FROM GRINGOS TO CRIOLLOS

The City and the Jews

They came from Poland, from Warsaw, from Serbia, from Croatia, carrying the vision of the "pogroms" in eyes hardened with anguish. They came packed tightly, worse than beasts in the ocean liners, speaking their sad jargon, tyrannized over by all the "goys," stomped on by Fate, leaving behind in the land of Sobieski or Ivan the Terrible family members they would never see again. They came to this city as to liberty. They knew that out there in Argentina there were no "pogroms." Many came with their parents, with their pale wives, and children terrified by the indelible memory of slaughter or pillaging. And after them came others, and then others, and then others. Their relatives came, brothers, mothers. And they settled in Corrientes Street, in Lavalle, in Talcahuano, in Cerrito, in Libertad. Those who knew the trade of tailor or furrier or buying and selling.

Buenos Aires was a colonial city of limited importance up to the end of the eighteenth century. In 1776, as part of the Bourbon reforms, the Spanish crown founded the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, and Buenos Aires became the seat of the viceroy. 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 or early twentieth 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 a meager 180,000 inhabitants in 1870 to a total of 1,300,000. Buenos Aires became a city of European immigrants, especially Italians and Spaniards. Its architecture and urban planning, its cafes and cultural institutions earned it the nickname of "the Paris of South America."

During the second half of the nineteenth century the Argentine elites and the national authorities adopted a strategic policy, inspired by positivist ideals, to encourage immigration from Europe. The main motivation for this policy was a desire to increase the relatively small population and to "improve" (a euphemism for "whiten") the local demographic makeup by attracting immigrants, preferably from northern Europe, who would import European civilization at the expense of the "barbarous" indigenous population. In this way the immigrants of "capable races" could promote the development and modernization of the Republic. "Gobernar es poblar" ("to govern is to populate") was a maxim coined in 1853 by Juan Bautista Alberdi, a prominent liberal intellectual and politician.

This maxim was translated into action, and in barely three years, from 1888 to 1890, Argentine agents in Europe distributed more than 133,000 free ship tickets to Buenos Aires. It should be remembered that when Argentina began the process of freeing itself from the yoke of Spanish colonialism in 1810, the country measured some 2,780,000 square kilometers in area—the equivalent of almost the entire European continent—yet it had fewer than half a million inhabitants, which, at the time, was about a quarter of the population of the small and mountainous Swiss Confederation, or a fifth of the population of London. Argentina was destined to play an important role in the nineteenth-century world economy as a supplier of various foodstuffs, but to do so it needed tens of thousands of laborers. The demographic revolution occurring in Europe at the time fostered mass emigration to the New World, especially to the United States and the River Plate region—namely, eastern Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. Between 1880 and 1950, Argentina received more immigrants, in both absolute numbers and relative to the country's population, than any other Latin American country.

The hope of making the country an attractive destination for Protestant emigrants from the more industrialized European northeast, a population that could contribute to Argentina's development and modernization, was soon dashed. Most of the new immigrants were in fact 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. A minority (including Moslems and Jews) did not profess any Christian faith at all, and many of these new immigrants did not settle even temporarily in the inland colonies, either because they did not want to or because they could not obtain land there; instead, they headed for the large urban centers, especially Buenos Aires. This city quickly became a metropolis in which, up until the 1920s, at least half the inhabitants had been born elsewhere. (See Figure 1.1.) Under these circumstances, xenophobic and nationalistic manifestations intensified, as did efforts to assimilate the new immigrants in the Argentine melting pot, mostly through the state education system. Sports also offered immigrants a way of winning acceptance—providing, for Jews, the added bonus of challenging anti-Semitic charges of cowardice and unmanliness.

The Jewish community in Argentina, the largest in Latin America, is basically a product of that same huge wave of transatlantic immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, and, to a smaller degree, the Middle East and the Balkans, to the Americas. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Jews of Eastern Europe (Ashkenazis) became the third-largest immigrant group, and the largest of the non-Catholic minorities. At its peak, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Jewish population numbered some 310,000 out of a total population of 20 million (see Table 1.1). In the mid-twentieth century Argentina boasted the fifth largest Jewish population in the world. Its prominence, however, easily exceeded its numbers, in large part because most Jews lived in Buenos Aires, many of them concentrated in specific neighborhoods such as Once and Villa Crespo. To this can be added the fact that many first-generation immigrants never completely mastered the Spanish language and retained an accent that was strange to many—almost as strange as the clothing of Orthodox Jews, with their hats, suits, and distinctive sidelocks. At the same time, the accumulation of Jewish stereotypes, whether religious or racist, gave Ashkenazi Jews a visibility far greater than their demographic representation would suggest. These Jews, striving for acceptance and belonging, embraced football, among other things local, as a way to shed their Old World traits and become Argentines.

La Pampa ... Promises

As with any other immigrant group, the factors that caused people to abandon their homes or that attracted them to other places must be analyzed in conjunction with the patterns of emigration that this particular group adopted. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews of...