Rethinking Latin American Jewish Studies

Latin American Jewish studies, a relative newcomer to the academic agenda, has undergone a series of metamorphoses that began with exploration of the intersection between two previously unrelated areas of scholarship, went on to develop new understandings of their linkage and is now taking on its own identity as it continues to evolve.

Dual problems of perception at first impeded the emergence of Latin American Jewish studies as a recognizable field. Students immersed in the millennia of Jewish history disregarded the mere one hundred plus years of Jewish settlement in Latin America, a brief span of time that seemed to leave open the question of Jewish permanence on the continent. Interest nevertheless arose among journalists, travelers, and observers of the contemporary Jewish diaspora, driven by curiosity, more than scholarly concern, to look in on these outliers at the periphery of the Jewish world. Their findings—many of the earliest written in Yiddish or Hebrew—appeared in journals of Jewish interest and were not listed in standard Latin American references. Volumes surveying Jewish communities around the world have more recently included chapters on Latin America, but these volumes, owing to space limitations, include only general observations. Almost none of this literary production has entered the cognitive sphere of Latin Americanists.

The first Latin American reference volume to include an entry for Jews, so far as I can determine, appeared in 1984.¹ Latin Americanists had not been attracted to the study of the Jewish immigrant population, which arrived adumbrated by centuries-old teachings of contempt. Before Vatican II and the dissemination of the declaration Nostra aetate (1965) on the relation of the church to non-Christian religions, Catholic doctrine did not provide a supportive context for researching the lives of the objects of that contempt.

If the notion of Latin American Jewish studies was slow to develop, practical obstacles also delayed linking the two fields. Scholars with an interest in melding the two were geographically and linguistically dispersed. The profusion of languages among researchers made initial contact difficult, and the need to work with cultures and languages previously exotic to many slowed access to the field. Although individual scholars published valuable and innovative studies, there was no organized forum in which to present this research for challenge and discussion. The need for such a forum became evident when 225 individuals and 90 institutions in 19 countries joined the Latin American Jewish Studies Association within a year of its formation in 1982. A series of international conferences followed at two-year intervals. The ensuing publication of research papers established a foundation for the field of Latin American Jewish studies and facilitated its integration into Latin American studies.² Curiously, the insertion of a Latin American component into Judaic studies is occurring at a slower pace. What is notable about both perspectives, however, is that pragmatism has guided the linking of the two fields, while a theoretical linkage remains elusive.

Latin Americanists Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein propose a linkage that in one sense is obvious, as it has been there...