Anti-semitic roots in Brazil or a different view of Paris

Abstract

The construction of culture undergoes a number of cultural influences. Cultural dynamics disavows alleged ethnocentric positions. From the beginning, Brazilian history has been linked to various socio-cultural systems. In the last two centuries, an intense incorporation of French and Anglo-Saxon cultures has been added to the Iberian, African and Native influences. Together, these have molded, to a large extent, our hearts and minds. This paper focuses on the influence of French culture and French conservative Catholicism in the constitution of Brazilian anti-semitism. The analisys of religious iconography reveals one of the sources of the satanization of the Jews in popular and elite imagination. The development of the social exclusion of the French Jews and their deportation to the concentration camps is analysed in the context of a tour around the Marais, the jewish district in Paris. Corbusier's concentrationist architecture completes the social exclusion picture. All of these elements together allow us to understand, to a certain extent, how the image of the immigrant Jew was built and seen by various authors.