See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/301557734

The Jewish Experience in Argentina in a Diasporic Comparative Perspective

Chapter · January 2013

DOI: 10.1163/9789004237285_003

CITATIONS READS

4 153

1 author:

Jose C. Moya
Barnard College
69 PUBLICATIONS 818 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Jose C. Moya on 31 May 2022.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 The New Jewish Argentina
Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone

Edited by
Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 CONTENTS

List of Tables, Maps, and Figures ............................................................... vii

Acknowledgment ............................................................................................ ix
List of Contributors ........................................................................................ xi

Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1
Raanan Rein and Adriana Brodsky

Chapter One The Jewish Experience in Argentina in a Diasporic

Comparative Perspective ......................................................................... 7
José C. Moya

Chapter Two From Textile Thieves to “Supposed Seamstresses”:

Jews, Crime, and Urban Identities in Buenos Aires, 1905–1930 ... 31
Mollie Lewis Nouwen

Chapter Three Uprooting the Seeds of Evil: Ezras Noschim and

Jewish Marriage Regulation, Morality Certifijicates, and
Degenerate Prostitute Mothers in 1930s Buenos Aires .................. 55
Mir Yarfijitz

Chapter Four Print Culture and Urban Geography: Jewish

Bookstores, Libraries and Printers in Buenos Aires, 1910–1960 ..... 81
Alejandro Dujovne

Chapter Five “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” Battles the

Nacionalistas: Crítica, the Funny Pages, and Jews as a Liberal
Discourse (1929–1932) ............................................................................... 109
Ariel Svarch

Chapter Six The “Other” Gerchunofff and the Visual

Representation of the Shoah .................................................................. 131
Edna Aizenberg

Chapter Seven An Argentine Experience? Borges, Judaism, and

the Holocaust .............................................................................................. 147
Federico Finchelstein

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

vi contents

Chapter Eight Electing ‘Miss Sefaradí ’, and ‘Queen Esther’:

Sephardim, Zionism, and Ethnic and National Identities in
Argentina, 1933–1971 .................................................................................. 179
Adriana Brodsky

Chapter Nine Politically Incorrect: César Tiempo and the

Editorial Stafff of the Cultural Supplement of La Prensa ............... 213
Raanan Rein

Chapter Ten Generation and Innovation in the Rise of an

Argentine-Jewish Community, 1960–1967 ........................................... 235
Beatrice D. Gurwitz

Chapter Eleven Reading Kissinger’s Avatars: Cold War

Pragmatism in Argentina’s Middle East Policy ................................. 263
David M. K. Sheinin

Chapter Twelve “Memories that Lie a Little.” New Approaches to

the Research into the Jewish Experience during the Last
Military Dictatorship in Argentina ....................................................... 293
Emmanuel Nicolás Kahan

Chapter Thirteen Child Survivors of the Shoa: Testimony,

Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires ........................... 315
Natasha Zaretsky

Chapter Fourteen Body and Soul: Therapeutic Dimensions of

Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy in Neoliberal Argentina ............................ 341
Shari Jacobson

Chapter Fifteen The Other Becomes Mainstream: Jews in

Contemporary Argentine Cinema ........................................................ 365
Tzvi Tal

Index ................................................................................................................... 393

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 CHAPTER ONE

THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE IN ARGENTINA IN A

DIASPORIC COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

José C. Moya

Around 1900 Argentina’s Jewish population ranked twenty-fourth in the

world in size. Even excluding older Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe,
North Africa, and the Middle East and counting only countries of more
recent immigration, Argentina still ranked close to the bottom.1 The
United States’ Jewish population, at about one million, was a hundred
times larger. England’s was twelve times larger; France’s ten times; Austra-
lia’s and South Africa’s twice as large; and Canada’s slightly larger. Yet, fijive
decades later Argentina boasted the fijifth largest Jewish population in the
world. This is arguably the starting distinctive trait of Jewish immigration
in Argentina: its comparative late start and its rapid and concentrated
growth during the fijirst half of the twentieth century.
From this early feature others followed. The fijirst is the lack of a signifiji-
cant Jewish community previous to mass arrival. In the United States when
German Jews began to arrive in the 1830s they found a well-established,
10,000—strong community made up mainly of Sephardim who had been
there since the middle of the 17th century. When Eastern European Jews
started coming in signifijicant numbers around 1880 they encountered a
fijirmly developed, 250,000-strong, Jewish community. The masses of East-
ern European Jews who migrated to France, England, and the Netherlands
beginning around the same time encountered a similar situation, but with
a stronger early Sephardic component.2 Those moving to Austria and

1 The American Jewish Year Book, 1900–01, Vol. 2, p. 625 contains data by country and
region. It gives an exact fijigure (6,735) for the number of Jews in Argentina in 1900. Ira
Rosenswaike, “The Jewish Population of Argentina: Census and Estimate, 1887–1947” Jewish
Social Studies, 22:4 (1960): 195–214 provides a similar fijigure (6,782) for the Jewish agricul-
tural colonies alone, which should raise the total to over 10,000.
2 By the middle of the nineteenth century there were 80,000 Jews in France, two-thirds
of them in Paris and the rest divided between the Sephardi communities of Bordeaux and
Bayonne and the German Jews of Alsace and Lorraine. Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France:
A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 52–56,
96–131. England had about 20,000 Jews by the 1790s, one-third of them Sephardim and

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

8 josé c. moya

Germany found few Sephardim but even bigger communities of German-

speaking Jews. Even in South Africa, which had a smaller pre-mass migra-
tion community, the fijirst Eastern European immigrants in the 1880s
encountered a collectivity of 4,000 Anglo-Jews which had been there for
half-a-century.3 By comparison, the 820 Eastern European Jews traveling
on the SS Weser who landed in Buenos Aires August of 1889 arrived at a
city whose census had counted only 366 Jews two years earlier.
The ultimate destination of this group, the pampas, gave Argentina’s
Jewry another distinctive characteristic. Although rural colonies existed in
other places, from Louisiana to New Jersey, nowhere did they play such a
foundational role as in Argentina. It is true that within a few decades the
Jewish agricultural colonies had been overwhelmed numerically by direct
overseas migration to cities and by internal rural to urban exodus.4 But
two factors preserved and amplifijied their symbolic importance in Argen-
tine Jewry.5
One is the fact that in societies of new settlement without a traditional
nobility those who came fijirst become, although mainly discursively,
the closest thing to an aristocracy. At the national level the privilege is
normally restricted to the “charter group”: Spanish conquistadors, New
England pilgrims, Virginia Cavaliers, Paulista bandeirantes, Afrikaner
Voortrekkers, and so on. But newer immigrant communities constructed
their own versions. It is no coincidence that the SS Weser is often referred
to as the Jewish Argentine Mayflower, just as the St. Charles, the vessel that
carried the fijirst Sephardim from Recife to New Amsterdam in 1654, is
often called the American Jewish Mayflower.6

the rest from German states. Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830:
Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999),
170–73. The Jewish population of Amsterdam numbered 35,000 in the 1840s. William
Ayerst, The Jews of the Nineteenth Century: A collection of essays, reviews, and historical
notices (London, 1848), 416.
3 Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa
(Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 1–2.
4 Rosenswaike, 205, estimates that the proportion of the Argentine Jewish population
in the agricultural colonies had declined to 22% by 1920 and 11% by 1935.
5 The importance of the rural colonies in the imaginary of an overwhelmingly urban
Argentine Jewry is discussed in Tziv Tal’s chapter on cinema in this volume.
6 Rosenswaike, 195; Henry D. Spalding, Classic Jewish Humor in America (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995), 13, for the St. Charles as the American Jewish May-
flower. Tellingly, the Wikipedia entry on Moisés Ville describes the “Colonos” who arrived
on the SS Waser as “the Argentine Jewry equivalent to the Mayflower passengers, and
whoever can prove his descent from them can claim to be part of the Agricultural Pioneer
Aristocracy.”

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 9

The other factor is that in most of these countries of immigration set-

tlement in the land, frontiers, agro-pastoralism, and equestrian cultures
came to be imagined as the embodiment of local authenticity and the
national ethos. Discursive association with it, therefore, functioned as a
claim of membership in the national body. The Jewish gaucho symbol-
ism has its counterpart in similar imagery developed by Basques, Irish,
Italians, Ukrainians, and other immigrant groups in Argentina and, using
cowboys and the West, in the U.S. and Canada.
Jewish rural colonization in Argentina, nonetheless, was too limited
and too close temporally to the mass urban arrival to create the splits
and hierarchies that were common elsewhere in the diaspora. In the U.S.,
England, France, and the Netherlands the Sephardim had felt a sense of
superiority toward later German arrivals and often avoided associating
with them to prevent the tarnishing of their own reputations.7 Gentiles
agreed with and reinforced the duality, often describing the Sephardim as
cultured and assimilated and German Jews as poor and backward.8 By the
late nineteenth century the two groups had merged to a signifijicant degree,
at least at the higher social strata, had come to represent the “national”
(American, English, French, etc.) Jew, and had developed similar attitudes
toward the newly arriving Eastern Europeans, attitudes that were again
echoed by gentile elites and middle classes.
The lack of a preexisting sizeable and long-established community
made the internal development of Argentine Jewry less dual and unequal.
Newly arrived immigrants may have not benefijited from the philanthropy
of a powerful, old community, as was the case in the other places men-
tioned above. But they did not sufffer either from the arrogance, paternal-
ism, and scorn that often accompanied that philanthropy. The division
between old-timers and “greenhorns” did emerge in Argentine Jewry, as it
usually does within most immigrant communities.9 But it did not acquire

7 On the Sephardim’s sense of superiority vis-à-vis German Jewish immigrants see

Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York [original edition,
1967] (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 29–31, 85–86, 127–28; Paula Hyman, The
Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 4–6; Endelman, The
Jews of Georgian England, xii, 6, 32, 105, 120–21; and Yosef Kaplan, “Gente Política: The Por-
tuguese Jews of Amsterdam vis-à-vis Dutch Society,” in Chaya Brasz and Yosef Kaplan, eds.
Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 21–40.
8 Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 171, maintained that “the popular view of
the Sephardi Jew was an opulent stockbroker and that of the Ashkenazi Jew a ragged
old-clothes man.”
9 Western European Jews played a prominent role in the foundation of the fijirst impor-
tant Jewish association in Buenos Aires in 1895 but they were just too few to exercise any

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

10 josé c. moya

the xenophobic tones that often characterized the attitudes of native/

national Jews towards the massive arrivals of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Neither did it acquire the quasi-racist disdain
and shame that Westernized, middle and upper class Jews of Germanic
or Sephardic origins often expressed for the mass of poor, religious, and
“backward” Eastern European arrivals elsewhere.10 We do not fijind in Bue-
nos Aires the dichotomies of native “German” or Sephardi millionaires
and “Russian” immigrant paupers and peddlers that we fijind in New York,
Paris, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, or Cape Town.
This gave Argentine Jewry a greater ethno-cultural and socioeconomic
homogeneity which permitted the formation of a relatively horizontal
class and status structure at least during the period of mass migration.
The only plutocracy that working-class rusos found in Argentina was the
Hispano-Creole landed elite, Anchorenas or Alzaga Unzués but no Roth-
childs, Disraelis, Guggenheims, Goldmans, Sachs, or Lehman brothers. On
the other hand, the distance from Eastern Europe and the resulting higher
cost of the trip tended to keep out the other socioeconomic extreme. In
her comparative study of Eastern European Jews in London and New
York, Selma Berrol showed that the latter city attracted the immigrants
with greater resources, education, and a more secular outlook.11 Because
the cost of travel to Buenos Aires was even higher than to New York, this
was likely even truer for those heading to Argentina with the exception
of the minority who headed for agricultural colonies whose passages were
paid by the Jewish Colonization Association. Some data point that way.

control, and were soon replaced by Eastern European arrivals. By comparison, in South
Africa, the case most similar to Argentina’s, Anglo-Jews continued to control communal
organizations long after Lithuanian immigrants had become a majority. Eugene Sofer,
From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1982), 7; Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 2, 27, 67.
10 Zosa Szajkowski, “The Attitude of American Jews to East European Jewish Immigra-
tion, 1881–1893,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 40:3 (1951): 221–30;
Idem, “The European Attitude to East European Jewish Immigration, 1881–1893 PAJHS,
41:2 (1951): 127–37; Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in
German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1982).
11 Selma C. Berrol, East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York,
1870–1920 (London: Praeger, 1994), xi, 143–46. Andrew Godley, Jewish Immigrant Entrepre-
neurship in New York and London, 1880–1914: Enterprise and Culture (New York: Palgrave,
2001) does not discuss their origins but shows much lower levels of Jewish entrepreneur-
ship in London than in New York.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 11

Jewish immigrants in Argentina were more literate than Jews in Eastern

Europe who in turn were more literate than those migrating to England.12
The institutional structure of the Argentine Jewish community reflected
this lack of social extremes. The structure of the organized community
was relatively horizontal during the mass immigration period. It included
landsmanshatn (regional or hometown associations), large mutual aid
and burial societies (specifijically the Chevra Keduscha Ashkenazi), phil-
anthropic organizations, farbands (working-class political associations),
labor unions that were overtly or de facto Jewish, worker’s circles tied
to specifijic trades, Bundist and Zionist clubs, and women organizations,
among other types. But compared to Jewish communities in New York,
London, or Paris, and to older immigrant groups in Buenos Aires such as
Italians, Spaniards, the French and the British, it lacked—at least before
the 1930s—upper crust social clubs, high culture societies, major banks,
and other institutions that required the accumulated capital and influ-
ence of established elites. By the same token, it seems to have had fewer
poorhouses than the Jewish communities in Western Europe and New
York.13 This institutional egalitarianism may explain the relatively high
level of participation and membership that characterized the associa-
tional life of Argentine Jewry.14
Migration patterns also afffected the phenomenon that Mir Yarfijitz tries
to demystify in this volume. Jewish involvement in international prosti-
tution rings has generated more scholarly obfuscation than illumination.
Existing studies tend to diminish the magnitude of the phenomenon
and of Jewish involvement in it, to treat it as an element in anti-Semitic
rhetoric, and to emphasize the mainstream Jewish community’s effforts to

12 I have only been able to fijind comparative fijigures for females: about half of Eastern
European Jewish women in Argentina in 1914 (48% of Russians and 60% of Austro-
Hungarians) were literate, compared to 37% of Jewish women in Russia and 35% of Jewish
women entering London in 1907. Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a
Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955 (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 250; Lloyd P. Gartner, “Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Trafffijic in Prostitu-
tion, 1885–1914,” AJS Review, Vol. 7 (1982): 135.
13 Joshua Harrison Stallard, London Pauperism amongst Jews and Christians (London:
Saunders, 1867).
14 The estimates of the proportion of Jews in Buenos Aires who belonged to an ethnic
association range from a low of 40% to a high of 85–95%, which are quite high, even at
the lower end. Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010), 70–71; Sofer, From Pale to Pampa:, 8.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

12 josé c. moya

combat it.15 Yet although the immense majority of Jews in Eastern Europe
and the diaspora never engaged in the business, and the issue was surely
exploited in Judeophobic propaganda, there is no question that Ashke-
nazim from Eastern Europe were the most overrepresented group in it
in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic World, easily surpassing
the French, their closest competitors. The reason is not that enigmatic if
we restrain our presentist tendency to moralize the activity and treat it
simply as part of the service economy of the period.
From this perspective, Ashkenazim were overrepresented in it in Eastern
Europe for the same reason that they were overrepresented in peddling,
urban and semi-urban trades, horse trading, money-lending, and other
sectors in the lower ranks of the tertiary economy: because being politi-
cally excluded from farming (the activity that engaged the vast majority of
the population) and in a region with limited industrial development, they
had the need and the accumulated skills and connections to concentrate
in these sectors of the service economy. And they turned it into a trans-
national business for equally obvious reasons: they were the only group
of the scores of ethnic groups in Eastern Europe with the required level
of dispersion and international connections to do so, particularly because
the other minority group with similar, or higher, levels of international
dispersion, ethnic Germans, were, in the nineteenth century, mainly farm-
ers who tended to migrate to rural frontiers. By the turn of the twentieth
century the Ashkenazi prostitution rings had become one of the most
impressive international business networks built from below.16 Stretch-
ing from Constantinople to Cardifff and Cape Town to Chicago, they had
probably surpassed in extent the legendary Sephardi trading grids of the
early modern period.

15 Mara L. Keire, “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in
the United States, 1907–1917,” Journal of Social History, 35:1 (2001): 5–41 disingenuously
treats Jewish international prostitution rings as if they were just a “scare,” a fijiction that
reflected the xenophobic prejudices and puritanical sexual anxieties of Anglo-Protestant
and Americanized German Jewish Progressive reformers. Gartner, “Anglo-Jewry and the
Jewish International Trafffijic in Prostitution, 1885–1914,” Victor Mirelman, “The Jewish Com-
munity Versus Crime: The Case of White Slavery in Buenos Aires,” Jewish Social Studies, 46:
2 (1984): 145–68, and Edward. J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against
White Slavery, 1879–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) focus on the effforts of
the mainstream Jewish community to combat the phenomenon.
16 Charles Van Onselen, “Jewish marginality in the Atlantic World: Organized Crime
in the Era of the Great Migrations, 1880–1914,” South African Historical Journal, 43 (Nov.
2000): 96–137; and Idem, “Jewish Police Informers in the Atlantic World, 1880–1914,” The
Historical Journal 50:1 (2007): 119–144.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 13

All this, however, does not explain why Buenos Aires came to have, as a
historian of the trafffijic put it, “the world’s largest, best organized commu-
nity of East European criminals.”17 To be sure, the Argentine capital—the
second largest city in the Atlantic basin by the early twentieth century
and a rich, dynamic, immigrant-fijilled place with a surplus of young men
and a large Ashkenazi population—provided an ideal setting for the busi-
ness. But so would have many other urban centers with similar traits like
New York, Chicago, London or Paris.
The answer to the puzzle lies in the migration patterns discussed above.
Trafffijickers and prostitutes had been among the fijirst Jews to arrive in Bue-
nos Aires. Brazilian newspapers mention the deportation of a dozen Rus-
sian and Polish “trafijicantes” and their “mulheres perdidas” to the Rio de
la Plata in November, 1879—a decade before the fijirst rural colonists in
the supposed Argentine Jewish Mayflower arrived. By the early 1890s a
police report lists 164 pimps.18 Like in most other places the mainstream
Jewish community led the campaign against them with the Chevra Kedus-
cha expelling the teme’im (the ritually impure, a generic term for the traf-
fijickers, pimps, madams, and prostitutes involved in the sex business)
from its ranks in 1899. The big diffference here lay simply in the balance
of resources and power between the “pure” and the “impure.” In New
York, London, or Paris the main support for anti “white slavery” organiza-
tions came from wealthy, long-established, “national” Jewish communi-
ties rather than recently arrived Eastern European immigrants. In Buenos
Aires those communities did not exist in the 1890s or even in the fijirst
decade or two of the twentieth century and, as Mir Yarfijitz shows in his
chapter, the fijirst association against white slavery in the city was founded
and funded by a London organization.
During this early period the teme’im were likely not only the richest
individuals among Buenos Aires Jews but the well-being of many others
depended on them. In the 1910 story “The Man from Buenos Aires” by the
famous Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, then living in New York, the man
of the title brags that “lots of people . . . would be happy to earn what I
give away to charity alone. Everyone puts the touch on me: synagogues,

17 Charles Van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master
Criminal (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2007), 346.
18 Centro de Estudios de la Policía (Lavalle St. 2625, Buenos Aires), Policía de la Capital,
División de Investigaciones, Planillas de rufijianes, 1893–1894.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

14 josé c. moya

hospitals, immigrant societies, benefijits—Buenos Aires is a big town!”19

Already by the mid-1890s we can fijind an immigrant who had made a for-
tune of £16,000 not directly in the sex business but by selling furniture to
brothels.20 In 1910, Sofijia Lisichsky, a twenty-fijive year old feminist anar-
chist and seamstress, married to another Russian anarchist who had tried
to bomb the Church of the Pilar in Buenos Aires, explained to the police
interrogators that she made a living by selling dresses to the “girls in the
brothels.”21 In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1970 story “The Colony,” set in Argen-
tina, the main character remembered that “in those days the pimps still
played a big part in our community. They were the bosses in the Yiddish
theater. When they didn’t like a play, it was immediately taken offf.”22
The religious and civic authorities in the Jewish community may have
carried a public, and thus visible, crusade against the teme’im. In part
because of its conspicuousness, this aspect has received the most scholarly
attention. But the fact that the crusade took so long suggests a more veiled
reality: the tacit support or acceptance of furniture-makers, seamstresses,
theater impresarios, and countless others who benefijited from the busi-
nesses of the impure. Crusades against “vices”—from the early modern
campaigns against tobacco, chocolate, tea, cofffee, opium, and sodomy to
Prohibition in the 1920s, anti-gambling and anti-prostitution drives, and
the “wars” against tobacco, fats, sugars, adolescent pregnancy, and drugs
today—have always reflected divisions of class, conventions, respectabil-
ity, and status aspiration. And the relatively horizontal social structure of
Argentine Jewry during the fijirst decades of the twentieth century—with
its preponderance of recent immigrants, laborers, peddlers, radicals, and
petty entrepreneurs, and its dearth of the more decorous or prudish types
associated with established elites—must have facilitated the acceptance
of the teme’im despite their demonization in the discourse of the “respect-
able” classes, a discourse that became hegemonic only as the Jewish com-
munity became more established, bourgeois, and tiered.
The lack of a pre-mass-migration community in Argentina also afffected
the timing of upward mobility. In his classic social history of Jews in Bue-

19 Sholem Aleichem, “The Man from Buenos Aires,” in The Railroad Stories, translated
by Hillel Halkin (New York, Schocken Books, 1987), 174.
20 Van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies, 201.
2 1 José C. Moya, “What’s in a Stereotype? The Case of Jewish Anarchists in Argentina”
in Jefffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein eds., Rethinking Jewish Latin Americans (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 55–88.
22 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Colony,” in A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 209.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 15

nos Aires, Eugene Sofer showed low levels of occupational mobility, which
he compared unfavorably to the economic success of North American
Jews.23 Yet the comparison is deceiving. The economic success of Jews in
the United States and Western Europe by the early twentieth century was
not a myth. But membership in the upper and better-offf middle classes
then was basically limited to the Sephardim, who had been there for a few
centuries, German-speaking groups, who had been there for a few genera-
tions, and, in smaller number, Jews from the western—and most devel-
oped—edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Silesia, and Pomerania,
who began arriving in the 1860s, a generation or two before the Eastern
European wave. None of those groups existed in Argentina in signifijicant
numbers and some studies have shown that upward economic and edu-
cational mobility in the United States and Western Europe for Eastern
European Jews was much more modest and delayed than was assumed.24
It is possible, however, that even for Eastern European Jews upward
mobility in Argentina was slower than in the United States. One reason
is timing. Their arrival in signifijicant numbers to Argentina occurred at
the same time as to France (from 1905 on) but twenty-fijive years after the
United States and England. The higher skills and education of transoce-
anic migrants likely made up for the lateness of the flow to Argentina in
comparison to England, but not in comparison with the United States.
Competition from other groups may have been stronger in Argentina.
Eastern European Jews were the only group, with Middle Easterners, to
arrive that late there. By contrast, in the United States they were actually
among the earlier arrivals within the “new immigration,” coming ahead of
Southern Italians, and Slavic and Southeastern European groups. More-
over, the older, pre-1890s, immigration in Argentina included a number
of highly successful groups: Basques, Northern Italians (particularly Pied-
montese and Ligurians), French, Swiss, and the British. In the United
States, the largest nationality among the “old immigrants” were the Irish,
a particularly poor and discriminated group, and many of the better-
offf, more accepted Nordic Protestant arrivals, particularly Germans and

23 Sofer, From Pale to Pampa, 128.

24 Selma Berrol shows that upward mobility of Eastern European Jews was slightly
higher in the United States than in England but limited in both places, concluding that
the “myth” that immigrants “used schooling as the primary road to the middle class, was as
untrue in London as it was in New York” (Berrol, East Side/East End, 146). Peter Tammes,
“‘Hack, Pack, Sack’: Occupational Structure, Status, and Mobility of Jews in Amsterdam,
1851–1941,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43:1 (2012): 1–26, demonstrates that despite
signifijicant upward mobility, few Jews entered the upper-middle and upper classes.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

16 josé c. moya

Scandinavians, headed for rural areas in northern Texas and the Midwest
where they did not present any competition to Jews.
Expressions of xenophobia in the early twentieth century seem to reflect
these demographic realities. Negative attitudes toward Jewish immigration
in the United States were common. But they were often diluted in more
generic diatribes against new immigrants in general and even some “old”
ones like the Irish. Religious prejudice was equally diluted in discrimi-
nation against Catholics, Jews, and non-Protestants in general, includ-
ing Mormons and other denominations outside of the mainstream. And
prejudice against European arrivals in general encountered “competition”
from phobias against non-European native and immigrant groups such
as Amerindians, blacks, Mexican Americans, Chinese, and West Indians.
Argentina, by contrast, had only the fijirst of these groups, no signifijicant
phobia—by the mass migration period—against non-Catholic Christians,
no other clearly “new” immigrant group other than Middle Easterners,
and no disdained old immigrant group equivalent to the Irish. On the
contrary, the Irish in Argentina had settled in the pampas rather than
becoming the quintessential urban poor as in the United States and expe-
rienced astronomical upward mobility with the agro-pastoral boom of the
second half of the nineteenth century. As a result of all of this, xenophobic
prejudice in Argentina during the early decades of the twentieth century
was less diluted, more concentrated on the two most obvious nouveaux
arrives.
Jews and Middle Easterners, therefore, became the main target of
twentieth-century xenophobia. Few of the gripes during the mass migra-
tion period echoed the religious component of traditional Catholic anti-
Semitism.25 One set of objections related to the supposed racial inferiority
and “oriental” nature of the two groups. A young lawyer referred to them
as “corrupted oriental races” in his 1907 law-school thesis, and, paraphras-
ing Juan Bautista Alberdi’s dictum of “To govern is to populate,” added:

25 During the fijirst three decades of the twentieth century the complaints about Jews in
Argentina were more xenophobic and anti-immigrant than anti-Judaism. With the sharp
decline of transatlantic migration in the 1930s and the rise of anti-liberal nationalism and
right-wing Catholicism, one can detect a noticeable shift from xenophobia to an anti-
Semitism that draws from Catholic traditions and contemporary fascist currents. See
Graciela Ben-Dror, The Catholic Church and the Jews: Argentina, 1933–1945 (Jerusalem:
SICSA and Hebrew University, 2008) and for the liberal opposition to this trend, see the
chapters by Ariel Svarch and Federico Finchelstein in this volume, and Rosalie Sitman,
“Protest from Afar: The Jewish and Republican Presence in Victoria Ocampo’s Revista SUR
in the 1930s and 1940s” in Jefffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein eds., Rethinking Jewish Latin
Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 132–60.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 17

“To populate with such vipers is not to govern but to make government
impossible.”26 In 1919, Ernesto M. Aráoz, a writer and politician from
Salta, also argued for the exclusion of “these people that can shatter the
homogeneity of our race,” on the grounds that the constitutional right
of all Europeans to immigrate to Argentina did not apply to them.27 The
framers of the 1853 constitution had not explicitly excluded them simply
because Turkey and the Eastern European countries were not politically
signifijicant then and had few relations with Argentina. Expressing other
common motifs, the writer and folklorist José Pio Sagastume, referred to
the turcos and rusos as fijilthy and backward, unproductive, stingy peddlers,
who were also—in a backhanded compliment—“submissive and respect-
ful of authorities.”28 There was, however, a charge aimed solely at the
rusos: that they were a group “full of anarchists, pimps, and prostitutes.”29
Even observers who expressed sympathy for Jewish immigrants in gen-
eral, remarked on this “undesirable element.”30
The “new” immigrant condition of Jews and Middle Easterners, and
thus their greater alterity, had physical expression in their high levels of
residential segregation. An analysis of geographical distribution from data
in the 1909 Buenos Aires census shows that the segregation indices for
the two groups were the highest in the city, more than twice as high as
those for Spaniards and the French, and close to fijive times higher than
for Italians. Yet, as the table below shows, Jews in Buenos Aires were less
segregated than their coreligionists elsewhere in the diaspora. Moreover,
Jewish residential segregation in Buenos Aires also dropped faster and
sharper than in most other cities.
The explanation for this is difffijicult to establish, but it may relate to the
degree of ethno-national pluralism. Of all the countries in Table 1, Argen-
tina had the greatest claim to the title “a nation of immigrants.” On the
eve of World War I, 30% of its residents were foreign-born, compared to
24% in Canada, 15% in the United States, 5% in Brazil, 3% in France, and
1% in England and Wales. The only country during the mass migration
period that reached a higher proportion of foreigners in its population

26 Saul Escobar, La inmigración (Buenos Aires, 1907), 68–69.

27 Ernesto M. Aráoz, La inmigración en la Argentina y sus vinculaciones con la cuestión
social (Salta: Imprenta Pascual y Baleirón de las Llanas, 1919), 48.
28 José Pio Sagastume, La inmigración: Su influencia en el país (La Plata, Argentina,
1916), 134–46.
29 Francisco Stach, La defensa social y la inmigración (Buenos Aires, 1916), 26–28.
30 Damián M. Torino, El problema del inmigrante y el problema agrario en la Argentina
(Buenos Aires, 1912), 30–31.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

18 josé c. moya

Table 1. Jewish Residential Segregation, ranked from low to high.

Place Year Segregation Index
Buenos Aires 1936 40.3
Buenos Aires 1909 47.5
St. Petersburg 1910 52.0
Rio de Janeiro 1920 52.8
U.S. mean of 11 cities 1910 57.2
Montreal 1911 62.8
Toronto 1911 66.7
London 1911 71.4
The segregation index can range from 0 (complete residential integration) to 100 (com-
plete residential segregation).
Source: José C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires,
1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 180–88 for all cases except
St. Petersburg, where the fijigure comes from Benjamin Nathans, “Conflict, Community, and
the Jews of Late Nineteenth-Century St. Petersburg,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas,
Neue Folge, 44:2 (1996): 178–216.

than Argentina was neighboring Uruguay with 35%. And what was true
of the country was even truer of its capital and other cities on its littoral
region. Immigrants during the period accounted for half of Buenos Aires’
population and for seven out of every ten of its adult residents, a higher
proportion than any city in North America or Europe. In such a pluralis-
tic setting, where natives were a minority and a variety of outsiders the
majority, exclusion—residential and of other types—was more difffijicult
to implement.
The diversity of the host environment contrasts and highlights the
exceptional homogeneity of the community. The absence of a signifijicant
old Sephardi and German presence prevented the emergence in Argen-
tina of modernized Sephardic rituals and Reform Judaism, keeping the
religious landscape less diverse than in most other diasporic nodes. Early-
twentieth-century Sephardim, which represented one-tenth of the immi-
grants, seem to have had better relations with the Ashkenazi majority
and with the host society than their co-ethnics heading to North America
during the same period, likely because of the Hispanic cultural base of
the destination.31 It is true that the arrival of highly educated German

31 Adriana Brodsky, “The Contours of Identity: Sephardic Jews and the Construction of
Jewish Communities in Argentina, 1880 to the Present” (Duke University, Ph.D. disserta-
tion, 2004) and her chapter in this volume discuss the Sephardim’s conflictive relations
with the Ashkenazi majority but also an element of mutual recognition and moments of

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 19

refugees in the 1930s and 1940s introduced an element of internal hierar-

chy into Argentine Jewry similar to what occurred in the Spanish com-
munity of Mexico with the arrival of republican exiles.32 But in this case
they arrived as dispossessed late-comers and entered a community with a
large, long-established or native middle-class, which placed a limit on the
actual inequalities that their presence could create.33 On the other end
of the status spectrum, Argentina did not receive a signifijicant influx of
less educated and less westernized Arab-speaking Mizrahim after World
War II, unlike the cases of France, Italy, the United States, Australia, and
Canada.34
The combination of being one of the least diverse Jewish diasporic
communities in one of the most diverse settings may be the most dis-
tinctive characteristics of Argentine Jewry. It is true that the community
was never completely horizontal and became less so with time. But by
the same token it never developed the sharp dual ranks that character-
ized most other settlements of Eastern European Jews: the uptown Jew/
downtown Jew divisions of New York City and West End/East End Jews
in London;35 or those between French Jews and polacks in Paris;36 or the

cooperation. This difffers from the history of consistent invisibility and lack of communal
recognition told about the Sephardim in the United States during the twentieth century
by Aviva Ben-Ur in Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: New York
University Press, 2009).
32 How many German refugees entered Argentina is not clear. Patrick von zur Muhlen,
“The 1930s: The End of the Latin American Open-door Policy,” in Frank Caestecker and
Bob Moore eds., Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2010), 103–08, gives a fijigure of 35,000, claiming this was the largest per
capita number (in relation to the country’s population) anywhere in the world. Carlota
Jackisch, El nazismo y los refugiados alemanes en la Argentina, 1933–1945 (Buenos Aires: Bel-
grano, 1989), 150, mentions 40,000 but explains this fijigure included refugees from Poland
and Eastern Europe. On the other hand the data on yearly entries of Jews from Germany
to Argentina between 1933 and 1941 adds to less than 10,000 in Rosenswaike, “The Jew-
ish Population of Argentina,” 205. In the decade after World War II, 80,000 Germans and
Austrians entered Argentina but about three-fourths went on to other South American
countries or returned to Europe. Raanan Rein, Argentine Jews Or Jewish Argentines?: Essays
on Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 80.
33 Leonardo Senkman, Argentina, la Segunda Guerra Mundial y los refugiados indese-
ables, 1933–1945 (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1991).
34 Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews, 191; Sergio DellaPergola, “‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews
in Israel and Western Countries: Migration, Social Change, and Identifijication” in Peter
Medding, ed. Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
3–43.
35 Milton Hindus, The Jewish East Side, 1881–1924 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1996), 139–42.
36 Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the belle époque (New
York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 75–76.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

20 josé c. moya

splits between Anglo-Jews and Litvakes (because the majority came from
Lithuania) or Peruvians (a disparaging epithet, of obscure etymology, for
poor Eastern European immigrants) in South Africa;37 or those between
Westjuden and Ostjuden in German-speaking Central Europe.
Despite the diversity of sites and nomenclature, by the nineteenth
century all these pairs had become a unifijied polarity in which the sec-
ond element acted as the self-constituting Other of the fijirst, and one that
reflected the broader dichotomy in Western culture captured in the sub-
title of the Argentine Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo: civilización y bar-
barie.38 Just as the intellectual artifijice of a “civilized West” required its
oriental barbaric mirror-opposite, so did the “cravat Jew” need the “caftan
Jew,” to use Theodore Hamerow’s apt terms.39 Western liberal regimes
and nation-states during the nineteenth century had demanded, or at
least fomented, the ethnic and cultural “conversion” of immigrants and
ethnic minorities to the national ethos without demanding religious con-
formity. Many immigrants or minorities obliged, at times with enough
gusto to even “nationalize” their religious practices (as happened with
much of Judaism and Irish Catholicism in the United States). By the late
nineteenth century Western Jews, whether of Germanic or Sephardi ori-
gin, had become basically indistinguishable from their gentile neighbors
of the same class.
It could be argued that this is exactly what eventually happened with
Eastern European Jews in Argentina. But even if that is the case, the pro-
cess difffered. It lacked an internal cravat/caftan polarity that elsewhere
functioned not just as an indicator of relative assimilation but as a sepa-
rator of quasi-racialized groups in a hierarchical order. The lack of this
type of internal division in the historical formation of Argentine Jewry
contrasted not only with other Jewish diasporic loci but also with other
immigrant collectivities in Argentina, such as the Italian—where early
arrivals from the north of the Peninsula felt a sense of cultural and quasi-
racial superiority toward the newcomers from the Mezzogiorno—and
the Spanish—where older Basque, Catalan, and Asturian immigrants

37 Shimoni, Community and Conscience, 2–3, 12, 281; Van Onselen, “Jewish Police Inform-
ers,” 123.
38 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, makes this case for the assimilation of German
Jews and their attitudes toward Eastern European Ashkenazi immigrants, but the frame-
work applies equally to older “national” Jews in the Netherlands, France, England, and the
United States.
39 Theodore S. Hamerow, “Cravat Jews and Caftan Jews,” Commentary 77:5 (1984):
29–30.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 21

expressed similar attitudes toward Gallego greenhorns. In this sense, the

experience of Eastern European Ashkenazi in Argentina resembles that
in Uruguay and Brazil, and that of German Jews in Germany. All of these
groups became less traditional and orthodox, more culturally urban,
socioeconomically middle-class, formally educated, and mainstream but
without the presence of another older, native, and “modern” Jewish group
that insisted on stressing the newcomers’ foreignness and “backwardness”
throughout the whole process.
If the distinctive traits of Argentine Jewish history are quite salient, so
are the commonalities with the other principal Ashkenazi destinations.
The most primary is the massive nature of the migrations. This deter-
mined the sociological composition of the flows. The diffferences in skill
and education levels between destinations mentioned before are relative.
In general, this was an exodus of workers and petty traders, not a mer-
cantile diaspora, as had been the case with the Portuguese Sephardim or
Italians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as was the case
with many Asian groups in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
This, in turn, shaped the formation of the immigrant community. If
we do not include older, more established, non-Eastern European groups,
Jewish immigrant settlements in the principal destinations were, at least
in their early stages, working-class communities with a sector of ethnic
mediators and entrepreneurs (what in the Italian diaspora were called,
with some irony and humor, prominenti) rather than multi-class com-
munities. In Argentina, the Jewish community was much less multi-class
than older, bigger collectivities such as the Italian, Spanish, and French,
whose members may have been underrepresented at the zenith of the
national social rank but otherwise fijilled the spectrum from millionaires
and literati to paupers.
Upward mobility is another commonality that goes beyond the Argen-
tine Jewish experience or the Jewish experience in general. To begin
with, countries and regions of destination offfer greater opportunities
for social climbing than those of origin. That, not just higher wages, was
what induced millions of people to move. Those who move, in turn, are
a self-selected group—in spite of the omnipresent narratives of forced
exodus in Jewish studies—with higher levels of human and social capital
and aspiration than the majority that stayed behind. That combination
makes just about every immigrant group more upwardly mobile than
non-migrants and than people in countries or regions that receive few
immigrants. But the degree and speed of socioeconomic ascent varies sig-
nifijicantly between groups.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

22 josé c. moya

In this spectrum Argentine Jewry occupies a position clearly above

the global medium but nowhere close to the top. As discussed before, its
tempo of upward mobility was slower than for North American Jews. But
its biggest gaps, within world Jewry, are not in relation to other major
destinations but in comparison to minor destinations, particularly in
Latin America. Jews in Argentina, or in the other principal host societies,
were just too numerous to concentrate in any single class or sector, and
too working-class in origin and occupation to be able to become purely a
mercantile community. Upward mobility therefore relied on a variety of
mechanisms: wage labor, family and child labor, home-work, sweat-shops,
independent skilled occupations, low consumption, family savings, ethnic
credit, and investment in small enterprises (particularly in the garment
sector). Most of these required time and were not conductive to rapid
ascent. Moreover, strategies that could produce faster mobility, such as
higher education and the professions, became a feasible option only for
the second or third generations. Consequently, upward mobility was com-
mon but uneven (with large intra-group diffferences and a sizeable propor-
tion of its members remaining within the working-class), protracted, and
often trans-generational. On the other hand, in destinations where there
was a surplus of labor, little competition from other immigrant or native
bourgeoisies, and the Jewish community was small, wage-labor was never
a viable option and almost complete concentration in commerce and
industrial enterprises was both possible and common. Thus in Mexico,
Central America, and the Andean countries Jews had moved, almost en
masse, into the top 5–10 percentile of the socioeconomic pyramid within
a generation or two. But so had Spaniards, Lebanese, Palestinians, and the
other small immigrant groups there, showing that here the explanation
laid in structural conditions rather than ethnic culture.
Ethnic culture provided more clear advantages in countries of massive
and varied immigration. In the United States, Eastern European Jews—
a quasi-urbanized group with greater craft skills, literacy, and familiarity
with market relations than the European peasantry—fared signifijicantly
better than the heavily peasant groups from Southern and Eastern Europe
that arrived roughly at the same time.40 That was also true in Argentina
vis-à-vis Southern Italians, Spanish Galicians, and non-Jewish Eastern
European immigrants. But although there is no empirical evidence for

40 Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York
City, 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 23

this (that I know of), Jewish economic success in Argentina (1) must have
resembled that of other groups who were mainly working-class but exhib-
ited high levels of literacy, skills, and market familiarity, such as Catalans
and Italians from the Piedmont and Lombardy; and (2) may be lower than
that of groups that were more mercantile—mostly religious minorities
from the Ottoman Empire such as Armenians, Greeks, Malekites, and
Lebanese Maronites—and groups that were smaller and more elite such
as the British and their Anglo-Argentine descendants.
This serves to demystify notions of Jewish exceptionalism rooted in
parochialism and a lack of comparative perspectives. In an article sugges-
tively titled “My son the doctor,” Mariam Slater argued that the parent in
the popular joke could only be Jewish because “the unprecedented rapid-
ity, height and breadth of Jewish upward mobility mark the Jews in many
ways as a special case.”41 Yet the line is a cliché in most immigrant cultures
and in terms of the “height and breadth” of “upward mobility” none of the
most striking cases globally are Jewish. The Chinese account for less than
three percent of the population in Indonesia but control three-quarters
of the country’s private economy. Indians in East Africa and Lebanese
in West Africa occupied equally stratospheric positions. Parsi and Hindu
Sindhi are two small groups that surpass Jews in per capita wealth and
diasporic dispersion. And the number of doctors per capita among Indi-
ans in the United States surpasses that of Jews, as does their per capita
income. Moreover there is nothing intrinsic to Judaism (or to any other
religion) that promotes economic success. Indeed, a recent study for
Amsterdam from 1850 to 1940 shows most of the cases of upward mobil-
ity occurred among non-afffijiliated Jews or those who had converted to
Christianity rather than the religiously observant.42 In a global perspective
then, there is nothing special about the socioeconomic success of Eastern
European Jews in Argentina and in their other principal destinations; it is
just higher than for groups who are more rural and less skilled; and lower
than for groups that are more entrepreneurial or more educated.
In terms of cultural persistence and levels of assimilation the Jewish
experience in Argentina does not difffer much from the experience of other
Jews, and other immigrants in general, in countries of immigration in the
Americas, Australasia, and—to a lesser degree—Western Europe. The

41 Mariam K. Slater, “My Son the Doctor: Aspects of Mobility Among American Jews,”
American Sociological Review, 34:3 (1969): 359–373.
42 Peter Tammes, “‘Hack, Pack, Sack’: Occupational Structure, Status, and Mobility of
Jews in Amsterdam, 1851–1941,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43:1 (2012): 1–26.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

24 josé c. moya

debate about whether—or to what degree—these countries are “melting-

pots” or “mosaics” has raged for some decades now. Part of the difffijiculty in
settling it relates to the undercurrent of moral philosophy. Is assimilation
a benefijicial process that promotes incorporation, inclusivity, and national
unity or an imperious and arrogant notion that assumes the superiority of
the host culture and imposes conformity? Another obstacle is conceptual
and perhaps even defijinitional. The meaning of the term is straightfor-
ward and unambiguous: to become alike, in this case like the immigrants’
hosts. But the possible indicators of the process are numerous (language
use, residential and occupational integration, marriage patterns, spheres
of sociability, formation of social identities, and so on), they do not nec-
essarily move in unison or tandem, some of the indicators are difffijicult to
measure, and it is next to impossible to assign them proportional value.
Moreover, assimilation is open ended, somewhat linear but reversible,
independent of socioeconomic ascent (indeed some of the most economi-
cally successful immigrants have also been some of the least culturally
assimilated), fragmented (immigrants can be completely assimilated in
some realms and dissimilar in others), and segmented (newcomers can
assimilate to the dominant culture of the host society or to some of its
subcultures, for example African-American culture).
Yet one of the most befuddling hurdles in the discussion relates simply
to the point of reference. Are Argentina and the other major countries of
European immigration homogeneous or pluralistic in relation to what?
If the reference point is the hyper-assimilationist position of traditional
national historiography and functionalist sociology—which presented
assimilation as rapid and complete—it is relatively easy to contest it.
Immigrant ethnic cultures thrived during the fijirst generation, retained
much of their vitality among the second generation, and signifijicant—
although not always visible—traces during the third generation and
beyond. Numerous studies in medical anthropology, psychology, and fam-
ily therapy during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States demonstrated
the continuing relevance of European ethnicity in mores and manners,
child-rearing practices, adolescent styles, attitudes towards illness, psychi-
atric disorders, authority, and other private behaviors even in cases where
the individuals examined were not particularly aware of their ethnicity.
Immigrants who settled in relatively isolated rural colonies—such as the
Welsh or Volga Germans in Patagonia and the Pampas, Scandinavians in
the Dakotas, and Mennonites in Argentina, Canada, and Brazil—were
able to preserve their languages and ways for a longer time than those
who settled in urban or suburban settings. The arrival of signifijicant num-

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 25

bers of European immigrants in all the settler countries after World War
II reactivated links with the homelands and pre-migratory identities.
However, if the point of reference is the rest of the world instead of
hyper-assimilationist positions, what is striking about Argentina and the
other countries of European settlement is not the persistence of pre-
migratory cultures, habits, and identities but the speed and thoroughness
of their erasure. Migrants throughout the world, from Arabs and Gujaratis
in East Africa and Ibos and Lebanese in West Africa to Volga Germans in
Kazakhstan, Chinese in Malaysia, and Indians in Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji,
and Surinam maintain separate identities and communal structures for
generations and sometimes centuries, even when they are not territo-
rialized. Their ethnic identity not only influences mores, manners, and
domestic behavior—as has been shown in the U.S.—but almost deter-
mines what they speak and eat, where they live, how they earn a living,
who they socialize with and marry, and just about every aspect of their
private and public life. Where they are numerous enough, they do not
simply show diffferent voting behavior but form their own political par-
ties. They perceive and describe themselves as a separate group and are
perceived and described by others as such.
Compared to this level of separation and continuity, Jewish and other
ethnic persistence in Argentina and other countries of European settle-
ment seems, particularly after the third generation, less consequential, to
put it mildly. Linguistically, these host societies have proven to be steam-
rollers. Third generation immigrants who speak the language of their
ancestors are few, and those who speak it fluently rara avis indeed. Yid-
dish, which had survived for a millennium as an ethnic minority language
in Central and Eastern Europe, basically disappeared in three generations
in Argentina, the U.S., Canada, Brazil, and Uruguay. The contrast with
Ladino, which survived as a minority, diasporic language for fijive centuries,
is both striking and telling. Rates of exogamy in the Neo-Europes are low
across racial lines but exceptionally high within Euro-descendants, even
among groups like Jews and Armenians that were already ethnic minori-
ties and highly endogamous before crossing the Atlantic. About half of
Jews in Argentina and the U.S. marry non-Jews, an unprecedented level in
the history of the group.43 Residential and occupational segregation were
never high by international standards and have declined drastically.

43 Shulamit Reinharz and Sergio DellaPergola, eds., Jewish Intermarriage around the
World (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009).

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

26 josé c. moya

Indeed, most people in the world—used to harder and clearer ethnic

markers and boundaries—would fijind it impossible to conceive of a Jew-
ish Argentine, or Canadian, Uruguayan, American, etc, as diffferent from
his/her co-nationals of European ancestry. Used to the level of ethnic vio-
lence and tension common in most of the world, they will also be hard
put to fijind the anti-Semitism that seems omnipresent in the scholarly and
popular literature on the Jewish experience in Argentina. Indeed one of
the distinguishing characteristics of Argentina and other societies of Euro-
pean settlement is the extraordinarily low level of xenophobic violence.
And the diffference is startling. All the immigrants or descendants killed
in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand together over the last two centuries would amount to a frac-
tion of those killed in any of a dozen or more individual countries in a
single day.
This relative lack of ethnic violence both results from and reinforces
the type of “light” ethnic diversity that characterizes Argentina and the
other Neo-Europes. It is a type of pluralism where ethnicity is not territori-
alized, as it is in most of the rest of the world, including Europe. These are
multi-religious milieus where religions also do not map out neatly territo-
rially, where no religion is offfijicial or backed by the state, and where most
of the population does not practice any religion. Here national Jewries
simply mirror their nations. The U.S. has one of the higher proportions
of residents who attend religious services (44%) in the developed world,
and American Jews are among the most religious. Argentina has one of
the lowest rates (25%) and Argentine Jews are among the most secular.
Increasingly, these are countries that defijine themselves as multicultural
but are among the least multilingual places on the planet. Membership in
the polity is open to anyone regardless of their origin. Most countries of
immigration confer citizenship as a birthright. Most other countries base
it on ancestry.
As Raanan Rein has noticed, scholars tend to exaggerate the salience
of Jewish or other ethnic identities in Argentina and elsewhere simply
because we tend to focus on the afffijiliated and within these, the most
active in ethnic institutions.44 Methodologically, this is the equivalent of
studying attitudes toward violence in a country by doing fijieldwork in jails.
The broader reality in Argentina, and the other Neo-Europes, is one of

44 Rein, Argentine Jews Or Jewish Argentines, 3–4.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 27

strong and universally-shared nationality, not just in legal terms but most
importantly in an unconscious, existential, and quotidian way. This deter-
mines what we speak, how we sound, our body language, how we see the
world, what we eat, and the thousands of other small behaviors and codes
that makeup social life. In this sense even an Argentine orthodox rabbi—
not to mention the vast majority of Jewish Argentines—has more in com-
mon with an Argentine atheist or Anglican than with a Yemeni Jew.
This combination of a widely-shared cultural and afffective national
identity that has become internalized, naturalized, and indeed ethnicized,
and particularist, softer ethnic identities that are less widely shared even
within the group in question but are assumed as complimentary rather
than competing, explains the remarkable lack of ethnic, sectarian, and
secessionist violence in countries where the majority of the population
actually have been there for just a few generations rather than millennia.
In this sense, the repetitious moaning by Argentines, Jews and Gentiles,
about their lack of a strong national identity, particularly in comparison
to other Latin Americans, is just another quirk in that supposedly missing
identity.

Bibliography

Aráoz, Ernesto M. La inmigración en la Argentina y sus vinculaciones con la cuestión social.

Salta: Imprenta Pascual y Baleirón de las Llanas, 1919.
Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German
Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Ayerst, William. The Jews of the Nineteenth Century: A collection of essays, reviews, and his-
torical notices. London, 1848.
Bashevis Singer, Isaac. “The Colony,” in A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.
Benbassa, Esther. The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999.
Ben-Dror, Graciela. The Catholic Church and the Jews: Argentina, 1933–1945. Jerusalem:
SICSA and Hebrew University, 2008.
Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2009.
Berrol, Selma C. East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York,
1870–1920. London: Praeger, 1994.
Birmingham, Stephen. Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York. Syracuse: Syra-
cuse University Press, 1996 [original edition, 1967].
Bristow, Edward. J. Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery,
1879–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Brodsky, Adriana. “The Contours of Identity: Sephardic Jews and the Construction of Jew-
ish Communities in Argentina, 1880 to the Present.” PhD diss., Duke University, 2004.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

28 josé c. moya

Centro de Estudios de la Policía (Lavalle St. 2625, Buenos Aires), Policía de la Capital,
División de Investigaciones, Planillas de rufijianes, 1893–1894.
DellaPergola, Sergio. “‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews in Israel and Western Countries: Migra-
tion, Social Change, and Identifijication” in Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews, edited by
Peter Medding, 3–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a
Liberal Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Gartner, Lloyd P. “Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Trafffijic in Prostitution, 1885–
1914,” AJS Review, Vol. 7 (1982): 135.
Godley, Andrew. Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880–1914:
Enterprise and Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Green, Nancy. The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the belle époque. New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1986.
Hamerow, Theodore S. “Cravat Jews and Caftan Jews.” Commentary 77, 5 (1984): 29–30.
Harrison Stallard, Joshua. London Pauperism amongst Jews and Christians. London: Saun-
ders, 1867.
Hindus, Milton. The Jewish East Side, 1881–1924. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996.
Hyman, Paula. The Jews of Modern France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Jackisch, Carlota. El nazismo y los refugiados alemanes en la Argentina, 1933–1945. Buenos
Aires: Belgrano, 1989.
Kaplan, Yosef. “Gente Política: The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam vis-à-vis Dutch Society.”
in Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others, edited by Chaya Brasz and Yosef
Kaplan, 21–40. Leiden: Brill, 2001.
Keire, Mara L. “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United
States, 1907–1917.” Journal of Social History 35, 1 2001: 5–41.
Kessner, Thomas. The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City,
1880–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Kobrin, Rebecca. Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010.
McGee Deutsch, Sandra. Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish
Women, 1880–1955. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Mirelman, Victor. “The Jewish Community Versus Crime: The Case of White Slavery in
Buenos Aires.” Jewish Social Studies 46, 2 (1984): 145–68.
Moya, José C. “What’s in a Stereotype? The Case of Jewish Anarchists in Argentina” in
Rethinking Jewish Latin Americans, edited by Jefffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein. Albuquer-
que: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
Rein, Raanan. Argentine Jews Or Jewish Argentines?: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and
Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Reinharz, Shulamit and Sergio DellaPergola, eds. Jewish Intermarriage around the World.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009.
Rosenswaike, Ira. “The Jewish Population of Argentina: Census and Estimate, 1887–1947.”
Jewish Social Studies, 22, 4 (1960): 195–214.
Sagastume, José Pio. La inmigración: Su influencia en el país. La Plata, Argentina, 1916.
Senkman, Leonardo. Argentina, la Segunda Guerra Mundial y los refugiados indeseables,
1933–1945. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1991.
Shimoni, Gideon. Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. Hanover:
Brandeis University Press, 2003.
Sholem Aleichem. “The Man from Buenos Aires,” in The Railroad Stories, translated by
Hillel Halkin. New York, Schocken Books, 1987.
Sitman, Rosalie. “Protest from Afar: The Jewish and Republican Presence in Victoria
Ocampo›s Revista SUR in the 1930s and 1940s” in Rethinking Jewish Latin Americans,
edited by Jefffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, 132–60. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2008.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

 the jewish experience in argentina 29

Slater, Mariam K. “My Son the Doctor: Aspects of Mobility Among American Jews.” Ameri-
can Sociological Review, 34, 3 (1969): 359–373.
Sofer, Eugene. From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires. New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1982.
Spalding, Henry D. Classic Jewish Humor in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995.
Stach, Francisco. La defensa social y la inmigración. Buenos Aires, 1916.
Szajkowski, Zosa. “The Attitude of American Jews to East European Jewish Immigration,
1881–1893.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 40, 3 (1951): 221–30.
——. “The European Attitude to East European Jewish Immigration, 1881–1893” PAJHS 41,
2 (1951): 127–37.
Tammes, Peter. “‘Hack, Pack, Sack’: Occupational Structure, Status, and Mobility of Jews in
Amsterdam, 1851–1941.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43, 1 (2012): 1–26.
The American Jewish Year Book, 1900–01.
Torino, Damián M. El problema del inmigrante y el problema agrario en la Argentina. Bue-
nos Aires, 1912.
Van Onselen, Charles. “Jewish marginality in the Atlantic World: Organized Crime in the
Era of the Great Migrations, 1880–1914.” South African Historical Journal 43 (Nov. 2000):
96–137.
——. “Jewish Police Informers in the Atlantic World, 1880–1914.” The Historical Journal 50,
1 (2007): 119–144.
——. The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal. New York:
Walker Publishing Company, 2007.
Von zur Muhlen, Patrick. “The 1930s: The End of the Latin American Open-door Policy.” in
Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States, edited by Frank Caestecker
and Bob Moore. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

View publication stats