José D. Najar is an assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. His new book Transimperial Anxieties was published in June.

From the late 1850s to the 1940s, multiple colonial projects, often in tension with each other, influenced the formation of local, transimperial, and transnational political identities of Arab Ottoman subjects in the eastern Mediterranean and the Western Hemisphere. Arab Ottoman men, women, and their descendants were generally accepted as whites in a racially stratified Brazilian society. Local anxieties about color and race among white Brazilians and European immigrants, however, soon challenged the white racial status the Brazilian state afforded to Arab Ottoman immigrants.

Introduction

In the early morning hours, thousands of people descend upon Rua 25 de Março (March 25th Street), a dynamic retail area in the heart of São Paulo city in Brazil’s state of São Paulo. Flashy billboards and buildings with Arabic names loom over the masses of deal-seeking shoppers crowding the sidewalks. The lively hustle and bustle of bargain shopping is made possible, in part, by the transient peddlers and street vendors who come to the city from Brazil’s northeastern states in search of employment and better economic prospects. The economic aspirations of these nordestino migrants, however, are often hampered by the racial prejudices of the Rua 25 de Março’s shop owners. Still, like migrants everywhere who have uprooted themselves to seek a better future, the peddlers and street vendors on Rua 25 de Março persist, overcoming obstacles to provide for their families, whether those families are in São Paulo or back home.

These nordestinos are some of the latest arrivals in the city of São Paulo’s long history of immigration. Arab Ottomans, the subject of my current study, came to the city for a similar reason in the late 1800s. Many of them also became peddlers to make a living but faced a different set of social, legal, and economic challenges.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and well into the early part of the twentieth century, newly arrived Arab Ottoman immigrants to the city of São Paulo made the area surrounding Rua 25 de Março their home. The modern history of Arab Ottoman immigration to the state began here, on this street named to commemorate the signing of the first imperial Brazilian Constitution in 1824, a time when the magnificent Tamanduateí River brought merchandise to the local economy. The street witnessed the first Arab Ottoman men, women, and children who arrived in the state of São Paulo to establish a new community in their new homeland. The exact date of the first Arab Ottoman immigrants’ arrival in Brazil is unclear. According to Élie Safa, the arrival of Youssef Moussa, a native of Lebanon’s northern city of Miziara, marked the beginning of Arab Ottoman immigration to Brazil in the early 1880s. Scholars, however, disagree on the number of immigrants and their descendants to Brazil over time. Official Brazilian statistics show that between 1871 and 1891, only 158 Ottoman immigrants entered the country. An estimated 92,872 immigrants arrived between the years 1908 and 1939. By 2003, approximately one million Syrian Lebanese immigrants and their descendants were living in the city of São Paulo alone. The fluctuation in these numbers, though dramatic, still tells us very little about the history of this community. Most studies on Arab Ottoman immigration to Brazil rely on the foundational work of Clark S. Knowlton’s “Spatial and Social Mobility of the Syrian and Lebanese in the City of São Paulo, Brazil” (1955). Much of Knowlton’s work relies on reports from informants whose memories may have been taken as truth without much scrutiny or analysis. Subsequent scholars who based their studies on Knowlton’s have taken some of these oral stories as truth, repeating, for example, the narrative of Arab Ottoman subjects arriving at European ports and either boarding the first steamer heading anywhere in the Americas or getting on any ship without knowing its destination. These narratives hew closely to the established immigration tropes in which single men arrived penniless in Brazil, worked hard as mascates (street peddlers), and eventually became successful businessmen, establishing and perpetuating the myth of the “exceptional immigrant” who quickly achieves upward social and economic mobility. Though versions of this story can be seen in historical narratives circulating in all Syrian and Lebanese communities today, my work challenges this essentialist version of social mobility.

The historiography of Arab and Jewish immigration to the Americas has developed with little attention to the legacy of the centuries long historical relationship between the Arab world, the Iberian Peninsula, and Latin America. This lacuna distorts or obscures crucial changes and continuities that have informed how scholars understand and study postcolonial waves of Jewish and Arab immigration to the Americas. The editors of Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America compiled studies illustrating the similar historical experiences shared by Arab and Jewish immigrants to the continent. In doing so, they hoped to challenge the exceptional/essentialist narratives that underpin much Jewish historiography and, by extension, the historiography of Arabs in the Latin American mahjar (Arab diaspora). This provocative move to illustrate the commonalities and differences that shaped the immigration experiences and ethnicities of Arabs/Muslims and Jews in Latin America strongly informs my work.

This project centers on the tension between historical memory, cultural mythology, and institutional documentation. As historical agents, Arab Ottoman immigrants to Brazil did not, as the accepted narrative suggests, make life-changing decisions on a whim, jumping on the nearest boat without a plan. Instead, in this study I demonstrate that the founders of the country’s Arab Ottoman community diligently researched, planned, and orchestrated every step of their immigration to Brazil. Records of Brazilian consulates in ports such as Marseille, for example, show Arab Ottoman immigrants requesting passports to travel to Brazil in the 1890s. These immigrants had done their research and knew that Brazilian law granted foreigners and citizens alike the right to request a passport to enter or exit the country with relative ease “for reasons of protection and relief of travelers.” This work contradicts established historical narratives and illustrates these immigrants’ agency. Following the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation (1858) between the Brazilian and Ottoman Empires, upon arriving in Brazil these “guests” of the emperor established economically flourishing enclaves, which aroused the ire of segments of the Brazilian elite, native Brazilians, and non-Arab Ottoman immigrant communities. Brazilians and immigrants from varied social sectors deployed prevailing gendered antisemitic and Orientalist tropes in an attempt to deter Arab Ottoman immigration by casting Arab Ottoman men as blood-libel practitioners, thieving businessmen, unscrupulous husbands, and other negative stereotypes. Arab Ottoman women rarely appeared in the historical record. On the rare occasions they did, they were portrayed as embodying the contradictory Orientalist visions of an overly sexualized, submissive, confined-to-their-homes, backward, and dishonest womanhood. Beyond being misrepresentative, these oscillating tropes link together people from different regions of the world—and across time—who made Brazil their home. Studying the patterns in these persistent false narratives reveals how the production of class, gender, and race in Brazil far exceeds the bounds of Brazilian or Latin American history. The tropes offer a wide lens that ties together Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Jewish studies across time and geographic space.

Such a project requires a new telling of Brazil’s Arab Ottoman immigration history, one that relies on evidence from social sources and public records rather than fallible collective memory. To make sense of this fragmented history, I will employ Christina Civantos’s notion of Orientalisms in the Latin American context “in order to take into account a variety of interconnected historical circumstances and discourses.” I investigate how Latin American Orientalist discourses illustrate Edward Said’s assertion that “there is a similarity between Orientalism and antisemitism.” In Brazil, terms such as Judiar/Judiação or Judia(r)ção (a verb or adverb synonymous with the act of making people suffer by mocking or mistreating them) summon a lingering prejudice against Jews and non-Jews “historically inherited from Portugal, which has remained ‘untouched’ over time and continued to circulate in Brazilian culture until the present.”