Hero and Outcast: César Tiempo and the History of Jews in Argentina

In the 1930s, the writer César Tiempo (whose pseudonym was Israel Zeitlin) was a hero of Argentina's organized Jewish community. At the age of 29, Tiempo led the campaign against the antisemitic director of the Biblioteca Nacional, Gustavo Martínez zuviría, the hugely popular novelist known as Hugo Wast. In 1935, Tiempo published his La campaña antisemita y el director de la Biblioteca Nacional (The antisemitic campaign and the director of the National Library), denouncing the bestselling books El Kahal and Oro, in which Martínez Zuviría had woven the plot of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into a Buenos Aires context.¹ The young Jewish-Argentine author instantly became a celebrity in the local Jewish community and was flooded with invitations to numerous events and conferences in a variety of community institutions.

Twenty years later, however, Tiempo had become a persona non grata in the community. There were no more invitations to give talks, no reviews of his books, barely any mention of him in the Yiddish or Spanish Jewish press. The change of status from hero to pariah came as a result of Tiempo's acceptance of the editorship of the cultural supplement of La Prensa, the daily newspaper by then highly identified with the Peronist government. Jews—and especially Jewish intellectuals—were not supposed to support the plebian movement headed by Colonel Juan Domingo Perón. César Tiempo's position annoyed many Jewish Argentines as it challenged the image of a homogeneous, unified community opposing the supposedly fascistoid politics of Peronism that served the interests of the working and not the middle class.

I was intrigued by this remarkable intellectual many years ago when I came across his first book of poems, Versos de una …, published in 1926 under the feminine pseudonym Clara Beter.² This slim volume pretended to be the poetic diary of a Jewish prostitute with social concerns. Tiempo's identification with this humble character led him to include an element of his own family history in the book. Back then, Tiempo had collaborated with the so-called Boedo writers, characterized by their sense of social commitment. This tendency kept drawing him toward "the underdogs" (los de abajo). Members of the Boedo group loved this type of social literature by Clara, who was simultaneously separated from her community of origin (Ukraine) and her host society (Argentina):

I give myself to everyone, but I belong to no one;To earn my bread, I sell my bodyWhat must I sell to keepMy heart, my sorrows and my dreams intact? … SometimesI am even ashamed to cryThinking how small my distress isCompared with the enormous universal sorrow.³

Reading these lines, one can easily understand what would later lead Tiempo to embrace Peronism, the self-proclaimed movement of Justicialismo (from the word justicia, justice). Years later, I decided to use the trajectory of César Tiempo as a lens to discuss several issues that either have not been previously addressed or that were studied in traditional ways and therefore warranted a fresh new look.

Many history books tell us that despite Juan Perón's efforts to eradicate antisemitism and his cultivation of close relations with the state of Israel throughout the Peronist decade of 1946–55, he failed in his attempts to enlist the support of significant sectors of Argentina's Jewish community. Historians and commentators assert that most Jewish-Argentines remained hostile to Perón, and that Perón's attempts to ingratiate himself with the community—for example, by setting up the Peronist Jewish organization known as the Organización Israelita Argentina (OIA—the Argentine Jewish Organization)—were all to no avail. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, as the extent of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe became clear, Jewish-Argentines, who were mostly of Eastern and Central European origin, were understandably wary of a leader who had supported Argentine neutrality during the war. The support that Perón had...