South America - widespread and rarely explored.

 

by  Klaus Hart

Anti-Semitism in South Amerika is an area that is still not sufficiently researched. All the more welcome is a recently published Brazilian anthology* that describes the phenomenon in its frightening dimensions, mainly in Latin America.

Many Latin Americans carry official first names like Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann. In the phonebook of Sao Paulo one can find, in all seriousness, the name 'Himmler Hitler Göring Ferreira Santos.' Again and again synagogues are attacked; the number of anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites has increased alarmingly; Jewish personalities often receive death threats. For the first time now, an anthology of 740 pages is available, in which experts approach the phenomenon of hatred against Jews in North and South America from different angles. Editor and co-contributor of the anthology is Latin America's leading anti-Semitism researcher, Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, who has already published numerous books on the topic. Carneiro teaches at the University of Sao Paulo and is currently building a virtual archive about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in cooperation with the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. In addition, she develops urgently needed educational materials for Brazil's teachers - materials that should have been available for decades.

The anthology describes anti-Semitism in Canada and the United States as insignificant and hardly threatening, hence it is considered in relative brevity, quite unlike the giant country of Brazil and its neighbor, Argentina, that have the largest Jewish communities in Latin America and are increasingly exposed to neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism. One can't help being reminded of the bomb attack on the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which 85 people were killed. This attack and other incidents lead to harsh security measures at synagogues, also in Brazil. Brazilian rabbis insist that the Iberian culture is still marked by strong anti-Semitism, and that Spain and Portugal who colonized the Latin American countries, deeply instilled Christian anti-Judaism as well as racist anti-Semitism, with all its stereotypes and prejudices in South American society.

 

A Luxury Edition of 'Mein Kampf'

Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro states that today, anti-Semitism in Brazil and other North and South American countries usually disguises itself as anti-Zionism, as hatred of Israel. "But if one looks closely, it goes against the Jews, it is nothing else but deep-seated, traditional anti-Semitism." Especially in Brazil, Argentina and Chile, the anti-Jewish mentality is strong and articulates itself politically. Anti-Semitic concoctions from the Nazi era are appearing in new editions. In Brazil itself the translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf in a luxury edition is selling out quickly. Since the 19th Century the major racial theories from Germany and France were adopted in Brazil by government circles and propagated by renowned intellectuals. "One wanted a pure race - white, Catholic and non-Jewish."

The anthology contains an astonishing study by the historian Silvia Cortez Silva about an icon of Brazilian culture, the writer Gilberto Freyre, whose 100th Birthday in 2000 had been celebrated with official pomp. In his lifetime Freyre had already been honored by many great universities of the world - although in his classic Casa-Grande & Senzala, ['The Mansion and the Slavehut'] he had spread the most evil prejudices against Jews. Silva writes that Gilberto Freyre never concealed what he was thinking about the Jews. "The way he describes the profile and identity of Jews could not be more anti-Semitic." He uses expressions and attributes such as blood sucker, parasite, exploiter, ruthlessness, cunning, Jewish nose, vulture-face - to name only a few. Silva underlined as particularly interesting that such writing passed unheeded in the long years of its reception.

Anti-Semitic views are still popular in Latin America. In some Brazilian dictionaries of foreign words the word 'Jew' is, in all seriousness, translated as 'bad person.' Even officially, the dictator and hater of Jews, Getúlio Vargas, is still celebrated as the greatest statesman in the national history of Brazil, though, since 1936, he had outlawed the issuance of entry visas to persecuted Jews by secret decree. "We know of about 10 000 rejected visa applications - and there are still a lot more," states Carneiro. But even worse, many Brazilian Jews were deported to Nazi-Germany.

 

Klaus Hart     

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