peddler after a friend arranged for him to purchase umbrellas on credit. "In truth [Givelder] was not very good" at peddling, but soon he became partners with a friend who owned a shop. This expanded the line of goods he peddled and increased his income. When Givelder's wife came to Rio ten months after his arrival, he already "had a house . . . and the basic necessities were satisfied."^[55] Givelder's story was not uncommon among Jewish immigrants in Brazil's large and small cities. One Jewish leader reported that although "the Jewish immigrants have to struggle hard in order to find independent existences . . . they [can] usually start as hawkers until they succeed in establishing themselves as shopkeepers."^[56]

Despite the economic support that community institutions provided for clientelchiks , peddling elicited ambiguous support from Jewish leaders in Brazil. Many worried that a popular association of Jews with peddling was dangerous because "the trouble is that most immigrants have no trades and to introduce a large number of luftmenschen [those with no visible means of support] who should swell the already too large numbers of peddlers is to run the real risk of increased anti-Semit-

ism."^[57] These fears were not unfounded. When the highly regarded poet Guilherme de Almeida, a member of Brazil's prestigious Academy of Letters, termed Born Retiro "The Ghetto" in a series of eight articles on "impressions of our diverse foreign neighborhoods" for the mass-circulation newspaper OEstado de São Paulo , he probably meant to conjure up a dual image that combined the notion of a Central European urban neighborhood where Jews were segregated from the surrounding society with the poverty and otherness that non-Jews often associated with the Eastern European shtetl .^[58] Bom Retiro, however, was neither a legislated Jewish residential area nor particularly poverty-stricken. In fact, Bom Retiro had been an immigrant neighborhood since 1881, when São Paulo's provincial assembly placed an immigrant receiving station there. Almeida's image of Bom Retiro, however, suggests that he believed Jews were somehow less than completely human: "I found myself face to face with the first face [I saw] in the São Paulo ghetto. Face? Beard: beard and nose. The first Jew."^[59]

Concern about image was further provoked by the existence of a small but visible number of Jewish pimps and prostitutes in most large cities. Most often associated with Argentina, and more specifically Buenos Aires, where the trade was legalized in 1875, foreign prostitution was introduced on a large scale to Brazil only at the end of the nineteenth century. Non-Brazilian prostitutes, often brought to Buenos Aires and moved overland to Rio, were to be found throughout the country by 1900.^[60] The Jewish community vociferously took part in the antiprostitution movement. The Brazilian government also showed its concern and in 1921 insisted on discussing the subject with the International Emigration Commission, a fifteen-nation group headquartered in Geneva. At the meeting, the Brazilian representative noted that "there remains the question of the protection of women and young girls and of the white slave trade. It is in the interest of Brazil to examine this question and to take all steps advisable so as to increase the efficacy of measures already adopted."^[61] The various international commissions had little success in stopping the trade, and in 1926 the League of Nations created a special commission to investigate the issue, but it too was powerless.^[62]

Even at its height, the number of immigrant Jewish prostitutes in Brazil was relatively small, probably less than 750. Almost 70 percent of the prostitutes registered in São Paulo in 1915 were Brazilian natives, and 35 percent were not white.^[63] Of the 3,529 prostitutes arrested by the São Paulo police in 1922, more than 55 percent were Brazilians and

less than 15 percent were from Eastern Europe. A study of ten thousand prostitutes published in 1936 found only 17 percent coming from Eastern Europe, certainly not the huge numbers claimed.^[64] In spite of the fact that most Jewish prostitutes were thought to be Polish, the 1936 study found only four hundred with that nationality.

It is telling that Jews, who made up a tiny percentage of all prostitutes in Brazil and who, "like prostitutes of color, suffered in the bordellos of the 'red-light' districts," elicited such frequent comment from Brazilians.^[65] This was the result of elite concerns about "moral hygiene" that were often expressed in attacks on prostitution among the poorer sectors of the middle class—exactly the clientele of the Jewish prostitutes.^[66] Soon the popular press and anti-Semitic "intellectuals," playing upon the traditional Christian view of Judaism as a religion of ritual and not morality, created an image that associated prostitution, and moral decadence, with immigrant Jewry. One of the best examples of this was Francisco Ferreira da Rosa's series on prostitution for Rio's popular daily newspaper OPaiz , later used as the basis for his book O lupanar: Estudo sobre o caftanismo e a prostituição no Rio de Janeiro (The bordello: A study of pimping and prostitution in Rio de Janeiro), published in 1896. On the surface O lupanar was simply a plea for the "moral cleansing of Rio de Janeiro" that would be conducted by protecting innocent women from harmful procurers.^[67] Who were these pimps who had to be stopped? "The pimp, generally speaking, is an Israelite, is a Jew ."^[68] Ferreira da Rosa, who labeled all pimps as "degenerate Israelites" and titled his first full "analytical" chapter "The Jew—The Pimp," was really attacking Jews. Indeed, virtually every person mentioned in Olupanar is Jewish, and virtually every anti-Semitic stereotype is expounded. Jews "multiplied themselves in every part of the world." Jews were "petrified in their rites and mummified in their customs, they are a type of human fossil." More frightening, no group "changed more and changed less" than Jews, making them "a privileged race . . . always ready for transformation" that would allow them to infiltrate Christian society.^[69]

These turn-of-the-century comments set the stage for an image that linked Jewish immigration, anti-Semitism, and prostitution.^[70] A number of scholars have pointed out that in fin de sicle Brazil the word polaca was synonymous with prostitute, Jew, and others on the margins of polite society and that the slang word for pimp, cafetão , was probably a reference to the caftan, the traditional robe of Eastern European Jewish men.^[71] The image of Jews as pimps and prostitutes, then, be-

came part of a societally accepted norm that was probably transformed from one in Christian Europe that linked Jewish men to non-Jewish prostitutes because both were seen to "have but one interest, the conversion of sex into money or money into sex."^[72]

The frequent references to prostitutes and pimps in Brazil as polacas and cafetões were implicitly about Jews, even if the group went unmentioned specifically. Even Gilberto Freyre, who openly defended Jews as one component of Brazilian "racial democracy," was deeply influenced by the negative stereotypes. In his discussion of prostitution in Ordem e progresso , Freyre uses the word cafetão ten times and cites O lupanar eleven times in just two pages.^[73] Freyre, furthermore, explicitly mentions the Eastern European background of prostitutes, referring to them as polacas and quoting Ferreira da Rosa's comment that the white slave trade was run by "an association composed of Russian Jews, Germans, Austrians and other nationalities."^[74] The association between Jewish immigrants and prostitution was not always subtle. Vida Policial , a weekly police journal published in Rio de Janeiro between 1925 and 1927, often claimed that white women involved in sex crimes (of which prostitution was only one) were Jewish. Frida Mystal, murdered by strangulation, was characterized in the following manner: "Polish by birth, this Jew conserved the peculiarities of race [perhaps a reference to synagogue attendance or speaking Yiddish] even while a prostitute."^[75] In fact, even while articles in Vida Policial regularly mentioned the names of other "dishonest women," the magazine focused on the Jewish minority and discussed religion only in reference to Jews.

Jewish prostitution was usually controlled by a multinational crime syndicate founded in Poland, the Zwi Migdal.^[76] The Zwi Migdal moved to Buenos Aires in 1904, and in 1909 more than 50 percent of the licensed brothels were said to be run by Jewish madams, and the percentage of Jewish prostitutes in the city may have been even higher.^[77] Its network stretched throughout Europe and the Americas and was entrenched in Brazil's large cities, where it, oddly enough, was one of the main patrons of Yiddish culture, particularly the theater. In 1910 the Zwi Migdal branch in Rio de Janeiro held a public march to dedicate the Torah scrolls of its private synagogue, but members of the Jewish community attacked the marchers and took the scrolls.^[78] In the 1920s the Zwi Migdal scandalized both Jews and non-Jews alike with the building of a synagogue whose president, a well-known Rio pimp, invited leaders of the Jewish and non-Jewish Brazilian community to a groundbreaking celebration and party.^[79]

There is no evidence that Jewish men frequented prostitutes, Jewish or otherwise, any more or less than other immigrant men with resident families. Indeed, since so many Jewish immigrants came to Brazil in complete family units, it is not surprising that the Jewish immigrant community was not ambivalent in rejecting Jewish prostitutes and pimps in social and religious matters as t'meim (impure).^[80] As a result, the prostitutes and pimps were forced to create a parallel Jewish society. In São Paulo, a group called the Sociedade Religiosa e Beneficente Israelita (SRBI) was formed in 1924, apparently by the prostitutes themselves, to provide a series of Jewish services that the general community refused to provide.^[81] The society had fifty-six members at the end of its first year, and its social center/brothel was located in the central red-light district of São Paulo.

The major concern of the SRBI was the future, in part because most of its members died before they were twenty-five.^[82] Because most rabbis refused to perform burial rites for known prostitutes, the prostitutes organized their own Jewish cemeteries. It must be emphasized that a desire among prostitutes to be buried in a traditional manner indicates how closed Eastern European Jewish society was; it does not necessarily indicate that the prostitutes were "religious" in the contemporary sense. On December 18, 1924, an "Extraordinary General Assembly" of the SRBI was held to discuss the "acquisition of land to serve as a cemetery for the members," since none desired burial in non-Jewish cemeteries.^[83] The SRBI did not have enough money to buy land, and a special fundraising drive among members was ordered by the group's president. Three years later enough money had been collected to purchase the land and provide regular medical care for all dues-paying members.^[84] By 1927, the membership of the Sociedade Religiosa e Beneficente Israelita had grown to seventy-five and the brothel had moved to a larger building.^[85]

Jewish law prohibits prostitution, and Brazil's Jewish community actively attempted to stop it. In response to the problem of white slavery, societies for the protection of Jewish women were formed in Brazil, usually with funding from Jewish organizations in Europe. In 1924 Brazil received special emphasis, and in 1925 London's Association for the Protection of Girls and Women singled out Brazil as a problem area.^[86] The chair of the B'nai B'rith Committee against White Slavery in Hamburg even translated and abridged Olupanar in an attempt to further emphasize the danger to Jews if white slavery continued to be associated with Jews.^[87] Brazil's immigrant Jews also took a strong stand, for rea-

sons of morality as much as of appearance. Samuel Malamud, who today is still a leading member of Brazil's Jewish community, notes in his memoirs that Rio's Jewish community actually organized a committee to prevent the mumes (Yiddish for "aunties") from entering theaters located in Jewish residential areas.^[88] Local organizations also watched the docks and prevented single Jewish girls and women from being contacted by Zwi Migdal operatives on arrival. One member of Rio's Jewish community remembered "a lot of white slaves" who were met at the port by relief workers and placed in private homes until legitimate work was found.^[89] The vigilance of the Jewish community paralleled the growth of the trade. In 1927 about 100 "young women" were "protected" from pimps in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 1928 the number surpassed 250, doubling yet again the following year.^[90] The community became even more vigilant after the Zwi Migdal leadership tried unsuccessfully to relocate to Rio de Janeiro following the arrest of members in Buenos Aires in 1930.^[91] In 1932, the Rio case worker for the local Society for the Protection of Girls and Women met 119 ships in order to ensure that Jewish women would not enter the white slave trade.^[92]

Local relief organizations were "instrumental in preventing innocent girls from being drawn into vice and shame," and often involved Rabbi Raffalovich in more serious cases.^[93] Esther C., a native of Safed, Palestine, came to Rio with her brother, a merchant, at the age of sixteen. Their neighbor was a "notorious libertine, who, with the assistance of a woman of bad repute, designed the moral destruction of the girl."^[94] Esther was reported missing by her brother at the end of September 1926 and traced to the interior of Brazil, where Raffalovich traveled to resolve the matter. The local judge of minors, after some persuasion, annulled a marriage that had taken place and had "the rascal arrested." Finding the girl "unable to resist the dangers of this city," Raffalovich had her repatriated to Palestine a week later. Another typical case was that of Sura F., an eighteen-year-old Polish girl brought to São Paulo with a passage paid by her sister, a local prostitute. Sura came to the attention of the São Paulo ICA office when a third sister contacted Buenos Aires's Jüdischer Emigranten Schutzverein. Upon making contact with Sura, Raffalovich had a local lawyer prepare immigration documents and had her sent to Buenos Aires in the care of another sister.^[95]

By the mid-1930s the battle against prostitution was over. The Jewish community made it increasingly difficult for single Jewish women to leave the ports in the hands of pimps, and Brazilian social legislation

made commercial vice an increasingly criminal act. The leading members of the Zwi Migdal were arrested in Buenos Aires in 1930, and although few convictions resulted, the organization never recovered.^[96] Even the Sociedade Religiosa e Beneficente Israelita began discussing its own dissolution.^[97] This never occurred, however, since new members were constantly joining the society, an indication of a concern among older prostitutes that they would not receive proper medical care and a religious burial. In 1940 the group had over 100 members and in 1945 almost 130. A rest home was established for "old and abandoned members," and in 1953, when complaints were common that the home "did not offer comfort, was unhygienic . . . and offered danger to those who lived there," it was decided to allocate funds for a new space.^[98] The story of Jewish prostitution ended in 1968 when the society was dissolved and the few remaining members entered the general Jewish Old Age Home with a donation of their remaining capital.^[99]

Although the Jewish community battled prostitution, its existence, even in small numbers for a limited time, created just the image that community leaders feared. Again seeming to follow the European lead, which held that Jewish sexuality, beginning with the ritual circumcision ceremony of the brit-milah , was a form of social deviance, Brazilian anti-Semites used prostitution as ammunition to promote notions of Jewish immorality.^[100] Cezar Magalhaens summed up these views, complaining in a collection of nationalist essays entitled Pela brazilidade that Jews made up one of "the inexpungeable and immoral . . . currents of emigration that enter too often in nations which encourage colonization."^[101] The old issue of Jewish moral turpitude meshed easily with new claims that Jews controlled the white slave trade.^[102] Other writers focused attention on Poland as the center of world prostitution, arguing that Jews, "because of the proverbial beauty of their women, are the principal traffickers."^[103] In a speech before the Brazilian Criminologists Society on "pimping" as a social problem in Brazil, Anésio Frota Aguiar made it clear that not all pimps and prostitutes were Jews, while at the same time suggesting that all Jews might be pimps or prostitutes.^[104] Presenting a list entitled "Pimps affiliated with the 'Migdal,' all Jews, expelled from Argentina," Aguiar portrayed all immigrant Jews in Brazil as pimps.^[105] Further playing on stereotypes, Aguiar complained that "the Jew . . . exploits pimping as if it were a business."^[106]

The combination, even if rare, of religious ritual and prostitution struck anti-Semitic commentators as hypocritical. This was the result of

a seeming incongruity of apparently religious Jews involved with crime. Many Jews involved in prostitution maintained traditions such as keeping kosher, attending regular religious services in special synagogues built by Jewish pimps, and being buried in special cemeteries for Jewish prostitutes and pimps. The tendency of non-Jews to associate such superficial aspects of Judaism with an acceptance of the moral creeds of the religion emphasized the oddity of what must have appeared an exotic immigrant subgroup, and the seeming peculiarity of traditional Jews involved in prostitution created a point of focus.^[107] Not all observers, of course, were so naive. Evaristo de Moraes, for example, noted that prostitution was one of the "saddest aspects" of Jewish life in Rio but was the natural economic result of the forced social and educational segregation of Jews in Eastern Europe.^[108]