Structuring Jewish Buenos Aires at the end of the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT

A common Jewish Argentine creation story begins in 1889, with 824 Russian Jews disembarking in Buenos Aires and ushering in three decades of massive Jewish migration to that city. In six key themes, this article expands the parameters of that story chronologically, spatially, culturally, and politically. It focuses on the Jewish gaucho (skilled horseman) as an iconic representation of the intersections of Jewish and non-Jewish Buenos Aires; the meanings of neighborhood; the tragedy of ‘white slavery’; cultural institutions; Sephardic porteños (Buenos Aires residents); and the Jewish anarchists and socialists.

KEYWORDS:

• Buenos Aires
• immigration
• white slavery
• neighborhood
• gaucho

In many regards, the outlines of the Jewish Argentine foundational story dovetail with the larger history of the city and immigration as foundations of nation building. Buenos Aires was a colonial city of limited importance up to the early nineteenth century. Even a few decades after Argentina achieved independence from Spain, Buenos Aires was still a relatively minor commercial port. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the city began to grow at a dizzying rate, becoming the largest and most populous metropolitan area of Latin America. By 1910 the population had multiplied seven times, from 180,000 inhabitants in 1870 to 1,300,000. Buenos Aires became a city of European immigrants.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Argentine elites and the national authorities adopted a strategic policy, inspired by positivist ideals, to encourage immigration from Europe. The motivation was a desire to increase the relatively small population and to ‘improve’ (a euphemism for ‘whiten’) the local demographic make-up by attracting immigrants, preferably from Northern Europe, who would import European civilization at the expense of the ‘barbarous’ indigenous population. ‘Gobernar es poblar’ (‘to govern is to populate’) was a maxim coined in 1853 by Juan Bautista Alberdi, a prominent liberal intellectual and politician.¹

Alberdi’s aphorism was translated into action. In barely three years, from 1888 to 1890, Argentine agents in Europe distributed more than 133,000 free ship tickets to Buenos Aires. The demographic revolution occurring in Europe at the time fostered mass emigration to the New World, especially to the U.S., Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Between 1880 and 1950, Argentina received more immigrants, in both absolute and relative numbers, than any other Latin American country.² Even so, the hope of making the country an attractive destination for emigrants from the more industrialized European north – the population that Alberdi and his contemporaries believed most able to contribute to modernization – was soon dashed.

Most of the new immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe, primarily Italians and Spaniards, with a smaller number arriving from other countries of the Mediterranean basin or from the Balkans. Muslims, Jewish, and non-Jewish, non-Muslim Asians arrived as well. The majority of new arrivals headed for the large urban centers, especially Buenos Aires, most of whose inhabitants in the early twentieth century had been born elsewhere.

The Jewish community in Argentina, the largest in Latin America, is a product of that same huge wave of transatlantic immigration. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Jews of Eastern Europe (Ashkenazis) became the third largest immigrant group, and the largest non-Catholic minority: from 1895 to 1919 the number of Jews in Argentina increased from 6,000 to 125,000.

In this context of how immigration built Buenos Aires, this article expands the parameters of the Jewish foundational narrative. It goes beyond much of the current historical literature by placing that foundational narrative in the context of broader historical narratives of nation building, outside Jewish communities. In so doing, it addresses and reconsiders six key themes in Jewish Argentine history. Much has been written on the Jewish gaucho (skilled horseman). This article reasons that the gaucho not only functioned as a normative memory site for generations of Jewish Argentines, but for many Jews, served as a cultural bridge from rural Argentina to the city, and as a memory marker for urban Jewish Argentines reaching back to a rural past. We explore the meaning of neighborhood not only as a point of Jewish ethnicity, but as porous geographical and cultural borderland between Jewish and non-Jewish Buenos Aires. The tragedy of Jewish ‘white slavery’ has been addressed by generations of scholars and others. We contemplate the Jewish sex trade in social and morality contexts beyond Jewish Buenos Aires. The article addresses Jewish urban identities by way of multiple cultural institutions, the oft-missing stories of Sephardic porteños, and the Jewish presence in anarchist and socialist movements.

The Jewish gaucho and the Lure of the Big city

The publication in 1910 of The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampa by Alberto Gerchunoff is a milestone in Jewish life in Argentina, as well as in debates around their collective identities with reference to an iconic Argentine figure, the gaucho. This series of vignettes of Jewish immigrants who had settled in rural agricultural colonies appeared in Argentina’s centennial year.³ Yet, by 1910, most of the seventy thousand Jewish Argentines lived in Buenos Aires. Still, and perhaps because of an already evident urbanization of Jewish Argentines in a country that celebrated a nostalgic rural past, Gerchunoff’s work was extremely important in creating the emblematic figure of the Jewish gaucho, underlining Jewish authenticity, roots, and attachment to the Argentine soil. Through the twentieth century, many Jewish Argentine writers followed Gerchunoff’s lead in glorifying this figure.⁴

Gerchunoff was born in 1883 in Proskurov, Russia, (today the Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi). His trajectory is telling as far as the move of Jewish immigrants from rural areas to Buenos Aires and the quick rise of Jewish immigrants to prominent positions in Argentine society. Gerchunoff’s family relocated to Argentina when he was six years old and settled in the mythical Jewish agricultural colony of Moisesville, in the province of Santa Fe – a locale lionized in literature and popular culture as the archetypical nineteenth century Jewish colony. His father was murdered by a drunken gaucho in 1891 and the family moved to Rajil, another Jewish colony established by the Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch, in the province of Entre Ríos.⁵

At the age of twelve, Gerchunoff moved to Buenos Aires, changing his first name from Abraham to Alberto as he became an Argentine citizen. Soon after, as a teenager, he embarked on a journalistic career. At the beginning of the twentieth century he wrote for La Nación, a newspaper bastion of Argentina’s conservative elite.⁶ Founded in 1870 by former president Bartolomé Mitre, La Nación enjoyed Latin America’s largest readership until the 1930s and included in its columns the literary luminaries of the Spanish-speaking world, including the young Jewish immigrant Gerchunoff.

Much as Frederic Remington painted the American West from his perch atop an apartment building in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, Gerchunoff offered Jews a new hybrid identity with Hispanic Argentine and Jewish cultures from Buenos Aires, in his highly romanticized reconstruction of life in the agricultural colonies of the pampas. Gerchunoff’s first language was Yiddish, but by the time he wrote his book he became a master of Spanish prose. His book was very well received by the Argentine literary establishment, including leading Catholic and nationalist writers, who described Gerchunoff as representing Argentina’s ‘Creole soul’ (espíritu criollo). Jewish Gauchos described Argentina as the Promised Land and the Argentine pampas as the new Zion, far superior to contemporary Palestine. And indeed, it was no other than Theodor Herzl himself, in his Judenstaat (1896), who described the choice facing the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe as ‘Palestine or the Argentine.’

Rumors of the opportunities offered by immigration to Argentina, where anyone might live freely and prosper, spread among urban and rural Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Relatives, friends, and former neighbors exchanged letters containing information about opportunities in and cautionary advice about Buenos Aires.⁷ For the majority of Jewish immigrants, Ashkenazi and Sephardic alike, Argentina did in fact turn out to be the ‘promised land,’ a place where they could secure a living for themselves and an education for their children, and where they could try to make a new home. Within a short time, they established community institutions, Jewish schools, and a Jewish Hospital (Hospital Israelita de Buenos Aires) that satisfied their social, economic, cultural, and athletic needs. In the process, they created a rich mosaic of social, cultural, political, and ideological life, which reflected a wide variety of faiths, identities, and social practices: communists and Zionists, Orthodox and secular, those who emphasized their Jewishness and others who preferred to stress their Argentine identity.⁸

Jewish immigrants began to arrive as early as the 1840s. In Argentina, unlike Brazil, evidence of conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity at the time of the 1492 expulsion) during the colonial period is scant. The first Jews to reach Buenos Aires came as a small number of German and French families. The earliest synagogue was not established until 1862. In 1881, following pogroms in Russia, the Argentine government sent a special emissary to invite Jews from Czarist Russia to settle in Argentina. The first organized group of immigrants, comprising 820 Russian Jews, arrived in August 1889 on board the ship Wesser, often referred to as the Jewish-Argentine Mayflower. The passengers aboard this vessel were sent to the Jewish agricultural colonies, and some of these immigrants founded Moises Ville (1889), Mauricio (1892), and Villa Clara (1892), among others. The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) of Baron Hirsch founded 26 agricultural colonies in Argentina. At the time, the agricultural settlements established in Argentina seemed to offer a partial solution to the Jewish national question. Although Jewish rural colonies existed in other places in the Americas, such as the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, their role and importance were far more significant in Argentina. However, even at their apogee as Jewish settlements, on the eve of World War I, their combined population numbered no more than 20,000.⁹ Many of the colonies did not last long and by the mid-1930s only 11 percent of Argentina’s Jewish population lived in them, most having picked up and left for Buenos Aires and, to a lesser degree, to other urban centers.¹⁰

Jewish neighborhoods and their limits

To understand the history of Jewish neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, the historian Sandra McGee Deutsch looked first at borders around them. A neighbourhood and the families, communities, organizations, and workplaces that define them were shaped by how people configured and reconfigured neighborhood borders. And sometimes neighborhoods were defined by the ways in which and the reasons why Jewish Argentines crossed in and out of the boundaries they created – cultural, religious, linguistic and otherwise.¹¹

After 1860, the handful of Jewish families in the city settled in the current San Nicolás neighbourhood around what is now Plaza Lavalle, two km west of the port of Buenos Aires, and one km east of what would become, at the start of the twentieth century, one of the city’s iconic Jewish neighbourhood, Once (the other being Villa Crespo). Neighborhoods often formed around religious institutions, as in the case of the the Congregación Israelita in the Plaza Lavalle area in 1862, and the founding of the Congregación Israelita Latina (1891) by Moroccan Jews in the Barrio Sud neighborhood. In 1901, a decade after the beginning of Argentina’s era of massive European migration, as measured with limited accuracy by adherence to religious institutions, the Jewish Argentine population of Buenos Aires numbered 8,000 and worshipped at twenty-three different assemblies, four Sephardic and nineteen Ashkenazi.¹²

Demonstrating that identities are multiple and shifting, as in Toronto and many other cities in the Americas, Jewish immigrants to Buenos Aires often established community in neighborhoods defined by their place of origin, where institutional identity in synagogue, school, burial society and other memberships shaped the core and the boundaries of neighbourhood. There was overlap. Both Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe and judíos sirios (Jews from present day Syria, Lebanon, and sometimes other parts of the Middle East) settled in Once. The latter also settled in Barracas, a central neighbourhood several kilometres south of Plaza Lavalle. The Barracas neighborhood became a base from which the sirios established textile and other factories in the suburbs, and opened shops in the interior of the country to sell their wares. In 1913, the founding of the Agudat Dodim synagogue led to the formation of the largest neighbourhood of Jewish Argentines from Damascus in the Flores neighborhood, near the southwestern outskirts of the city. Many from this community began laboring as street peddlers, work often associated with male Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish immigrants in many cities of the Americas, and for which the local slang (lunfardo) term cambalachero applied, and could refer specifically to Jewish porteños (residents of Buenos Aires).¹³ Tracing the activity of peddlers demonstrates how Jewish Argentines, through this and other forms of work, broke neighborhood boundaries to move throughout the city. In many cases, peddlers eventually established bricks-and-mortar shops in most Buenos Aires neighborhoods. The same demographic insight is true for early twentieth-century crime data on Jewish victims of theft, assault and other offenses. By 1910, the range of neighborhoods inhabited by Jewish Argentine victims of crime demonstrates a Jewish presence in most working class areas of the city, and a further breaking of boundaries out of largely Jewish neighborhoods.¹⁴

Jewish involvement in the sex trade represents a window into neighbourhood migration and reconfiguration in the late nineteenth century. By 1895, there were twelve registered brothels with Ashkenazi Jewish women within a 0.5 km radius of the original Jewish settlement area, indicating the outward movement of Jewish porteños from the Plaza Lavalle settlement (though, to be sure, brothel clientele was not restricted by ethnicity). But in addition, there were fourteen similarly registered brothels concentrated around a city block one km to the west of Plaza Lavalle, on the edge of Once, before that neighborhood had become a ‘Jewish’ population center. Even so, this register of brothels is an early indicator of the beginnings of Once as a Jewish neighbourhood, with the sex trade – morally and entrepreneurially subversive by the standards of Jewish community institutions – located tenuously on the border of the new neighborhood. By contrast, in the working class La Boca neighbourhood, with no significant concentration of Jewish Argentines, fewer than ten percent of registered sex trade workers were Jewish.¹⁵ There’s something else that sex work in the late nineteenth century can tell us about neighbourhood formation in the late nineteenth century. The Buenos Aires Police compiled a list of 157 brothel operators with Ashkenazi names and places of origin in Central and Eastern Europe. Those data come in conjunction with evidence that many had been in Argentina since the 1860s and 1870s, indicating that the Plaza Lavalle Jewish neighbourhood had been settled for the most part by men.

At the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, Jewish immigrants from Greece settled a stone’s throw from the port along Reconquista and 25 de Mayo streets, subsequently moving 10 km northwest, past Once to the Colegiales neighborhood defined in part from the outset by community institutions that included synagogues and burial societies.¹⁶ Yet, despite the role of ethnicity, religion, and other Jewish identity markers in establishing the boundaries of what became Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish Argentines lived across the city in neighborhoods that combined a broad range of ethnicities and other identity markers. At the same time, Jewish neighborhoods were never exclusively Jewish. In this context, Jewish porteños defined and experienced Buenos Aires as part of larger communities of immigrants, children of immigrants, workers in dozens of occupations, anarchists, and in many other ways that influenced – through their interactions with others – their transformation into Jewish Argentines. Across the city, Jews experienced the disastrous 1871 Yellow Fever epidemic along with other porteños. They lived in iconic immigrant housing along with non-Jewish immigrants from across Europe and the Middle East – the infamous conventillos, working class housing structures, accommodated as many as 350 people, with families crowded into a room or two. And along with other immigrants, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish immigrants defined neighbourhood and the city in activities that emphasized their class identity. This included the 1907 renters’ strike that began outside the conventillos in the La Boca neighborhood when women and children took to the streets to demand lower rents. Like many similar protests, Jewish Argentines are hard to locate in historical records because their actions often came outside ‘Jewish’ neighborhoods and beyond the spatial and identity borders set by Jewish community institutions.¹⁷

White slavery

In Buenos Aires, New York, and other cities in the Americas, people have long tied Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to sex work, sex workers, the exploitation of women, the business of brothels, and a range of attendant immoralities and subversions. Buenos Aires became the most notorious hub of such accounts of transnational ‘white slavery,’ asserting that unscrupulous Jewish entrepreneurs brought unsuspecting Jewish women from Europe to work as forced sex laborers. Porteño elites like the jurist and diplomat Estanislao Zeballos and the political leader Leopoldo Lugones reflected frequently in the media and in other public fora on what they perceived as racialized threats to their construction of a Europeanized white republic. These included growing numbers of anarchist immigrants from Southern Europe, the heavily indigenous vast interior of the country, and the enormously popular, highly sexualized, working class tango genre of music and dance. For many, the most menacing of these threats were the networks of white slavery: French, Spanish or Jewish. These networks were considered an insidious assault on moralities and civilized urban life.¹⁸

The contours of the story are well documented; in Buenos Aires, as early as the 1870s, despite their still small numbers in the city, Jewish Argentines played a disproportionately large role in all aspects of sex trafficking and sex work.¹⁹ While there are several good hypotheses, there is still no compelling argument for why there is so strong a Jewish link to sex work, when at the same time, every ethnic group in Buenos Aires was involved in the sector. In Buenos Aires, in the late nineteenth century – as in the early twenty-first – and as in many other places, the sex trade thrived on exoticized desire; porteño men seem to have constructed Jewish women in that light. No area of Jewish Argentine history has been more scrutinized by scholars, the media, film, and literature. There are infamous testimonies that have been retold dozens of times, the most famous of which is that of Raquel Liberman, brought to Buenos Aires from Poland in 1918 to work in one of the many brothels on the infamous city block in Once described in the ‘Neighborhoods’ section of this article. By the early 1920s, the Zwi Migdal (which held/employed Liberman) had grown to a network of 190 ‘Jewish’ brothels in which some 2,500 Eastern European Jewish women labored. A diversified organized crime network, Zwi Migdal was named after one of the group’s founders, but cynically registered as a legal enterprise as the Varsovia Jewish Mutual Aid Society, a Jewish community burial society.²⁰

As early as the 1870s, Jewish porteños began condemning Zwi Migdal as anathema to Jewish community morality, and just as early, the group’s activities were cited in public anti-Semitic vitriol. In 1885, the Jewish Association for the Protection of Women and Girls was formed to counter white slavery, though at times Jewish community leaders were ambivalent considering Zwi Migdal contributions to the Yiddish theatre, synagogues, and other Jewish institutions. Perhaps because of anti-Semitism, the extent of Jewish involvement in sex trafficking was exaggerated to a point. Moreover, the historian Mir Yarfitz has argued that, without lessening the criminality or violence of the Buenos Aires sex trade, and while recognizing that the options available to Jewish women immigrants were grim, some sex trade workers ‘asserted their agency as they moved in and out of prostitution, traded lovers, and occasionally amassed wealth or purchased property.’²¹

Some Jewish Argentine opposition to white slavery reflected an assertion of both Argentine and Jewish moralities. That is, Jews emphasized their Argentine identities by joining non-Jews in the fight against the sex trade. Among Jewish porteños, the fight to exclude those linked to the sex trade – spatially, morally, and institutionally – sometimes played out in a range of community institutions beyond theatres and synagogues. The Sociedad Obrera Israelita (Jewish Workers Society) was a mutual aid society that explicitly excluded tmeyim, meaning ‘the unclean’ and encompassing both brothel operators and sex trade workes. The Chevrah Keduscha Ashkenazi burial society excluded Varsovia Society members and their relatives from community cemeteries, synagogues, and clinics. Before 1892, the city restricted Jewish burials to the Dissidents’ Cemetery. Shortly after, once Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews established burial grounds, Zwi Migdal bought space in a new Moroccan Jewish cemetery, in the municipality of Avellaneda just to the south of Buenos Aires. Here as elsewhere, efforts by some Jewish porteños to isolate the Varsovia Society failed in the long run as the syndicate found ways to establish an institutional and cultural presence in Buenos Aires. A reckoning of sorts came in the 1930 trial of dozens of Zwi Migdal members who were sentenced to significant prison terms. Most were released the following year on appeal, and after that, the link of Jewish identity to prostitution waned quickly.²²

A mosaic of identities

On 6 January 19096 January 1909, a group of young Jews established the Centro Juventud Israelita Argentina (Jewish Argentine Youth Center) in Buenos Aires. They were sons of colonists from the agricultural settlements who had migrated to the nation’s capital. Interested in a space to socialize but with no clear idea of what they would do there, they wondered, should these be Jewish or universal in character? The group tended to the latter. Manuel Bronstein, who struggled to inject Jewish content into the new center, lamented of porteño Jewish youth,

They very soon found themselves freely immersed in the national life of the country … that is to say that when they were acquiring a conscientiousness of their personality, they felt Argentine before Jewish. They lived their argentinidad existentially, while their Judaism was a tenuous palpitation about something they knew only vaguely, but which was not felt sufficiently to generate the need to proclaim it and build a will to live it.²³

By the early twentieth century, in building the largest Jewish community in Latin America, Jews in Buenos Aires already had a wide variety of social and cultural institutions that reflected the constant negotiations to elaborate new hybrid identities. Some tried to transform Buenos Aires into a center of a global Yiddishland. Others were fascinated by the new Zionist ideology and the revival of the Hebrew language. At the same time, a new generation of Jews, born or fully educated in Argentina, opted for Spanish as a means not just to assure their integration into society, but to create a Jewish Argentine culture. Some rose to prominence in the lettered elite and the doors of the most important Argentine dailies were open to them. During the first decades of the twentieth century, both leading newspapers La Nación and La Prensa had Jewish columnists. La Nación had Alberto Gerchunoff and the art critic Gregorio Fingerman, and La Prensa employed Enrique Lippschutz.

Many of the immigrants from Eastern Europe were bearers of both traditional and modern Yiddish culture. Soon they started transforming Buenos Aires into an important hub for Yiddish literature, theater and press. Following World War I, and to large extent due to the restrictions imposed on Jewish immigration to the United States, Buenos Aires became a thriving Yiddish cultural center.²⁴ Buenos Aires boasted a lively Yiddish cultural scene. The Yiddish press started in 1898 with the weekly Viderkol (Echo) and Di Folks Shtime (People’s Voice) and by 1918 Buenos Aires had two Yiddish dailies, Di Yiddishe Zeitung and Di Presse.²⁵ Yiddish theaters entertained Jewish immigrants in their mother tongue. In 1901 Abraham Goldfaden’s comedy Kuni Lemel was already staged in Buenos Aires. In the following years, Yiddish theater flourished in Buenos Aires with local talents and actors who came from Europe and the United States.²⁶ A Spanish-Yiddish dictionary was first published in 1911, more than a hundred Yiddish books were published in Buenos Aires before 1930.²⁷ The first history of Jewish presence in Argentina appeared in 1914 (David Goldman, Di Juden in Argentine). By 1916 the largest Jewish cultural centers and libraries were the Biblioteca Progreso, the Society Dr Herzl, Juventud Israelita of the La Boca y Barracas neighborhoods, the Center I.L. Pereyz of Caballito, and the Biblioteca Israelita of Villa Crespo.

At the same time a growing number of immigrants and their descendants gave priority to the Argentine component of their identity, attracted to the promise of participation on an equal footing in their new home. Most Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were not religiously pious. Rabbinic authority and religious observance lost much of their influence. Many of the immigrants organized around secular residents associations (landsmanschaften).

Zionist activity was also on the margins in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, between 1897 (when the first Zionist Congress was convened in Basel) and 1917 (when the Balfour declaration was published) the Zionist movement in Argentina was limited to a small number of people. Although lacking a popular base, the Zionist movement was split among many small groups based on different ideologies and loyalties to different leaders, especially before the establishment of the Federación Sionista Argentina (Argentine Zionist Federation) in 1913.²⁸ By the 1940s, the Zionist ideology became more attractive to Jewish Argentines. Supporting Zionism gradually became a way of becoming Argentines. As Spanish immigrants identified Spain as their mother country, and Italian immigrants had Italy, Jewish immigrants focused on Palestine/Eretz Israel as their imagined country of origin.

This kind of Zionism was common among Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike, at least until World War II and the establishment of the state of Israel. Thus, Israel, a periodical founded by Moroccan Jews in Buenos Aires in 1917, offered a very specific identity construct. While waving the Zionist banner during its six decades of existence, the newspaper did not call upon its readers to emigrate. Rather, it went so far as to suggest that Argentina was preferable to Palestine. Jews had made Argentina their home and wanted Argentines to recognize them as members of their adopted nation. Zionism was therefore not necessarily and exclusively about Palestine, but often about creating identities in the Diaspora. For the editors and writers of Israel, Zionism was about their lives in Argentina. Their apolitical Zionism was used to create a new Jewish identity, based as much on a common mythic past as on the hope of a shared future in Argentina.

Reviewing the polyphony of voices and organizations among Jews in Buenos Aires in the long nineteenth century, scholars should not impose on their subject rigid categories of either ‘Argentine Jews’ or ‘Jewish Argentines’ by giving preference to ethnic diasporic identity or to the national identity as Argentine. The lesson Jewish Buenos Aires teaches us is that we should use the concept of ‘identity field’ in which individuals can place themselves at different ‘identity points’ according to the changing circumstances of time and location.²⁹ Buenos Aires Jews constantly negotiated their multiple identity components as Jews, Argentines, Zionists, Ashenazi or Sephardic, with all these components (and others) being complementary to one other.

The Sephardic minority within a minority

The historiography of Jewish Argentina has focused on the experiences of Ashkenazim who accounted for the vast majority of Jews in this country. Most Sephardic Jews arrived in Argentina between 1890 and 1930, with Arab speakers being the largest group, mostly originated in the cities of Aleppo and Damascus, followed by Ladino-speakers from Turkey and other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The pioneers among Sephardim were Moroccan Jews coming from cities that were under Spanish rule until the mid-twentieth century, such as Tetuán, Tangier and Larache. Although Brazil and Venezuela proved to be more attractive for Moroccan Jews, some of them relocated to Argentina as early as 1859, following the Spanish-Moroccan war.³⁰

Sephardim have never accounted for more than 10 per cent of the total Jewish population in Argentina.³¹ Even so, Moroccan Jews had a huge advantage in becoming Argentine. By stressing their ties to a Spanish past, and by extension to shared experiences with other Argentine groups, their integration into the host society was more fluid. Absent the language barrier faced by Yiddish or German speaking Jews, they could more rapidly construct their identities as Jewish-Argentines. As the historian Adriana M. Brodsky stated, in regard to Sephardim and Moroccan Jews in particular, they were ‘Jews who were not Jews in the eyes of Argentines.’³²

The Argentine census of 1895 indicated that there were 110 Moroccan Jews in the country and the 1914 census reported 927.³³ Some found their way into the interior of the country, a few – male and female alike – teaching Spanish to Ashkenazi settlers in the agricultural colonies. As in the case of other immigrant groups, it was mostly through interpersonal and communal networks that Moroccan Jews decided where to settle. Most opted for the Sud neighborhood in Buenos Aires (later renamed Constitución). They preferred to live near the port and the commercial center of the city where they established most of their community institutions. The decline of the Ottoman Empire, with its attendant economic collapse, encouraged many Jews to look for a better future in the Americas. The 1908 Young Turks revolution provoked fears of conscription, and the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 also encouraged Jews to leave the Old World behind. World War I and the rise of Arab nationalism also pushed Sephardic Jews to emigrate. The mosaic of Sephardic groups in Argentina thus became even more heterogeneous.³⁴

Jews from Aleppo opted for Once, Flores and Ciudadela. Ladino speakers from Salonika, Rhodes, Turkey and the Balkans found their way mostly to Villa Crespo, Once, Colegiales, Flores, and Villa Uriquiza.³⁵ By the end of the nineteenth century, Moroccan Jews were numerous enough and sufficiently well established to organize their own communal institutions in the federal capital. In 1895, they established the Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires. The name Latina allowed them to emphasize their supposedly exclusive primordial cultural link with the Hispanic world, alongside Spanish and Italian immigrants in the city. While in 1914 Jews accounted for 1.5 per cent of non-native porteños, Italians represented twenty per cent of this group and Spaniards 19.5 per cent. In 1919 the Congregación built its synagogue, the first Sephardic temple in the city. Gradually Moroccan Jews, and other Sephardic groups as well, started a variety of philanthropic societies.³⁶ That Sephardic Jews maintained a separate burial ground likely had to do in part with dismissive Ashkenazi attitudes mocking Sephardic religious practices.³⁷ In 1897 they also started their own Hevra Kedusha, Gueolat Hasadim, which had members from the provinces of the interior as well. Sephardi women began to be involved in community institutions, mostly in philanthropic work. In 1899, the Sociedad de Damas de Sión (Society of Zionist Women) appears in the Moroccan community minute books. In the following years women of other Sephardic groups also became actively involved in community organizations.

Turning left: anarchism and socialism

Buenos Aires Jews crossed the borders of neighborhood and identity as peddlers, crime victims, and in other ways that contributed to their identity formation as Argentines and as porteños. No journey across those borders was more significant than their first entry into national politics as anarchists and socialists in ways that not only shaped what it meant to be a Jewish Argentine, but in how it changed Jewish communities and altered political life in Argentina. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants reached Buenos Aires, strong working-class political movements emerged as they had a generation earlier in London, and at roughly the same time in New York. Working-class Jewish porteños joined anarchist and socialist groups by the thousands. For many, Jewish identity was bound up in the secular, working-class politics of Yiddish literature, theatre, and social circles. Argentines associated Jewish immigrants with left-wing politics in part because of an enormous adherence of Jewish Argentines to the left (as a function of their numbers) but also as part of growing anti-Semitism in Buenos Aires after 1890, and an exaggerated link between Jews and subversive ‘anti-Argentine’ politics.³⁸

Between 1892 and 1914, more than 2,000,000 immigrants entered Argentina. Foreign-born residents represented almost three quarters of the population over twenty years old by the First World War. Spanish and Italian immigrants made up the majority of new anarchist groups in Argentina, spearheading a general strike in 1902 over which the government declared a state of siege. In 1909, more than 200,000 workers went on strike over the violent police suppression of a May Day anarchist protest. Eight workers died in brutal conflicts with the police. In one of the most significant political assassinations in Argentine history – on par with the 1920 killing of Frederick A. Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli in South Braintree, Massachusetts – on 14 November 190914 November 1909, the Jewish anarchist Simon Radowitzky killed Buenos Aires police chief Ramón Falcón.³⁹

Jewish Argentines joined socialist groups and later on also the Communist Party (which had its Jewish section from 1920 onward) as part of a larger workers’ movement for improved wages and better working conditions. But in addition, some saw socialism as an antidote to growing anti-Semitism in Buenos Aires. In 1909, the nationalist writer Ricardo Rojas published La restauración nacionalista, a widely read treatise in which he echoed the discriminatory sentiment of many anti-Semites when he identified Jews as insidious intruders incapable of becoming Argentine. Rojas also represented the sort of anti-Semitism common in Buenos Aires and elsewhere where Jews were depicted as both rapacious capitalists and left-wing revolutionaries.⁴⁰

As was the case throughout the Americas, Jews often brought left-wing militancy from their places of origin in Europe. With a handful of key exceptions, there were few Jewish Argentines in left-wing political movements until the early years of the twentieth century, a function of the acculturation of working-class immigrants to their new polity and the relatively small number of Jewish immigrants to Argentina before 1900. The historian José C. Moya has found evidence that there may have been a link between the sex trade and anarchism, where a small number of sex traffickers and brothel owners may have been attracted to anarchism as a movement that challenged social norms (including those linking sex and morality). In addition, Buenos Aires anarchists mobilized in response to the Dreyfus Affair and in 1905, Julio Herschenbaum became the first Jewish anarchist deported from Argentina for subversive activity. In March 1906, police arrested twenty-two Jewish anarchists. All were immigrants aged sixteen to thirty-four. While most non-Jewish anarchists lived in the Barracas and La Boca working-class neighborhoods, twenty of those arrested in March 1906 lived in the Once and Plaza Lavalle areas of the city, confirming a linkage between Jewish political activity and neighborhood. There were Yiddish-language anarchist publications, many short-lived, that appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century and a Jewish library, the Biblioteca Rusa, had support from socialists, Bundists, syndicalists and anarchists.⁴¹

The first Jewish politician to establish a well-known national presence in Argentina was Enrique Dickman, who arrived as an immigrant in 1890 and became a citizen seven years later. In 1895, Dickman joined the Centro Socialista Obrero (the Worker’s Socialist Center). That same year, he was arrested for subversive activities and on May Day 1896, gave a rousing speech to thousands in favour of workers’ rights. Many remembered him for May Day speech he gave a decade later at the head of a Socialist Party march in which he called indirectly but clearly for an end to the influence of the Catholic Church in society. ‘Just as Christian peoples celebrate Easter,’ he told the crowd, ‘we celebrate the First of May … . While some have been searching for “the kingdom of heaven,” socialists have been searching for “the kingdom of earth.”’⁴² A firebrand writer for, then director of the socialist La Vanguardia newspaper, Dickman was first elected to the national Congress in 1914 and an active Socialist leader through his death in 1955.⁴³

While as a Jewish Argentine and a socialist Dickman was in many regards an outsider, his personal trajectory marked both the transformation of socialism into a mainstream political movement after 1910, but also his own journey in becoming a porteño Argentine. The historian Mollie Lewis writes that as a fourteen-year-old immigrant in 1890, Dickman quickly faced two stages of choices that many Jewish immigrants encountered. Like that of Alberto Gerchunoff, Dickman’s family went first to a rural JCA colony in the province of Entre Rios. Becoming Argentine meant acculturating to non-Jewish Argentine criollo (creole or local) customs. These included developing a taste for the grilled meat and polenta that his Italian brick mason employer served him. But perhaps more important, and anticipating Gerchunoff, Dickman consciously reported on his becoming Argentine with his purchase of a first set of gaucho (Argentine cowboy) clothing that include bombacha pants and a kerchief.⁴⁴

But this was a rural identity. For the many late nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants who moved first to a rural colony, then to Buenos Aires, a second identity transformation became crucial. Once in Buenos Aires and rising in the Socialist Party, it would have been unthinkable for Dickman to wander about in gaucho attire. As they did for generations of Jewish and non-Jewish migrants from the countryside to the city, Dickman’s rural clothing disappeared in favour of more formal, Western attire. Even so, for Dickman and for other Jewish Argentines – particularly for those who had come from the colonies, but for others as well who understood the manner in which urban Argentines celebrated argentinidad through a culturally constructed rural past – identity construction meant melding the rural and the urban. This was especially true for Dickman’s nemeses in the world of business and commerce where evoking a nostalgic rural past was a key way to advertise. One such symbol of the rural past for Argentines is the ombu tree. The Yiddish poet Moishe Dovid Guiser wrote a poem about the tree in Yiddish, ‘Der Ombu’ while the entrepreneur Max Glücksmann used the image of a gaucho and his horse under an ombu as a symbol in his advertisements for phonograph records.⁴⁵

Conclusion: language and borders

Not long ago, in casual conversation, a non-Jewish Argentine friend used the word ‘tuque.’ She was referring to a second person’s ‘behind.’ It didn’t take long to establish first, that she had no idea where the word originated, and second, that it came from the Yiddish, tuches.⁴⁶ Just as in late nineteenth-century Brooklyn, New York, non-Jewish immigrant children learned Yiddish words they picked up on the streets, so too in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, Yiddish words found their way into the language of Buenos Aires working-class neighborhoods, where they stayed (along with words from a host of other languages that included Italian dialects). The transformation of language was not unidirectional. Spanish words and lunfardo – the argot of the Buenos Aires streets equivalent in some regards to the cockney dialect a century ago – crept into the songs of Jevel Katz, for example, a giant of the Buenos Aires Yiddish musical theater.⁴⁷ In ‘Rabeynu Tam,’ one of the pieces he sang, Katz altered the lyrics by Itzik Manger for a Buenos Aires audience. He used the word kunyele, for example, from the Spanish word cuña, which can mean a ‘wedge.’ In lunfardo, though, the word means a ‘fixer’ or a ‘power broker’ and Katz moved the term to Jewish Buenos Aires by adding the Yiddish suffix ‘-le,’ altering the meaning to ‘disreputable fixer.’⁴⁸

Just as Yiddish became intertwined with Buenos Aires Spanish, the story of late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century Jewish Buenos Aires is one of a range of other sorts of borders established, and all at once broken down in a manner that shaped Jewish Buenos Aires as Argentine and as porteño (of the ‘port’ or from Buenos Aires). Here again, there’s an important parallel with New York, Montreal, and other cities in the Americas with significant Jewish populations. Jewish culture, society, and politics in the city were shaped by dominant, majoritarian cultures and by other immigrant cultures. But the Jewish immigrant generation and their descendants shaped in almost equal measure mainstream Buenos Aires society.

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Notes on contributors

Raanan Rein

Raanan Rein is the Elías Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History at Tel Aviv University. Rein is a member of Argentina’s National Academy of History, His most recent book is Jewish Self Defense in South America: Facing Anti-Semitism with a Club in Hand (New York: Routledge, 2022).

David M. K. Sheinin

David M. K. Sheinin is Professor of History at Trent University. His most recent book, co-edited with Benjamin Bryce, is Recasting the Nation in Twentieth Century Argentina (New York: Routledge, 2023). Sheinin is a member of the National Academy of History of Argentina.

Notes

1. On Alberdi’s views see his Bases y puntos de partida para la organización de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1979.

2. For a general overview of immigration to Argentina, see Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism, Argentina and Chile, 1890–1914 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970).

3. Alberto Gerchunoff, Los Gauchos judíos (La Plata: Talleres Gráficos Joaquín Sesé, 1910). For an English translation, see Edna Aizenberg, Patricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Albeto Gerchuniff’s Los gauchos judios (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2000).

4. Ricardo Feierstein, ed., Los mejores relatos con gauchos judíos (Buenos Aires: Ameghino Editora, 1998).

5. Ricardo Feierstein, ed., Alberto Gerchunoff: judío y argentino (Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá, 2000). These agricultural settlements have received much scholarly attention. The most comprehensive account is still Haim Avni, Argentina, ‘The Promised Land’: Baron de Hirsch’s Colonization Project in the Argentine Republic [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1973). For a recent contribution, see Iván Cherjovsky, Recuerdos de Moisés Ville: la colonización agrícola en la memoria colectiva judeo-argentina (1910–2010) (Buenos Aires: Deauno, 2017).

6. For a splendid biography of Gerchunoff, see Mónica Szurmuck, La vocación desmesurada: una biografía de Alberto Gerchunoff (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2018). For his autobiography, see Alberto Gerchunoff, Entre Ríos, mi país (Buenos Aires: Futuro, 1950).

7. Mariusz Kalczewiak, Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019).

8. Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein, eds., The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone (Boston: Brill, 2013); Haim Avni, Argentina and the Jews: A History of Jewish Immigration (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002); Robert Weisbrot, The Jews of Argentina: From Inquisition to Perón (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979).

9. Avni, Argentina ‘The Promised Land,’ chapter 3; Judith Noemi Freidenberg, The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Daniel Fernando Bargman, “Un ámbito para las relaciones interétnicas: Las colonias agrícolas judías en Argentina,” Revista de Antropología 11 (1992): 50–58; Lea Literat-Golombek, Moisés Ville: Crónica de un shtetl argentino (Jerusalem: La Semana Publicaciones,1982).

10. Ira Rosenswaike, “The Jewish Population of Argentina: Census and Estimate, 1887–1947,” Jewish Social Studie 22, no. 4 (1960): 205.

11. Sandra McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine-Jewish Women, 1880–1955 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10–11.

12. Victor A. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890–1930 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 76–101.

13. ‘Rescatan rol de la inmigración de los judíos sirios en Argentina,’ EFE News Service (Madrid), August 16, 2015. https://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1704241224?accountid=14667

14. Mollie Lewish Nouwen, Oy, my Buenos Aires: Jewish Immigrants and the Creation of Argentine National Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), chapter 5.

15. Mir Yarfitz, Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 107.

16. Andreas Guidi, “Patterns of Jewish mobility between Rhodes and Buenos Aires (1905–1948),” Südosteuropäische Hefte 2 (2015): 13–24.

17. Diego Armus and Jorge Enrique Hardoy, “Conventillos, ranchos y casa propia en el mundo urbano del novecientos,” in Mundo urbano y cultura popular, ed. Diego Armus(Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1990), 153–93; Inés Yujnovsky, “Vida cotidiana y participación política: ‘La marcha de las escobas’ en la huelga de inquilinos, Buenos Aires, 1907,” Feminismo/s 3 (June 2004): 117–34; James Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press), 114–23.

18. Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (New York: Routledge, 1995), 137–68; Pablo Gorelero, Historia del teatro musical en Buenos Aires, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Emergentes, 2013), 45–48; Eugenia Scarzanella, Ni gringos ni indios: Inmigración, criminalidad y racism en la Argentina, 1880–1940 (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2015), 41–50.

19. ‘Guerra a la esclavitud blanca,’ El Puente de los suspiros, 1.8 (April 26, 1878), in Señoritas de salon, vol. 1, ed. Nicolás Aguirre Pizzaro, second edition (Buenos Aires: Malas Palabras Buks, 2013), 13.

20. Juan Pablo Casas, Telos: Un mapa de la sexualidad porteña (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2014), 27; Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 120–32.

21. Yarfitz, Impure Migration, 139. The historian Donna J. Guy is less convinced of the assertion-of-agency hypothesis. See Donna J. Guy, ‘Prostitución y suicidio en Buenos Aires, 1880–1900,’ in Moralidades y comportamientos sexuales: Argentina, 1880–2011, ed. Dora Barrancos, Donna Guy and Adriana Valobra (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2014), 115–29.

22. Yarfitz, Impure Migration, 110–15.

23. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 175.

24. Malena Chinsky and Alan Astro, ed., Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America (Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2018).

25. On the history of Jewish-Argentine press, see Liliana Ruth Feierstein, ‘The New Midrash: Jewish Press in Argentina,’ in The PRESSA, International Press Exhibition in Cologne 1928, and the Jewish Contribution to Modern Journalism, ed. Susanne Marten-Finnis and Michael Nagel (Bremen: Lumière, 2011).

26. On Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires, see Susana Skura and Silvia Glocer, eds. Teatro ídish argentino (1930–1950) (Buenos Aires: Editorial FFyL, UBA, 2016).

27. Alejandro Dujovne, ”La diáspora en imprenta. Actores, tramas y espacios del libro judío en Buenos Aires, 1910–1960,” Revista del Museo de Antropología 6, no. 1 (2013): 119–32.

28. Silvia Schenkolewski-Kroll, The Zionist Movement and the Zionist Parties in Argentina, 1935–1948 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996).

29. Raanan Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora (Boston: Brill, 2010).

30. Victor Mirelman, ‘Sephardic Immigration to Argentina Prior to the Nazi Period,’ in The Jewish Presence in Latin America, ed. Gilbert W. Merkx and Judith Laikin Elkin (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Aviad Moreno, “Moroccan Jewish Emigration to Latin America: The State of Research and New Directions,” Hespéris-Tamuda LI 2 (2016): 123–40.

31. Adriana M. Brodsky, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press Indiana University Press), 16.

32. Brodsky, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine, 3.

33. Juan Vilar, “La emigración judeo-marroquí a la America Latina en la fase preestadística (1885–1880),” Sefardica 11 (1996): 11–54.

34. Margalit Bejarano, ‘The Sephardic Communities of Latin America: A Puzzle of Sub-Ethnic Fragments’, in Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach ed. Margalit Bejarano and Edna Aizenberg (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012).

35. Eugene Sofer, From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires (New York: Holms & Meier, 1982).

36. Diana Lia Epstein, ‘Instituciones y liderazgo comunitario de los judíos de origen marroquí en Buenos Aires,’ in Árabes y judíos en Iberoamérica, ed. Raanan Rein (Seville: Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo, 2008), 135–58.

37. Brodsky, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine, 29.

38. Joanna Meadvin, “At Heym in the Hoyf: Mimi Pinzon’s Argentine Yiddish World,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 36, nos. 1–2 (2016): 167–89.

39. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 46–75. A peak of anti-Semitic violence took place in the so-called 1919 Tragic Week, when right-wing nationalists attacked ‘Bolsheviks’ (that is both workers and Jews), killing more than a few. On this pogrom, see Marcelo Dimentstein, “En busca de un pogrom perdido: diáspora judía, política y políticas de la memoria en torno a la Semana Trágica de 1919,” Sociohistoria, No 25 (2009): 103–22.

40. José C. Moya, “The positive side of stereotypes: Jewish anarchists in early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires,” Jewish History 18 (2004): 19–48.

41. Moya, ‘Jewish Anarchists,’ 28.

42. ‘El 1 de Mayo. Fiesta del Trabajo,’ La Vanguardia, 53, May 3, 1906, 1.

43. Francisco Reyes, ‘Religiones de la política en la Argentina finisecular. La sacralización de la identidad en el radicalismo y el socialismo (1890–1912),’ Temas y debates 36 (2018): 85–111.

44. Nouwen, Oy, my Buenos Aires, 30.

45. Nouwen, Oy my Buenos Aires, 30–36.

46. The Argentine Ministry of Culture spells the word ‘tuje’ in Spanish, identifies its Yiddish origins, and ascribes it the meaning ‘good luck’ in addition to a ‘human behind.’ See Ministerio de Cultura, Argentina, ‘Lunfardo: conocé de dónde vienen muchas de las palabras que usamos a diario.’ https://www.cultura.gob.ar/en-el-dia-del-lunfardo-conoce-de-donde-vienen-muchas-de-las-palabras-que-usamos-a-diario_4604/

47. Zachary Baker, “’More Argentine than Martín Fierro’: Jevel Katz’s Debut in Buenos Aires, 1930 Digital Yiddish Theater Project, February 20, 2019. https://web.uwm.edu/yiddish-stage/jevel_katz

48. Patricia G. Nuriel, “Jevel Katz: Representing Yiddish Buenos Aires,” Latin American Jewish Studies Association Publication, February 2020. http://www.lajsa.org/wp-content/uploads/Jevel-Katz-Nuriel.pdf