Images of Jews and Refugee Admissions in Brazil, 1939–42

Abstract

This article focuses on immigration policy enforcement, or the lack of it, in Estado Novo Brazil. It suggests that formal government policies that prohibited Jews from entering Brazil were only one component of a very sophisticated overall “Jewish policy” that sought to appease two contradictory and powerful forces among Brazilian elites: large landowners and “modernizers” interested in industrial and agricultural development based on immigrant skills and capital, and urban nativists who sought to ban many immigrant groups that had traditionally entered Brazil under the “European” rubric. Furthermore, I argue that both the “advantages” and “disadvantages” that many Brazilian policy makers attributed to Jews were often based on longheld stereotypes. Such bigoted notions, as I show, had both positive and negative components, thus leading to their manipulation by competing forces such as Jewish relief organizations, the United States government and anti-Semitic Brazilian intellectuals and politicians heavily influenced by European pseudo-science and racism.