Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Creating Community and National Identity, 1880–1960 by Adriana M. Brodsky (review)

Adriana M. Brodsky's work is a much-needed addition to the growing field of Latin American Jewish studies. Focusing on the diverse Sephardi groups from the Middle East and North Africa that settled in Argentina (both Buenos Aires and the provinces), Brodsky provides an essential overview of a diverse and often-divided group that was a minority within the small Jewish population. She argues that since it was made up of disparate groups that had little contact in the Old World, Sephardi identity was always a choice in Argentina, made possible by the new proximity of the different groups.

The chapters cover a broad range of topics and issues over a long period that coincides with the arrival and consolidation of Sephardi life in Argentina. Each chapter works well as a discrete unit, exploring Sephardi experiences from cemeteries to marriage patterns, from Zionism to intergroup disputes over communal organizations. The chapters themselves are quite detailed, with excellent information that will be of great use to scholars working on Jewish life or immigration during the period.

Brodsky has consulted an extremely broad range of documentation, much of which has not been used by previous scholars. She does an excellent job teasing out the salient points of the often spotty sources, particularly those for earlier years and those for communities outside of Buenos Aires, which have tended to receive little sustained scholarly study. The work has a strong focus on communal documentation and periodicals, but the parts that incorporate oral histories are some of the strongest and most memorable in the entire book, particularly the section on women and food.

The broad nature of the book is both a positive and a negative. The range of topics and themes considered over time that Brodsky addresses is exciting, covering a wide array of the Sephardi population from birth to death, in all of Argentina. Yet by their very nature, the Sephardim are a group with diverse origins, languages, and traditions. The work seldom explores these differences, choosing instead to focus on the moments in which the Sephardim came together or in which individuals within the larger group had similar experiences.

One reason scholars have spent less time on the Sephardim than the Ashkenazim is precisely their communal fragmentation, and the difficulties in drawing broader conclusions from the documentation on such small disparate groups, many of which proudly guarded their independence. Brodsky does explore these schisms and differences, particularly in the chapter on the failed attempt to create an overarching Sephardi organization, but readers have little sense of the reasons groups of various backgrounds took such strong stances to keep themselves separate from other Sephardim of different origins. Brodsky also devotes little time to the reasons that the various Sephardi groups left their home countries and chose Argentina, or the mechanisms by which they chose to settle in the provinces versus Buenos Aires.

The extended period covered by the book allows Brodsky to show change over time, but the thematic nature of the chapters often makes it difficult to keep track of how the different topics and themes relate to each other at different moments. Some chapters incorporate a lot of Argentine background and show the ways that the Sephardim inserted themselves into Argentine life, while others are narrowly focused on the Sephardim, or on the larger Jewish community. Because of the way the chapters are structured and argued—each one introducing a new topic and chronology—it is hard at times to follow the book's larger argument from chapter to chapter.

Overall, however, the book gives an excellent overview of an immigrant group that has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. By writing a history of all Sephardim in Argentina, Brodsky illuminates new paths of inquiry for scholars to follow as we expand our knowledge of Sephardi life and the ways the Sephardim became Argentine.