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CHAPTER 4 Confrontations That Produced Structural Changes: Five Case Studies Each day with our own hands, we make something other than what we believe we are making, and History backfiring, makes us other than what we believe ourselves to be or to become. -Sartre Ashkenazim in Mexico were undoubtedly fortunate in having been welcomed by Syrian Jews who helped them to settle and find their way in the new society . The help from the B'nai-B'rithl and from HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Association) was also important. However, what marks the development of the Ashkenazi communal structure is precisely their break with these sources of support, help, and direction. This early breaking away and finding of their own direction was a central characteristic of their structural development. The account of the evolution of this community is presented in this chapter by following the various conflicts, confrontations, and breaks among groups in the community. This section focuses on five specific cases of conflict that highlight and clarify the specific character and content of the institutionalized life the community was to take on. In the early 1920s, Ashkenazi communal expansion was partly motivated by what the actors themselves felt and wanted to solve: "not knowing the language of the country, not having access to the local press; [feeling that] the life of the people in whose midst we find ourselves is foreign, incomprehensible; the same seems true of the meaning and functions of political and economic life [here]; they are all hidden to us." The changes that occurred were in part a distinctive willed social process. The changes in the community's organization were to a large degree directed shifts fought out by contending groups which wanted to establish their own definition of the situation. The outcomes, while "willed," were always both much more and much less than expected. The five selected case studies of internal group conflict, and the structural changes that occurred as they were debated and resolved, are: (1) the process of consolidation and organizational control resulting in the creation of the "Central Committee"; (2) the definition of ideological bound129 130 ASHKENAZI JEWS IN MEXICO aries and political control as fought among communists, Bundists, and Zionists; (3) educational conflicts that aimed at the control of the younger generations; (4) the conflict over language as the reconquering of the control of culture; and (5) by focusing on the politics of interrelation between minority and government and defining the structural condition of the minority as an "incomplete-allowance," these external limitations show themselves affecting the inner life of the group too. THE PROCESS OF CONSOLIDATION (THE FIRST EXPERIMENT): THE CREATION OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE The creation of the Central Committee represents the first formal, though experimental, formation of a central political power-center aiming to protect the community from outside threats as well as directing its internal affairs. This attempt must be seen as a social response, with the context of anti-Semitism as the crucial galvanizing force. Some linked the external problems, which were clearly the most important, to the existing internal disorganization of the community. The Central Committee was therefore seen as a mechanism to handle coherently both external and internal issues. It was a reaction to the perceived need for antidefamation activity, as well as an opportunity to centralize power. Responding to these issues, the community became a legitimizing force that either supported or restrained the efforts of the leadership. However, not even the need for protection from external threats was enough of an incentive to allow any organization, in this case the Central Committee, total internal control of the community. Control meant limits on possible action, thought, and lifestyles, and no faction was ready to give up the opportunity it had then, in Mexico, to experiment with its version of Jewish identity. As the more socialist-minded European immigrants decided to withdraw and form new organizations more attuned to their needs, organizations mushroomed. The repetitiveness and ineffectiveness of the activities of some of these organizations created enough dissatisfaction to give rise to the idea of an umbrella organization in the late 1930s.2 At the same time, much of what was happening in the country made Jews uneasy about their situation and future; thus, the desire to coordinate internally coincided with the need to create a united front to protect the community .3 But the theoretical distinction between an umbrella organization or a supraorganizational apparatus, or a federation of organizations in which each member group would subordinate...

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