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This chapter presents some of the ways that Brazilian Jews intertwine their multiple sources of identity. The “Brazilification” of the Jewish community is evidenced through their embrace of Brazilian racial and ethnic constructs to explain their acceptance within the nation (the myth of Brazil as a “racial democracy”) and Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations (employing interracial metaphors of “mixed” marriages and institutions). The incorporation of Brazilian foodways, including where these appear to contradict Jewish practices, reveals some of the tensions inherent in navigating these contradictory identities that are also evidenced through the particular use of language employed by this community.

The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.

The concluding chapter discusses how this exploration of Jewish Brazilian experience is important for understanding both Jewish ethnicity and Brazilian national identity, and the relationship between national and ethnic identity. An examination of Jewish Brazilian identity further illuminates the complex ways that Brazilianness is a nexus of race, class, and culture. While Jews in São Paulo construct their communities and identities in ways that are consistent with local culture, their condition as transnationals limits the extent to which they can be fully national while maintaining ethnic distinction. Each aspect of their identity informs the other: as Jews and as Brazilians they have a dual identity that cannot be separated.