The Jews of Latin America by Judith Laikin Elkin (review)

Judith Laikin Elkin has updated and amended this book, originally published in 1980, for a new generation of scholars. She writes that what drove her to initially undertake a history of the Jewish presence in Latin America was that she could find no continent-wide historical account. She had met Jews in the region, but could not find any scholarly works that documented their experience. What’s more, she says Latinamericanists seemed to dismiss Jews as too small in number to have significantly impacted the region and those who studied Jews typically considered Latin America outside the scope of their history. But as Elkin’s meticulous and comprehensive treatment demonstrates, Jews have maintained a steady presence in the region for more than 150 years.

Elkin opens with a note on historical context, which details the long reach of the Spanish Inquisition, both in terms of its authority in many Spanish American colonies (to which some conversos had fled) and in terms of longevity. While Elkin recognizes the likely earlier presence of people who either knew they were Jewish but hid the fact, or did not know they were descended from Jews but would have likely been seen as Jews in Spain, she dates the modern history of Jews in Latin America to the mid-19^th century.

The body of the book is organized into three parts: The Immigration Years, At Home in America, and Jews in Their World. Each provides histories along chronological lines as well as geographic ones that illustrate how Jewish communities formed, to what extent Jews assimilated, and what became of their communities. From small, short-lived enclaves in Bolivia, the Dominican Republican and Guatemala, to sizable, modern urban populations in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Elkin’s work seems to explore every variation on the Jewish experience.

The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) played a key role in helping waves of Russian and European Jews to found agricultural “colonies” from the 1890s through about 1940, most successfully in Argentina. Fleeing persecution, these immigrants were often intellectuals with little farming experience and no capital. The JCA helped them secure passports and/or visas, paid their passage and, upon arrival in rural Argentina, gave them some seeds and tools and the opportunity to rent land from the JCA. Some families made the most of this start and the colonies grew as word spread back to Eastern Europe and Russia that agricultural regions of the American continent offered the potential for Jews to live in relative peace and isolation.

“For a few years, the JCA colonies captured the imagination of the Jewish world, for they seemed to hold the promise that, here in the New World, the Jewish condition of rootlessness could be remedied,” Elkin writes (p 106). But tensions arose. The Argentine government provided no formal education and Jewish families wanted schools for their children. The JCA never allowed the immigrants to purchase land, which meant most young people had to leave the community, for school and/or as adults. The original insularity of the Jewish colonies juxtaposed with the inevitability of young people needing to leave them.

By the early decades of the 20^th century, though, the young Argentine-born Jews could migrate to the capital and find a Jewish community within. Peddlers who scraped together enough money to open up a shop, prostitutes, scribes, and artisans ultimately found they could support themselves in many Latin American cities. Those who came from Europe, particularly in the early decades of the 20^th century, found their experience in business, manufacturing and industry in Europe served them well, particularly in the rapidly modernizing urban economies.

Elkin details different ways Jewish workers and entrepreneurs approached their emerging roles in these cities. Some brought their politics and union organizing from the Old World to their American communities. Others practiced the time-honored tradition of denying their roots to “pass” in a rather closed society. This...