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 Eastern Europe, in particular those who lived within the Pale of Settlement—an area that encompassed part of what is today Poland and Russia and was largely populated by Jews—felt an increasing urgency to seek a better future outside Europe, impelled by a combination of physical harassment, social pressure, and economic hardship.

The year 1905 marked a milestone in Jewish immigration. The Russian empire had lost its war against Japan and thwarted a revolution. Reactionary groups, in collaboration with police forces loyal to the czar, embarked on a series of pogroms in more than six hundred cities and towns in the Pale of Settlement. The socioeconomic breakdown, the fear of violence, and the sense of insecurity prompted mass emigration. At more or less the same time, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the Ottoman Empire was also undergoing a crisis, giving rise to the persecution of religious minorities, growing Arab nationalism, and forced military service. Economic changes made life difficult for a growing number of craftsmen and small-business owners. Thus, Syrio-Lebanese immigration—Christian, Jewish, and Moslem alike—arose out of a combination of political, economic, religious, and cultural factors.

The Americas, both North and South, seemed to promise prosperity and a better future for both Jews and Arabs. Argentina became home for hundreds of thousands of them, most arriving between the late 1870s and the 1930s; their numbers tapered off when the government began to impose the first significant barriers to immigration, largely in response to the Great Depression.

While a few Eastern European Jews sought refuge in Palestine, their real or imagined homeland, others looked for ways to cross the Atlantic and build lives in the New World. Jewish organizations considered various proposals for settling these Eastern European Jews in new countries. One such proposal focused on a practically unknown land in South America. Theodor Herzl himself, in his Judenstaat (1896), described the choice facing the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe as one between "Palestine or the Argentine." Of those who took the second option, most settled in the capital, although a significant minority did become farmers, giving rise to the myth of the Jewish gauchos (a common name for Jewish immigrants who settled in areas of inland Argentina). Those immigrants were masterfully portrayed by Alberto Gerchunoff in his 1910 work Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, the publication of which marked the centenary of the May Revolution that had set the country on its way to independence from Spain. In later works by many Jewish-Argentine writers, the emblematic figure of the Jewish gaucho is a recurrent theme, meant to emphasize the Argentine Jew's authenticity, solid roots, and attachment to Argentine soil. The agricultural settlements established in Argentina (and later in Brazil) by the Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch seemed to offer a partial solution to the Jewish national question at the time.

Determined to cut their ties with the former colonial power, Spain, members of the Argentine governing elite looked toward republican France as a secular, progressive model to emulate. This cultural and political orientation, together with the country's growing economic and commercial relations with Great Britain, contributed to the institution of a liberal constitution in 1853 (which guaranteed freedom of worship and reflected the welcoming attitude toward immigrants), the adoption of an equally liberal immigration law in 1876 (which did not discriminate against non-Catholic immigrants), and the enactment of state-education and civil-registration laws in 1884 (thus limiting the power and influence of the Catholic Church).

Rumors about the opportunities offered by immigration to Argentina, where anyone could live freely and prosper, spread among urban and rural Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. The myth of "making good in America" spread rapidly across the ocean through family and ethnic channels, as relatives, friends, and former neighbors exchanged letters containing information about opportunities and cautionary advice. 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 and Jewish schools 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.

Many Jewish immigrants rose to prominent positions in Argentine social, economic, artistic, and political spheres. This does not mean that Jews, or any other ethnic immigrant group for that matter, were welcomed at all times and by everybody. Like Arabs and other ethnic groups, Jews benefited from Argentine open-door policies but also suffered, from the late nineteenth century onward, from the Argentine elites' disappointment over the outcome of the immigration project that had been intended to "Europeanize" or "whiten" their country. Jews and Arabs both encountered general anti- immigrant sentiment as a result. As nationalism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia grew, especially in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, Semitic immigrants, whether Christian Arabs, Eastern European Jews, Moslem Arabs, or Jewish Arabs—basically all immigrants who were not "white" or Catholic—were targeted as undesirable. Positivist Argentine discourses often looked at the non-northern European immigrant as racially inferior, diseased, and contaminating.

An article that appeared in the Buenos Aires Herald in 1898 reflected this attitude: "Are we becoming a Semitic republic? The immigration of Russian Jews is now the third largest in the list, while Syrian Arabs (Turks) and Arabians are also flocking to these shores." Similar articles were published by some Spanish-language newspapers. Thus La Nación asserted in 1910 that the deplorable trafficking in cheap trinkets by Syrio-Lebanese peddlers was a dishonor to the nation, and it called for the restriction of Levantine immigration. Race, and not just economic concerns, could be used as an argument against Arab and Jewish immigration. As one provincial politician who favored the exclusion of Jews from Argentina claimed, "These people ... can shatter the homogeneity of our race."

Among the liberal elites, even the staunchest supporters of immigration embraced the concept of the melting pot. All newcomers, especially non-Catholics, were expected to abandon the customs and idiosyncrasies they had brought with them from their countries of origin in favor of the new culture that was emerging in the immigrant society of Argentina. This attitude and the pressure toward cultural homogeneity and assimilation were particularly pronounced in nationalist and xenophobic circles. Albeit a minority, these elements have always existed in Argentine society, and in certain periods they have managed to exert influence in political, military, and clerical circles, as well as on the contemporary intellectual climate. This phenomenon was a constant source of unease among Jewish Argentines, who, because of their European origins and family ties with the Old World, could not but view the evidence of growing hostility toward Jews in Argentina from a European perspective.

Debate continues as to the number of Jews living in Argentina both during the twentieth century and today. Part of the problem lies in the tendency of most studies to focus on those Jews affiliated with formal community institutions, even though research indicates that most Jews—in common with members of other ethnic communities—never join such institutions. Furthermore, in national population censuses many respondents have preferred not to define themselves as Jews, either because they feared identifying themselves ethnically in government databases, especially in times of authoritarian rule, or because the option of a hyphenated identity was not included and they did not wish to give Jewishness priority over their Argentine identity. Moreover, the use by many scholars of religious rather than cultural criteria to define Jews has created additional barriers to data collection in a community known until recently for its highly secular character.

According to the studies of demographer Sergio DellaPergola, the number of Jews in Argentina grew from 14,700 to 191,400 in 1930 (see Table 1.1, above). Jews from Romania, Poland, and Lithuania seeking new homes joined those who had already arrived from Russia after conditions in Eastern Europe worsened during the Great War and in the interwar period. The fact that the United States, followed by various other countries, instituted a very strict quota in 1921 that excluded most immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe increased Argentina's allure for refugees.

The number of Jews in Argentina reached 273,400 at the end of World War II and a peak of some 310,000 in the early 1960s. From then on, numbers began to decline, with Jews emigrating from Argentina to Israel, the United States, or to other countries in Latin America and Europe. At the same time, the number of exogamic marriages was increasing. Whereas in the mid-1930s the rate of marriage to non-Jews was 1 to 5 percent of all marriages involving a Jewish partner, by the early 1960s it had risen to 20 to 25 percent, reaching 35 to 40 percent in the mid-1980s. Current estimates put the number of Jews now living in Argentina at more than 200,000.

Chronologically, Jewish immigrants began to arrive as early as the 1840s (in Argentina, unlike Brazil, evidence of conversos during the colonial period is scant), but consisted mainly in a small number of highly assimilated German and French families. The earliest synagogue was not established until 1862. The first real milestone in Jewish immigration was recorded in 1881 when, following pogroms in Russia, the Argentine government decided to send 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. The SS Wesser is 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 the now-legendary colonies of Moises Ville (1889), Mauricio (1892), and Villa Clara (1892), among others. The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) founded twenty-six agricultural colonies in Argentina (see Table 1.2). Although Jewish rural colonies existed in other places in the Americas, such as the United States and Brazil, their role and importance were much greater in Argentina. However, even at their apogee, on the eve of World War I, all of them together numbered barely 20,000 Jews. Many of them did not last long, and by the mid-1930s only 11 percent of Argentina's Jewish population lived in them.