Chapter One
The "Other" Arrives

With the end of World War I, Jews began arriving in Brazil in ever-growing numbers.^[1] This was partly a result of changes in immigration legislation in the United States, Canada, Argentina, and South Africa, where restrictive immigration acts reduced Jewish entrances.^[2] The National Origins Act, which enacted a quota system in the United States in 1921 that was strengthened in 1924, provided a model for countries desiring to restrict immigrants. Similar Canadian legislation led to a 75 percent drop in Jewish immigration between 1922 and 1923, and later increases never again approached the 1922 high.^[3] The Argentine government significantly decreased Jewish immigration in late 1922 by withdrawing permission from the Jewish Colonization Association, and all other immigration and colonization organizations, to certify immigrants for passport visas. Another law instructed Argentine consuls to issue visas to emigrants only in their countries of birth, making it virtually impossible for large segments of the Jewish refugee population to obtain visas.^[4]

Why did Jews start migrating to Brazil in large numbers after World War I? One answer, commonly heard among those in the business of refugee relief, was that only "when the gates of the United States were closed against immigration, the more or less regular immigration of families to Brazil commenced."^[5] This interpretation, in addition to implying a certain passivity, explains only why Jews were unable to enter other American nations and why Jewish international relief groups put a new emphasis on Brazil. It does not explain why Jewish immigrants

began to accept Brazil as a nation for relocation after previously rejecting it. A better explanation, perhaps, has to do with the immigrants themselves. Active choices played a critical role, and Brazil's new popularity lay, at least in part, in the expectations immigrants had about the chances of future success.

There were a number of reasons Brazil's image began to improve in the 1920s. One was location. For those wishing to establish themselves in well-known Argentina, Brazil was a strategically placed and convenient way station out of Eastern Europe.^[6] Yet even if significant numbers intended to move elsewhere, Brazil's relatively strong economy was attractive. Newly formed communal and religious institutions provided funding and social help for newcomers. As Jews prospered in small and large cities throughout the states of Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Paraná, they sent a new message back to Europe. Brazil was no longer the land fun di mahlpes (land of the monkeys) but a land of prosperity and little religious conflict. Substantial post-World War I industrial economic growth provided jobs, and, for Jews encountering economic restrictions in Eastern Europe, Brazil's developing economy acted as a magnet.

At the same time that Jewish migration to Brazil was increasing, Brazil began to tighten its own immigration procedures, although not to the extent of other American nations. In 1921 Epitácio Pessoa's government mandated that immigrants prove they could financially survive in Brazil as a condition of entrance.^[7] Even so, Brazil continued to be one of the few large American republics without quotas. The Jewish Colonization Association, while continuing to target Brazil as a nation of relocation, realized that the federal government was increasingly restricting

immigration. The ICA thus decided to appoint Rabbi Isaiah Raffalovich, formerly the director of a large Jewish relocation center in Liverpool, as head of operations in Brazil in December 1923. Raffalovich was a superb choice for the job: he was an experienced politician who worked well with Jewish and non-Jewish political leaders and social organizations.^[8]

One of Raffalovich's first decisions was to urge the relocation of the ICA central office to Brazil's political capital, Rio de Janeiro, where he could deal directly with those involved in making, and making exceptions to, Brazil's increasingly complicated immigration laws. Visas, for example, could no longer be issued without specific approval from Rio de Janeiro, and many Jewish applicants were waiting in cities like Warsaw and Bucharest.^[9] As a result, Jews had "a tendency for immigration into Uruguay [even though] none of these immigrants have anybody to join [but] their only reason being the difficulty in obtaining the Brazilian Consul's visa."^[10] Finding the situation intolerable, the new ICA director hoped to "obtain the goodwill of the Brazilian Government Authorities, in order that restrictions on immigration may be removed and, if possible, concessions procured for future immigrants."^[11] Raffalovich's political experience paid off. He befriended Arthur Haas, a well-connected French Jewish immigrant who lived in Belo Horizonte and had cofounded the Siderúrgica Belgo-Mineira ironworks as well as introducing the first windmill and Ford automobile to the state. Through Haas, Raffalovich was introduced into high political circles.^[12] Pleading his case directly to the ministers of foreign affairs and of agriculture, both of whom became "very interested in our work," the rabbi was able to garner special concessions for immigrants sponsored by the ICA.^[13] A few months later, the minister of foreign affairs pledged that those holding ICA certificates of recommendation would be assured a Brazilian visa.^[14]

Raffalovich's growing connections worked particularly well in 1924, when Brazil tightened its immigration laws even further. Only federally approved navigation companies could now bring immigrants to Brazil.^[15] Second- and third-class non-Brazilian passengers were all defined as immigrants and allowed disembarkation only if possessing a series of documents including police good-conduct certificates.^[16] Entries were restricted to specific ports, and all immigrants entering through Rio de Janeiro were required to pass a health inspection.^[17] None of this stopped Raffalovich, who responded by making applicants for visas seem to fit the immigration categories set up by the legislation. Skirting

laws intended to promote the entry of farmers, the Jewish Colonization Association subsidized the fares of family members of colonists without requiring them to work on the Rio Grande do Sul colonies.^[18] This worked only in a limited way, and Raffalovich believed that "without an agricultural basis we cannot hope for any appreciable immigration into Brazil."^[19] Claiming erroneously that Brazil had no industries in which to employ factory workers, Raffalovich believed that the arrival of Jews without agricultural skills was dangerous: "We shall not only be overwhelmed with an indigent mass with whom we shall not be able to cope, but a howl will be raised in the familiar tone of European antisemitism."^[20]

Raffalovich was correct in his assessment. Following notices in Rio de Janeiro's major newspapers of a meeting between the rabbi and the minister of agriculture, one journal, "in the orthodox fashion of the Jew baiters," printed a series of articles warning against Jewish immigration.^[21] In response Raffalovich befriended the editors of local newspapers in order to keep anti-Semitic articles from appearing. Furthermore, he believed that the only way to gain "the sympathy and cooperation of the Government [and] of the Brazilian people" was to demonstrate that the objective of the Jewish Colonization Association was to "plant on Brazilian soil workers and producers."^[22] Such statements endeared the rabbi to many in the Brazilian government, and the mid-twenties marked a high point in the relationship between the government and the ICA. The immigration department, part of the Ministry of Agriculture, was "constantly at our service and at our request grants free passages into the interior to our immigrants." In 1926 consuls at Riga, Danzig, Paris, Warsaw, and Galatz were ordered by the Foreign Ministry to grant visas to ICA-sponsored holders of Russian passports in spite of a special order denying visas to Russians.^[23] Similar service was granted by the intendant of the state of São Paulo.^[24]

By the early 1920s, Brazil was so popular that some Eastern European Jews had even concocted a complicated scheme to gain passages and visas. First, they applied to work on one of the Jewish colonies in Rio Grande do Sul, thus garnering a free passage from the ICA. Once in Rio Grande do Sul, they would quickly find a free train ride from Porto Alegre to São Paulo by agreeing to work on a São Paulo coffee plantation. Many then jumped train, since they were "artisans such as carpenters, blacksmiths and shoemakers who can find work in São Paulo and its environs."^[25] After arriving in São Paulo they presented

themselves to local relief organizations as refugees who had arrived independently, in order to receive aid and language classes.^[26]

Brazil's doors had been pried open, and one relief group, the United Evacuation Committee, sent more refugees to Brazil than to the United States or Argentina.^[27] Brazil's positive image among relief groups was heightened in 1923 when the ICA received a colonization offer from a company "backed by the Brazilian Government" that would provide free transport and land for Jewish refugees moving to rural areas.^[28] Although a "high official" supervised the project, nothing came of it. Even so, the putative willingness of the government to encourage Jewish immigration led the ICA to press for more immigration to Brazil. By the mid-1920s Brazil was a tsukunftsland far idisher emigratsye —a land of the future for Jewish emigrants.^[29]

The Roots of the Anti-Jewish Immigrant Movement

The same forces that had led to a positive reevaluation of Brazil as a nation of relocation by European Jews also frightened many Brazilians. The population of the country was exploding, and the census of 1920 showed an increase of over 13 million people in just twenty years (from 17.3 to 30.6 million), a significant portion of it as a result of immigration.^[30] Almost half of Brazil's urban population lived in just two cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and Porto Alegre was becoming a metropolis as well. São Paulo, now Brazil's second largest city, absorbed almost 60 percent of the immigrants entering Brazil between 1901 and 1920. Immigrants represented 10 percent of the male labor force in Brazil, and many had become moderately successful, in part because they were more literate than native Brazilians and in part because the Brazilian state had invested heavily in them through the subsidized immigration policy.^[31] At the same time, a growing number of native Brazilians were descending the economic ladder, expressing their frustration in riots or via organized resistance to compulsory military service or rapidly rising prices.^[32]

Immigration played a major role in the development of new social conflicts in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre, not coincidentally the areas where Jewish immigrants concentrated.^[33] As natives found their expectations for success unfulfilled, state and federal politicians soon realized that anti—immigrant rhetoric held a potent attraction

for many urban voters. In the 1920s nativists increasingly turned their attention toward attacking Jews, often using the eugenics-influenced language of Central and Western European anti-Semitism. The fact that most Jewish immigrants were from post-Russian Revolution Eastern Europe provided fodder for leading Brazilian intellectuals and politicians to confirm their prejudices of all Jews as communists and economic exploiters. The press, policymakers, and academics commented on "The Jewish Problem" more than would be expected given the relatively modest size of the community.

The specter of a "Jewish invasion" was especially apparent in discussions of immigration. In 1923 Francisco José Oliveira Vianna, a lawyer and historian who was one of Brazil's most important theoreticians of ethnicity and an architect of modern Brazilian immigration policy, testified before the Chamber of Deputies that "the intensive Aryanization of our ethnic composition" should be a priority.^[34] A year later Alcibíades Delamare, an intellectual whose periodical Gil Bias was a self-described nationalist pamphlet, helped form the Academia Brasileira de Estudos Econômicos e Sociais in Rio de Janeiro along with Nicolau José Debané and others who in the 1930s would be associated with the anti-immigrant group the Society of the Friends of Alberto Torres. Apparently Delamare frequently attacked foreigners through references to an unpublished tract by Álvaro Bomilcar titled A ordem militar e a ordem judaica .^[35] Rio de Janeiro's OBrasil (which should not be confused with the monarchist journal of the same name) agreed, printing a "virulent anti-Semitic article that warns against the immigration of Jews who are not producers but will come to [Brazil] to exploit the inhabitants."^[36]

Attacks on Jews came not only from academics and the press, but from politicians as well. In 1923 Fidelis Reis, an influential and longtime federal deputy from Minas Gerais's Partido Republicano Mineiro best known for his attempts to ban all immigrants of African and Asian descent, worried that "the Jewish Colonization Association is interested in acquiring vast stretches of land in Rio Grande do Sul," even though the organization had not purchased any land in Brazil after 1912 and no longer even promoted colonization. Although only ten thousand of Brazil's approximately 30 million inhabitants were Jewish, Reis, founder of the Minas Gerais engineering faculty and former director of the Sociedade Mineira de Agricultura, demanded that Brazilian society confront what he believed was a new social danger.^[37]

Reis's vision of Jews became increasingly common among Brazilian

politicians in the 1920s.^[38] Jewish visibility, and the fascination and disgust that went with it, were the result of the concentration of Jews in specific neighborhoods in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre and concomitant concerns about assimilability and integration. That many Jews spoke Yiddish and did not worship as the majority did gave the group an exotic appeal. Imaginations were inflamed, and anti-Semites found an easy target when a small group of Jewish immigrant pimps and prostitutes were discovered operating in Brazil. Yet what really separated Jews from other European immigrants in Brazil, and made them a subject of scrutiny by non-Jews, was their concentration in a series of very visible occupations, mainly peddling and the textile trades, in which they had rapid success. Their increasing affluence brought out the latent racism and anti-Semitism of the society that surrounded them.^[39] Within a decade, Jews would find themselves restricted from entering Brazil.

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]

Institutions and Integration

Swelled by the numbers and relative success of immigrants arriving after World War I, Brazilian Jewry created an extensive network of communal, social, economic, and political institutions. These included synagogues, relief agencies, libraries, old-age homes, burial societies, and restaurants. The realization that the future was in Brazil, and not elsewhere, lay behind this. The Jewish Colonization Association's boast that "it is the undisputed opinion of all that a marked difference is discernible in the moral and religious condition of local Jewry since our advent into this country" was correct in many respects.^[109] The creation of ICA-sponsored institutions in Brazil, and the promotion of them abroad, gave the community the social and religious bases needed to complete Jewish life.

The rapid expansion of Jewish institutions took place not only in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre, the cities where the majority of Jews were settling. In 1914, the state of Bahia's first Jewish cultural organization was founded in the capital city of Salvador, where the Jewish population consisted of about twenty families, the majority working as peddlers, although some were shop owners.^[110] By 1923, the Jewish population of the city had grown to 267, about 80 percent of those living in the state, and was a microcosm of Jewish life in the early interwar era. Most Jewish immigrants to Salvador chose peddling as a first occupation, although those with capital did buy furniture stores and fabric shops or establish themselves in textiles.^[111] For those without

a skill, peddling was a good option because an initial loan for living expenses, trade goods, and cart could be gotten from the local laispar kasse .

The Jews in Salvador founded a synagogue, library, banquet hall, and lecture hall by charging the members of the community a monthly fee. Their small numbers, and their isolation in the midst of a generally monolithic Catholic society, however, also encouraged the community to want to expand its size. Thus when Marcos Pereira, an ICA representative, visited Salvador in August 1923, Jewish leaders emphasized that their community had the funds and the desire to lodge new immigrants and was willing to help them find work.^[112] Salvador operated on a small scale like all other Jewish communities in Brazil. A desire for immigrants and economic opportunity created a functioning aid network for arrivals. As this system grew, encouraging reports returned to Europe, stimulating more immigration, which in turn expanded the system still further.

Other factors helped establish a communal base that encouraged Jews to come to, and stay in, Brazil. In the early 1920s Jewish schools, most funded by the ICA, could be found throughout Brazil, even in such small communities as Campinas, Niterói, and Curitiba.^[113] The ICA's largest school was the Gymnasio Hebreo-Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro, with more than 250 students. By 1930 the ICA had twenty-five schools in operation for more than 1,600 Jewish students.^[114] Yet it was not only the ICA that was giving education to the young. As early as 1925 the Jewish Colonization Association's educational support funding had caused a small war in Brazil between Zionists, who insisted that Hebrew be taught, and the anti-Zionist, left-wing Russian Jews, who did "not do their duty to the schools, chiefly because Yiddish is not taught."^[115] Political parties created their own schools even in smaller communities like Porto Alegre. The larger Jewish communities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro had as many as five schools divided along political lines.

Newspapers also served the community. Brazil's first Yiddish-language newspaper, DiMenscheit (Humanity), began publication in 1915 in Porto Alegre to serve the growing community of ex-ICA colonists. The establishment of Jewish newspapers indicates that migrants were accepting Brazil as "home."^[116] In 1916 Brazil's first Portuguese-language Jewish newspaper was founded by a Rio de Janeiro intellectual, David Perez, whose Moroccan parents had arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of a small North African Jewish migra-

tion to the Amazon region. Perez, a lawyer who felt himself both a Zionist and "a Brazilian as well," founded A Columna to combine a Zionist line with a desire to "defend the interests of Jews in Brasil."^[117] Interestingly, A Columna's strident Zionism was often encouraged by its coeditor, Alvaro de Castilho, a non-Jew who believed that Zionism should be part of the Humanist movement.^[118] While A Columna was published for only two years, its existence suggests that Brazilian Jews operating in the public arena saw Zionism as a respected ideology that would appeal widely to Jewish immigrants. Indeed, Zionism's impact reached outside of the Jewish community beginning in the 1920s, when Brazilian newspapers regularly reported on the situation in Palestine and visits to Brazil by Zionist leaders.^[119]

The decade after World War I witnessed an expansion of the Jewish press in Brazil. Most newspapers were printed in Yiddish and served as political and informational tools for the growing Jewish community. Even political journals printed items that made integration into Brazilian social and economic life easier. The Jewish press also helped facilitate immigration to Brazil, because much published information was related to the bringing of family members to Brazil from Eastern Europe. Rio de Janeiro's Dos Idische Vochenblatt (The Jewish Weekly) is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Founded in 1923 as a Zionist weekly by Aron Kaufman, the paper ran many lead stories on the positive aspects of Jewish immigrant life in Brazil.^[120]Dos Idische Vochenblatt's advertisements encouraged new migration. One travel agency, A Maritima, based on Avenida Rio Branco, the main commercial street in Rio de Janeiro, recognized that new business might be stirred up among the Jewish community; less than three months after the founding of the paper it began placing large ads. These advertisements, first published in Portuguese but soon after in Yiddish, announced that prepaid tickets could be purchased in Rio for travel to Brazil from Eastern Europe.^[121] The least expensive passages were from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Vilna, the two main cities of embarkation to Brazil, and cost 760 milreis, or about ninety U.S. dollars. Those traveling from Bucharest or Kishineff had to pay a higher fare of 810 milreis (ninety-six U.S. dollars). In order to encourage Jews to buy the prepaid passages, and in recognition of the fact that immigration often occurred in family units, discounts were given for children and all fares could be bought on installment.

The Yiddish newspapers connected the growing Jewish-Brazilian community with the rest of Brazil. As early as 1919, Eliezer Levy, editor

of Belém do Pará's Zionist Kol YisroeI (Voice of Israel), had founded a school for children that taught both Portuguese and Hebrew and boasted that "the Governor of the State presided at the [inauguration] ceremony, and there were in attendance a large number of [non-Jewish] first-class families and gentlemen prominent in social and commercial circles."^[122] It was Dos Idische Vochenblatt's announcement of the invitation of Albert Einstein to Brazil by Rio de Janeiro's Escola Politécnica and Clube dos Engenheiros that led Isaiah Raffalovich to make the visit a means by which to unite Rio's Jewish community.^[123] The pro-Zionist and leftist political slant of many of the Jewish newspapers caused a great deal of concern for those in the ICA who felt their job of refugee relief would be hampered by a virulently pro-Zionist Jewish community. As early as 1923, recognizing the growing power of the Brazilian Jewish press, Marcos Pereira suggested to the ICA Directorate that it found and maintain a magazine in Portuguese and Yiddish. As Pereira envisioned, Illustração Israelita's run of 779 copies was of general interest to Brazilian Jews and stayed away from any political opinions that might "offend Brazilian national sentiments."^[124]

The desire of the ICA to publish in Brazil's national language shows that it, and presumably at least some Jewish leaders, were making an attempt to acculturate Eastern European Jewry. The Jewish newspapers did serve an important role in helping immigrants to accustom themselves to their new land. Even the stridently Zionist Dos Idische Vochenblatt ran advertisements, sometimes in Yiddish and sometimes in Portuguese, for Fildago Beer from Brahma and goods sold by merchants outside of the Jewish community. By 1925 the newspaper had a section in Portuguese that it promoted in front-page headlines, and a government decree, which required all newspapers to print the 1925 constitutional revisions in Portuguese, was strictly followed.^[125] The Yiddish press thus gave immigrant Jews the initial means, in terms of both language and economic/social life, to start becoming Brazilians and, like so many other institutions, made Brazil a positive choice, and not simply a last one, for Jewish immigrants.

The establishment of Jewish institutions made Brazil a more desirable place for Jews, which led the ICA's Isaiah Raffalovich to grow in political importance, especially in the area of refugee relief. He convinced local shipping companies to give the ICA reduced rates on prepaid tickets and free passages when space permitted. This allowed him to make special arrangements for Jews in serious trouble. A woman whose husband was killed in Rio de Janeiro and who was left penniless

was repatriated along with her two children to Odessa. Aaron Weiner, a Bessarabian immigrant who contracted tuberculosis, was given free passage by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company back to Europe, where "his disease was arrested and he is doing almost well." A young woman who arrived from Constantinople without parents "and would have most assuredly gone wrong" also received a free passage to Alexandria so that she might join her mother.^[126]

Unlike earlier immigrants, many of whom had been aided financially, about two-thirds of the Jews arriving after 1925 came with passages prepaid by relatives already in Brazil.^[127] These capital expenditures by new residents indicate how quickly many Jews found economic success. Jewish immigrants already in Brazil also established a relief system that helped newcomers find jobs. Those with no skills, however, swelled the number of Jewish peddlers, visibly concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Raffalovich continued to worry about a negative backlash and encouraged the establishment of more loan and credit societies because he felt that "a system must be formulated and capital provided, whereby the newcomer should be able to render himself, in as short a time as possible, independent for his means of gaining a livelihood."^[128] He also encouraged the ICA to send only immigrants with skills or money: "Brazil offers immense opportunities for artisans and skilled craftsmen . . . [but] the country presents few resources for intellectuals, those in the liberal professions and those involved in commerce who have no capital with which to start."^[129]

In order to guarantee a "proper" migration, Raffalovich wrote a pamphlet extolling Brazil's virtues for distribution in Eastern Europe. Filled with facts and figures designed to present Brazil in a good light, Brazilye: A tsukunftsland far idisher emigratsye (Brazil: A land of the future for Jewish emigrants) even insisted on using the nation's proper name since "in truth the name is 'The United States of Brazil.'"^[130] Perhaps Raffalovich, as had the Republican assembly that created the name, hoped to conjure favorable comparisons with another "United States" that had been popular with Jewish migrants. How much Raffalovich's book encouraged movement to Brazil cannot be measured. What is certain is that those in the ICA's Berlin office, where the pamphlet was published, knew little about Brazil. The advertisements printed on the dust jacket were for Spanish-language courses and a Spanish-Yiddish dictionary.

Throughout the 1920s the process of integrating Jewish immigrants into Brazilian society improved. An ICA-edited, multivolume history of

the Jews now included a section on Brazilian Jewry and was published in Portuguese. Sermons for all major Jewish holidays were printed in both Yiddish and Portuguese, and local institutions regularly provided language lessons for new arrivals. A Portuguese-Yiddish dictionary was distributed. In 1916, the Talmud Torah Bet-Sepher Yvrit of São Paulo became Brazil's first Jewish religious school. By the early 1920s religious and nonreligious Jewish schools existed throughout Brazil. In 1928 there were twenty-two ICA-sponsored schools, and Rabbi Raffalovich reported enthusiastically that the number of children enrolled, especially outside of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, was growing rapidly.^[131] The schools that opened in smaller communities usually succeeded in that most Jewish children attended. In the larger and wealthier communities of Rio and São Paulo, however, "the vast majority of the people neither send their children to nor assist financially the Jewish classes."^[132] Political divisions, particularly between Yiddishists (who were often non-Zionist) and Hebraists (who were usually Zionist), created many schools with poor funding rather than a few schools with good financial bases.

With the influx of immigrants, the Jewish Colonization Association could no longer handle the financial and human costs of international refugee relief. As a result, the ICA joined forces with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid and Sheltering Society of New York and Emigdirect of Berlin to form HICEM (HIAS-ICA-Emigdirect ). The group claimed that Brazil was "immensely rich [and] offered [great] possibilities for immigrants and especially Jews," and sent many migrants there.^[133] The creation of HICEM increased the funding, and thus communal visibility, of already established organizations and helped encourage still more Jews to immigrate.^[134] This included, for the first time, an institutional promotion of Sephardic immigration.^[135] In 1926 many Jews in Constantinople were evacuated, and in the early 1930s Brazil received between 10 and 20 percent of the Jewish immigrants leaving that city.^[136] The Sephardic community quickly grew in size and importance, and with this nucleus in place, a later migration, mainly from Egypt following the Suez crisis of the mid-1950s, was to find recognizable communal life already in place.^[137]

By the end of the 1920s Jewish life in Brazil was well established. Many were comfortable economically, and in some cities there were "literally no poor, although very few . . . in affluent positions."^[138] The Brazilian Jewish community experienced remarkable growth in the twenties, tri-

pling in size. Raffalovich said that he thought "Brazil is destined to play an important role in the future history of Jewry," a belief reinforced by a growing communal participation in international Jewish affairs through such efforts as sending Passover food to Russia.^[139] Economic problems, beginning with the drop in coffee prices in the late 1920s, changed the attitude of many Brazilians to all immigrants, and especially Jewish ones. By 1930 the world-wide depression caused a rise in prices and unemployment and further influenced immigration. Local Jewish organizations had fewer funds, and economic and political problems in Brazil discouraged potential immigrants. Overall immigration dropped over 30 percent between 1929 and 1930, and Jewish entrances fell as well.

By the early 1930s Brazil's Jewish community had changed significantly. Whereas a decade earlier Jews viewed Brazil merely as a station on their way to fortunes elsewhere, now remigration was rare. Many realized that "if it is not possible at the present juncture to make fortunes in Brazil, it is yet easier to earn a living here than in any other part of the world."^[140] As a result of these changes, the ICA concentrated its work less upon arrival aid and more on the legal aspects of garnering visas and changing immigrants into Brazilian citizens. ICA-Brazil, especially under Raffalovich, was ideally suited for this task and maintained excellent relations with authorities, even after the passage of restrictive legislation. As 1933 approached, the "Country of the Future" seemed to offer great promise for Brazilian Jewry.