Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach

5. Syrian Jews in Buenos Aires: Between Religious Revival and Return to Biblical Sources, 1953–90

88 Syrian Jews in Buenos Aires Between Religious Revival and Return to Biblical Sources, 1953–90 Susana Brauner The future has become the present. Sick and tired of the bread of tediousness, intoxicated with the waters of the nontranscendental, we find ourselves, at the end of the twentieth century, hungry and thirsty for God. Among our chastised people, the Baalé Teshuvá [returned to biblical sources], on their return to our cultural heritage, have ceased to be a rarity and have become a daily reality. It is mandatory to satiate that thirst. —Dines, “Prólogo”1 A distinct religious revival process was undergone by the Syrian Jews who came from the cities of Aleppo and Damascus to Buenos Aires from the mid-1950s to the beginning of the 1990s. The secular leadership, open to modern world values, was weakening, while new religious leaders and sectors that promoted strict compliance with biblical precepts was gaining strength. Such leaders and sectors claimed that only their beliefs and practices could ensure Jewish intergenerational continuity. A combination of variables made certain developments possible. First, a strengthening influence was exerted by some rabbis, who were acknowledged as holding the interpretative monopoly on the ideal standards needed to comply with biblical precepts, as well as on the criteria for admission and exclusion 1. Author’s translation. Syrian Jews in Buenos Aires  89 applied to those wanting to stay or to join the community. Second, there arose a new generation of native-born religious leaders who became the dynamic factors in the “return to the biblical sources” movements. Most of these leaders were especially ordained abroad, in rabbinical schools that responded to ultraOrthodox Jewish formulas (See Friedman 1988 and J. Katz 1984).2 Their movements spread in Buenos Aires from the mid-1970s. They incorporated a large number of young people who had distanced themselves from religious practices and from communal Jewish organizations. Finally, financial institutions, in combination with the religious power, not only promoted the spread of Orthodox Judaism, but also represented this form of Judaism in the broader context of the Jewish community in Argentina. In other words, different trends arose from the most moderate sectors— aimed basically at reviving religious and ethnic distinctive features within their own communities—to others that then became more radical and intended to expand their influence to the whole Argentine Jewish community. This work is based on a wide range of sources: the internal documentation of the main community institutions, the private archives and reminiscences of outstanding leaders, and the national and communal press, as well as interviews conducted with representatives of the various sectors involved. Between Orthodoxy and Openness The main Sephardic3 sectors first arrived in Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the outset, a strong regionalism characterized all sectors. In general, they founded their own institutions independently according to their zone of origin and/or mother tongue, but with similar objectives , so as to render religious services and provide a traditional Jewish education. 2. For Aleppan militant conservatism, see Zohar (1993a) and Horowitz (2000). 3. This term generically describes the Jews whose ancestors descend from those who were evicted from the Iberian Peninsula as well as those coming from the Arab World. On the Sephardim in Argentina, see Bejarano (1986, 1978) and Mirelman (1988, 31–41, 126–28, 152–54, 207– 8, 254–57). On Sephardim in Latin America, see Bejarano (2005). On Sephardim, see Stillman and Stillman (1999); Goldberg (1996); Elazar (1989). 90  Ideological Divergence All in all, four groups may be distinguished, at least according to the forms of organization they adopted in Buenos Aires: the Spanish-speaking Moroccans; the various Ladino-speaking Jews, including the Turks, the Greeks, and people from the Balkan countries; the Syrians of Aleppo, together with others whose mother tongue was Arabic, generally from Egypt and Jerusalem; and the Syrians of Damascus, together with those coming from Lebanon. Although there is no official data, it was estimated that in the mid-1980s the Syrian Jews constituted around 9 percent (20,000) of the Jewish population in Argentina, 60 percent of the Sephardic population,4 and nearly 95 percent of the descendants of immigrants from Arab lands.5 Thus, as in other countries, they were a “minority within a minority,” as compared to the majority Ashkenazi6 Jewish community, and the largest group among the Sephardic communities. From the beginning of the century until the mid...