ABSTRACT
Unlike in the US, where the “one-drop rule” has traditionally created inflexible and widely understood racial categories, in Brazil, race often seems to be up for grabs. Thus, when I first started studying Brazil, doing research on images of Jews, I placed them in the “white” category along with all others of European descent. Yet the documentation told a different story. Jews were neither white nor black: they were in a category that the traditional scholarship never mentioned. My initial assumption was that this placement was related to the very specific history of Jewish–Gentile relations in the Americas. But then I received a phone call from Albert Hourani, one of the foremost scholars of the Arab experience. He wanted me to contribute an essay to a volume he was writing on the Lebanese Diaspora. “Prof. Hourani,” I implored, “I study Jews, not Arabs.” The Professor was not interested in my excuses, “Go back to the documents” he told me, and of course I did. What I found shocked me. Virtually every public discussion of Jews in Brazil was also about Arabs and Japanese. What could it mean that these three groups, who arrived at different times, engaged with the economy in different ways, and seemed to have little to do with each other, were linked over and over again? The answer does not simply reflect elite attitudes towards others. Rather, leaders of each of these groups were able to grasp the core of the national sense and thus create public strategies to negotiate their identities as Brazilians. These strategies, based on taking national identity myths and ethnicizing them, have created the following four foundational fictions:
Myth 1: This myth is often told by Jewish-Brazilians, a group of about 120,000 people or less than one tenth of one percent of the Brazilian population. The overwhelming majority of Jewish-Brazilians are descendants of immigrants who arrived between 1920 and 1940. According to this myth, during the Inquisition, Jews in colonial Portugal chose non-Jewish names based on biblical animals and trees, and this people, with names like Coelho or Cardoso, are descendants of Jews. Gerações, the newsletter of the São Paulo-based Sociedade Genealogica Judaica do Brasil, even published an article including a genealogical tree suggesting that Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil, is descended from Jews. 1
Myth 2: Beginning in the nineteenth century, a number of well-respected French theorists offered the questionable suggestion that King Solomon sailed the Amazon River and that the Quechua and Portuguese languages were offshoots of ancient Hebrew. Such theories were repeated frequently in Brazil: In the 1930s the well-known Arab-Brazilian intellectual Salomão Jorge, a prize-winning poet, author, and radio commentator modified the myth to suggest that King Solomon was the “ancestor of the Syrians” and thus Brazil's indigenous tribes descended from Solomon and, by extension, from Jesus. 2
Myth 3: Marataízes is a city in the state of Espírito Santo in the coastal center of Brazil. Today it has a population of almost 35,000 but in the early twentieth century it was much smaller. A story about the name of the city has been told to me by numerous Brazilians who define themselves as “Syrian-Lebanese,” a term used to describe those of Middle Eastern descent:
The Legend of the Town of Marataízes
There once was a group of peddlers who sold their wares in the interior of Espírito Sant, going from place to place by mule. One of the peddlers was named Aziz and his wife (a colloquial Arabic word for “wife” is “marat”) was considered the leader of the women who stayed behind as the men went out to sell their goods. These women went out every day to wash clothes in a place called the “Turkish bath.” Over time, the town that grew up around the place where the women washed their clothes came to be called Marataízes in honor of the wife (“marat”) of Aziz.
Myth 4: Between 1908 and 1941 about 190,000 Japanese entered Brazil. Today, almost one million Brazilians claim Japanese descent and some 200,000 of these self-defined Nikkei (a description for those Brazilians of Japanese descent) currently work in Japan. Hachiro Fukuhara, a wealthy Japanese businessperson, returned from an exploratory trip to the Amazon in 1927 claiming that Brazil was “founded by Asiatics” since,
the natives who live along the River Amazon look exactly like the Japanese. There is also a close resemblance between them in manners and customs … (and) a certain Chinese secretary in the German Embassy at Rio (has) made a careful study (of language) and concluded that these Indians descended from Mongols.
Fukuhara even stated that he knew of a Buddhist ceremony performed in the Himalayas where a woman holds a tree as she is bearing a child and her husband walks around her, exclaiming “I saw the same thing in the Amazon.” 3 Rokuro Koyama, an early 1920s immigrant to Brazil and founder of an influential São Paulo-based Japanese-language newspaper, agreed. Koyama asked, in the introduction to his Tupi-Japanese-Portuguese dictionary: “Did we Japanese and Tupi-Guarani originally come from and share the same Polynesian seed? Do we meet again now, after four thousand years?” 4
