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CHAPTER 1 The Reestablishing of an Acquaintanceship A society is, therefore, a structure which consists of beings who stand inside and outside of it at the same time.... This is that the individual can never stay within a unit which he does not at the same time stay outside of, that he is not incorporated into any order without also confronting it. -Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms The encounter between Mexicans and Jews involved many things, including a confrontation with long-standing myths and the clashes of a new reality. The views they had about each other and the context in which they renewed their acquaintance played an important role. Though most of the accounts of immigrant Jews to Mexico highlight the perplexity they felt over the country, the geography, its flora, its folklore, the food, and the strange sound of the language, the confusion deepened because of the newcomers' ignorance of the recent Mexican past and their vague knowledge of an older history of uneasy relations with Jews. Mexicans, having been distanced from Jews for centuries, brought a mixed background to the new acquaintanceship. In addition to strong religious prejudices , Mexicans experienced great difficulty with the idea of and possible intrusion of foreigners-all foreigners. Both these intellectual currents always played a part when judging Jews. The immediate and often unexpectedly friendly encounter between Jew and Mexican in this century required the juggling of contradictory information; when reality did not coincide with prejudice, the Mexican often concluded that the particular Jew had to be an "exception" to the norm, a being very different from the picture the Mexican had intellectually internalized.! At times, however, this attitude toward the Jews came perilously close to prejudice, and when the wave of anti-Semitism enveloped the world, Mexicans did not entirely disassociate themselves from those feelings. They remained largely detached: Jews were not physically attacked in Mexico, but neither was there any rush to help refugees out. Even the Spanish language, a good mirror of the group that uses it, 3 4 ASHKENAZI JEWS IN MEXICO reflected some of the feelings towards Jews. A "Judas" doll was burned in effigy during Easter Week (Semana Santa), and Judas-like was used as pejorative adjective. Similarly, a judiada was defined as an inhuman action, particularly one producing excessive and scandalous gain. The negative associations put on Jews were thus encoded in language and hence in thought. When the Spanish came to the "New World," they brought and passed on their "Jewish experience" to America, not only by including some converts among their expeditionaries, but mostly by bringing a well-defined anti-Jewish ideology that was an intrinsic part of their thinking and acting. This ideology was reproduced in the New World, and its traces, still felt today, were part of the cultural structure that welcomed Jews in the modern immigration. The conquest and control of this part of the world was carried out by the same institutions that had made possible the discovery of this "new" world, all created in the mother country. The desire to Christianize, for instance, used as an argument to suggest the possible "salvation of the world," was closely linked to the conquest of the new territories. The Inquisition, the institution created to search out heretics or anyone that could hamper the project, was activated in Spain in 1481, and was soon to open a branch in the new continent too. To the Spanish, then, Jews were not an unknown, and the Spanish who came to Mexico brought their ideological and institutional structures to the social world they attempted to remodel and control. The desire to banish Jews was not new. England expelled all its Jews in 1290; France followed the pattern with massacres and expulsions in the fourteenth century; and Spain subjected its Jewish population beginning in the mid-fourteenth century to periodic massacres, mob attacks, and forced conversion. Spain ended its chapter of Jewish life with the expulsion of Jews in 1492. However, the case of Spain is different, unique, and paradigmatic, because for a period Jews, Arabs, and Spaniards cooperated in a most fruitful cultural experiment of sustained association. It is only when the Spanish attempted to reverse the balance of power and control in the search for a new social structure, when the Spanish sought to reestablish an absolute control of their territory, that these old alliances were broken. New definitions of the "other" were activated. Religion, both as a system of thought and as...

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