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The Immigration and Integration of Polish Jews in Brazil, 1924-1934*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Jeffrey Lesser
Jeffrey Lesser*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut
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Extract

The end of World War I marked the beginning of a new era in European migration to Brazil. The immigrants that had poured into the “país do futuro” (country of the future) now came at only a trickle and the number of entries fell by over fifty percent between 1913 and 1914 and by another sixty percent the year after. In 1918 fewer than 20,000 immigrants entered Brazil, a low that would not again be approached until 1936. Even so, between 1918 and 1919 the number of arrivals to Brazil's ports almost doubled, and in 1920 almost doubled again, reaching 69,000.

Post-war immigrants to Brazil differed in many ways from the pre-war group, both in national origin and in their views of success and opportunity. Although Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, and German immigrants continued to predominate, between 1924 and 1934 East European immigration to Brazil increased almost ten times to more than 93,000, representing about 8.5 percent of the total. Most of the East Europeans who migrated to Brazil in the quarter century after World War I were those fleeing the upheavals created by the establishment of the state of Poland. At the same time quotas and other forms of restriction in the U.S., Argentina, and Canada increasingly led potential migrants to look towards Brazil. The frequently destitute East Europeans rarely enjoyed the support of their often powerless governments, a factor that made such immigrants attractive to Brazil's large landowners. In 1927, a contract between the Polish Government and Brazil's Secretary of Agriculture for the transportation of 2,000 Polish families was partially based on the belief that the mixing of “docile” East Europeans with more “volatile” Southern Europeans would “go a long way to obviate any labor trouble that might otherwise occur.” Whatever positive attributes the East Europeans might have presented to Brazilian elites in terms of “dividing and conquering,” the Lithuanian government complained that the condition of its 20,000 immigrants was “so pitiable … that (we) might be forced to repatriate them.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , October 1994 , pp. 173 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1994

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Marc Forster for his comments on an early version of this article. Later comments from The Americas readers were invaluable in making the piece publishable.

References

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2 Revista de Imigração e Colonização [hereafter RIC] 1:3 (October, 1940), 641–642. This does not include Russian immigration which, as a result of the Russian Revolution, was restricted by the Soviet government. Between 1914 and 1923 Eastern European immigration to Brazil was less than two percent of the total.

3 Extract of report of HM Consul, São Paulo, to British Foreign Office, February, 1927. FO 371/ 11196 A2074/2074/6, p. 181. British Public Records Office-London [hereafter PRO-L].

4 Sir T. Vaughan (British Consul, Kovno, Lithuania) to Sir Austen Chamberlain, 29 December 1927. FO 371/13270 W70/70/59, p. 183. PRO-L.

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10 Independently gathered statistics from both Jewish relief agencies (which kept both out-migration figures from Europe and in-migration figures to Brazil) and the Brazilian government agree on the high percentage of Jews among Polish entries. Jewish Colonization Association, Séance du Conseil d’administration [hereafter SCA], 1925–1933, Archives of the Jewish Colonization Association-London [hereafter JCA-L]. “Discriminação por Nacionalidade dos Imigrantes Entrando no Brasil no Período 1924–1933 e 1934–1939,” RIC 1:3 (July 1940), 633–638.

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24 Report of Marcos Pereira (São Paulo) to ICA (Paris), 20 July 1923. SCA 6 October 1923, IV. p. 212. JCA-L.

25 Cameron, C.R., “Immigration into São Paulo, Parts II and III.” Report no. 357, 14 April 1931, p. 41. 832.55/78.Google Scholar National Archives and Record Center, Washington [hereafter NARC-W]. Poles made up 55 percent of all Eastern European immigrants while Polish Jews represented 64 percent of all Eastern European Jews entering Brazil. RIC 1:4 (October, 1940), 633–4.

26 Boletim da Directoria de Terras, Colonização e Imigração [hereafter DTCI] I (October, 1937), Table A-11, p. 64. forty percent of the immigrants from Rumania were not Catholic as well as twenty percent of those from Lithuania. Other immigrant groups, such as Spanish and Portuguese, were to provide over 99.9 percent Catholic immigrants.

27 Less than forty percent of the Polish immigrants to Brazil between 1908 and 1936 were listed as farmers. DTCI I (October, 1937), Table A–17, p. 74. The groups with the lowest number of farmers were both from the Middle-East, the Turks, at 11 percent, and the Syrians at 28 percent. At the high end, ninety-nine percent of Japanese and 87 percent of Yugoslavs were listed as farmers.

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30 DTCI I (October, 1937), Table A–11, p. 64.

31 DTCI I (October, 1937), Table A–4, p. 54.

32 Between 1908 and 1936 about 56 percent of foreigners entering Santos left after some time. Of Poles, however, only 43 percent departed, of Rumanians 29 percent, and of Lithuanians 16 percent. DTCI I, (October, 1937), Table A-4, p. 54.

33 Until 1936 the religion of immigrants was simply categorized as Catholic or non-Catholic.

34 EZRA did not keep statistics on the sex of children under the age of 15 and, because it often used only a first initial for children, it is impossible to determine their sex by name.

35 DTCI I (October, 1937), Table A–12, p. 67.

36 Widows made up 71 of the 1,025 adult women registered by EZRA. For overall information on civil status see DTCI I (October, 1937), Table A–12, p. 67.

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51 Members of these institutions frequently clashed with German Jews who arrived in Brazil in the mid-1930s. See Lesser, Jeffrey, “Continuity and Change Within an Immigrant Community: The Jews of São Paulo, 1924–1945.” Luso-Brazilian Review 25:2 (Winter, 1988), 45–58.Google Scholar

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