Women: The Forgotten Half of Argentine Jewish History

Women: The Forgollen HalfofArgentine Jewish History 49 Women: The Forgotten Half ofArgentine Jewish History! Sandra McGee Deutsch Sandra McGee Deutsch is Professor of History at the University of Texas at EI Paso. A specialist in the history of southern South America in the twentieth century, she is the author ofCounterrevolution in Argentina, 1900-1932: The Argentine Patriotic League (Lincoln, 1986), and co-editor ofThe Argentine Right: Its History andIntellectual Origins, 1910 to thePresent(Wilmington, 1993). Recently she completed a.manuscript on extreme right-wing groups in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890-1939. An evocative collection of photographs and commentaries on Argentine Jewry contains these words: "... we are men and women, protagonists ofa common destiny, who contribute our special qualities (peculiaridades) to enrich the diversity ofthe people who inhabit this country."2 Jewish men and women created families, agricultural and urban communities, leisure activities, schools, labor unions, and other institutions in Argentina. One would hardly know that women were involved iIi these enterprises, however, from most secondary-and even some primmy sources.3 They are the forgotten halfofArgentine Jewish history. Oddly, the only aspect oftheir past that has received significant attention is prostitution.4 Surely one can say more ab~ut Argentine Jewish women. 11 thank Adriana Brodsky, Lois Baer Barr, Marifran Carlson, Ignacio Klich, Jeff Lesser, Yolanda Leyva, Cheryl Martin, Jose Moya, Sylvia Schenkolewski, and Michael Miller Topp for suggestions and materials. 1also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. 1 paraphrase the title of this paper from Nancy Caro Hollander, "Women: The Forgotten Half of Argentine History," in Ann Pescatello, ed., Female and Male in Latin America. Essays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), pp. 142-58. 2Martha Wolf( coord., Pioneros de 10 Argentina, los inmigrantesjudioslPioneers in Argentina, The Jewish Immigrants (Buenos Aires: Manrique Zago Ediciones, 1982), p. 7. 3Eugene F. Sofer wrote that "Chevrah records reflect traditional Jewish patriarchalism and prevented an examination ofthe role of women in the community." See From Pale to Pampa: A Social History ofthe Jews ofBuetlosAires (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), p. 13, n. 16. 4Even these sources tend to focus on the images of prostitutes and political battles surrounding them, rather than the women themselves. See Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Proslilution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1990); Victor A Mirelman, "The Jewish Community Versus Crime: The Case of White Slavery in Buenos Aires," Jewish SocialStudies, 46:2 (Spring 1984): 145--68; Nora Glickman, "The Jewish White Slave Trade in Latin American Writings," American Jewish Archives, 34 (Nov. 1982): 178-89. A promising Ph.D. dissertation in progress is Adriana Mariel Brodsky, "Purity, Memory, and the Construction ofJewish 50 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 lbis article sw-veys the historical literature on Argentine Jewish women. It indicates what these works, primarily memoirs and secondary sources, reveal about women's lives.5 As the written sources focus heavily on Ashkenazim, the paper privileges them over Sephardim. Much ofthe literature, for example, treats the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) agricultural settlements, whose inhabitants were ofEastern European origin. The source limitations notwithstanding, I point out areas for future research on Jewish women ofall backgrounds. In the process I also raise. queries and suggest comparisons with Jewish women in other countries. First it is necessary to place the women into the broader context ofthe Jewish presence in an immigrant nation. From 1870 to 1910 Argentina attracted perhaps 2,200,000 permanent settlers from abroad. In 1914 about 30 percent of the population was foreignbom , a higher proportion than that of any other major country, including the United States. Immigrants and their progeny represented an even higher percentage ofthe economically active in the larger cities and agricultural heartland.6 In contrast to Italians and Spaniards, the largest groups of foreigners in Argentina, Jews formed a small community. Indeed, it would be more accurate to refer to them as a set of communities of diverse cultural origins. A few Jews from Western and Central Europe and from Morocco settled in the country before 1889, when a wave of mass migration from Eastern Europe began. Initially most of these newcomers moved to the JCA agricultural colonies, becoming what a local...