Argentina and the Jews
288 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:28 Jun 2002
ISBN:9780817311803
Argentina and the Jews
A History of Jewish Immigration
By Haim Avni
SERIES:
Judaic Studies Series
University of Alabama Press
Traces the shifting patterns of Jewish immigration and Argentine immigration policy
Argentina is home to the largest Jewish community in the Hispanic world, the second largest in the Western hemisphere. During successive political and social regimes, Argentina alternately barred Jews from entering the country and recruited them to immigrate, persecuted Jews as heretics or worse and welcomed them as productive settlers, restricted Jews by law and invested them with the fullest rights of citizenship. This volume traces the shifting patterns of Jewish immigration and Argentine immigration policy, both as manifestations of cultural and historical processes and as forces shaping the emergence of a large and energetic Jewish community.
Argentina is home to the largest Jewish community in the Hispanic world, the second largest in the Western hemisphere. During successive political and social regimes, Argentina alternately barred Jews from entering the country and recruited them to immigrate, persecuted Jews as heretics or worse and welcomed them as productive settlers, restricted Jews by law and invested them with the fullest rights of citizenship. This volume traces the shifting patterns of Jewish immigration and Argentine immigration policy, both as manifestations of cultural and historical processes and as forces shaping the emergence of a large and energetic Jewish community.
Within Argentina, many Jews followed traditional immigration strategies by consolidating communities and institutions in Buenos Aires and other cities. But many others settled on the land, in agricultural colonies sponsored by Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association, a group with far-reaching impact that is examined closely in this book. The Israeli kibbutz movement drew strength from the Argentine farming colonies, when beginning in 1949 groups of Argentine Jews immigrated to Israel to found kibbutzes. Eventually, in the face of political and economic upheavals with anti-Semitic undercurrents, almost 40,000 Jews left Argentina for Israel. A country of absorption became a country of exodus, and Zionism became a central focus of Argentine Jewry, interlocking families and fates separated by oceans and continents.
‘Has the unusual merit of drawing on the foreign ministry archives of four Western European nations as well as on original Jewish sources…[and] provides an illuminating account of the Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the pioneer and guiding light of Jewish settlement in Argentina. [C]almly argued and well-researched.’ —Latin American Research Review
‘This book brings together in one place and in accessible prose the history of Jewish immigration to Argentina, hitherto scattered in a multitude of sources. It offers authoritative evaluations of the record and should stand as the definitive text on the subject for some time.’ —Judith Laikin Elkin, The University of Michigan
Haim Anvi is professor of Modern Jewish History at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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