Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach

1. The Sephardic Communities of Latin America: A Puzzle of Subethnic Fragments

3 The Sephardic Communities of Latin America A Puzzle of Subethnic Fragments Margalit Bejarano The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was followed by the reemergence of small enclaves of the old Sephardic world in different corners of Latin America. Emigrants from the Middle East and the Balkan countries, fleeing misery , war, and political transitions, were able to transplant to the remote corners of the continent their traditional way of life and to reconstruct ethnically based communal frameworks. The entities that they created were shaped by the social structure in the countries of provenance more than by the legal requirements of the host societies. Coming from a Muslim world, in which the status of the ethno-religious minorities was defined by law, the Sephardic immigrants had to adapt themselves to the secular Catholic environment of the Latin American republics, where religious organization was on a voluntary basis, owing to the separation between church and state. Daniel Elazar points out the affinity between the Muslim environment of the Middle East and the pre-modern Iberian societies of Latin America as a factor that determined the course of immigration (Elazar and Medding 1983, 9; see also Mörner and Sims 1977, 73). Ladino-speaking Jews had the advantage of using a similar language to that of the host societies with whom they shared common cultural roots. Their arrival in Ibero-America was a symbolic reencounter between the descendants of the Jews that preserved the nostalgic memory of 4  Sephardim in the Americas Sepharad as the essence of their identity and the new nations that were formed as a consequence of the discovery and conquest of America. In their countries of origin, in the Middle East and North Africa, the Sephardim constituted the dominant Jewish element. In Latin America they were exposed to the predominance of the Ashkenazim and to an encounter with other Sephardic groups. They were compelled to redefine the boundaries that separated them not only from the ethnic groups that constituted the majority societies , but also from other Jewish groups—Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, as well as Sephardim coming from different communities of origin. In a circular letter distributed in 1917 among Ladino-speaking Jews in Buenos Aires, the board of the Society Chesed Shel Emet complained about not being able to purchase a cemetery because of “the lack of union among the Sephardic Jews, because not all of us come from the same country, and even when we come from the same country, because we don’t come from the same town or village, and even between those you may find antagonisms.”1 Immigration to Latin America was a process of atomization and dispersion: The Sephardim were scattered throughout the continent and divided into small nuclei that identified with their communities of origin. The history of each individual community was shaped by the confrontation between its cultural and social heritage and the conditions in the respective country. The objective of this chapter is to reconstruct the history of these communities both horizontally (according to their geographical divisions) and vertically (according to their communal origin), combining the fragments of a metaphorical jigsaw puzzle. Early Sephardic Settlement The Jews from the Middle East and North Africa were not the first Sephardim who reached Latin America. They were preceded by converted Jews who immigrated to Hispanic America and Brazil and returned clandestinely to the religion of their ancestors, as well as by members of the Spanish Portuguese Jewish nation who settled in the Protestant colonies. Although most of them were gradually 1. Minutes Sociedad Israelita Sefaradi Hesed Chel Emet, hm2/1422A, Central Archives of the Jewish People, Jerusalem. Sephardic Communities of Latin America  5 assimilated, they left the imprint of the Sephardic presence among the first settlers on the historical memory of the Latin American and Caribbean nations. Crypto-Jews in Ibero America The legal status of the Jews in the colonies of Spain and Portugal was identical to that in the mother countries. Following expulsion or forced conversion (from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497), the presence of Jews was absolutely forbidden and persons found to be secretly practicing Judaism were treated as Catholic heretics and handed over to the Inquisition. The converted Jews and their descendants were marked as conversos or New Christians and remained a socially separate group, subject to legal discrimination that included restrictions on their admission into the colonies of the New World. Nevertheless, a...