Margalit Bejarano, Yaron Harel, Marta F. Topel, and Margalit Yosifon, editors

Jews and Jewish Identities in Latin America: Historical, Cultural, and Literary Perspectives

Academic Studies Press, 2017, ISBN-13: 978-1618116482

Reviewed by Regina Igel^*

The opening lines of this book`s Introduction says it all: “The history of the Jews in Latin America is marked by contradictions” (p. viii). The corpus offers a head-first dive into the paradoxes or ambiguities that populate the history of Jews in Latin America by researchers, professors, and academics, in general. The Jewish population examined by them ranges from Mexico to Uruguay to Brazil. The latter gets the lion’s share of the essays comprising this dense volume. Latin American Jews living in the United States, mainly in Florida, also are the focus of this collection of essays. Actually, this gathering of articles,

“is based on an international conference that took place in São Paulo, in September 2012. The conference was organized in Israel by the Dahan Center of the Bar-Ilan University and the Academic College in Ashkelon and, in Brazil, by the Program for Jewish Studies of the University of São Paulo” (p. xiii).

The volume is divided into four parts: I. Globalization, Transnationalism, and Latin American Judaism and Jewishness; II. The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: The Emergence of New Jewish Religious Identities, and the Creation of Singular Interactions between Jews and Non-Jews; III. Zionism – Multiple Dimensions: History, Diplomacy, Politics, and Education; IV. From Jewish Writers in Latin America to Latin America in Israeli Contemporary Literature. Eminent academics such as Judit Bokser Liwerant, Margalit Bejarano, Silvia Schenkolewski-Kroll, Daniela S. Segre Guertzenstein, Susana Brauner, Michel Gherman, Graciela and Victor Ben Dror, Nancy Rozenchan, Luis S. Krausz, Berta Waldman, and Saul Kirschbaum are some of the scholars who collaborated on this publication. Indeed, the depth of these and other studies makes this volume a fundamental source of information on Jewish life, including similarities and differences and the actual social, economic, educational, professional, and political situations in several countries in the Americas from the point of view of their respective Jewish communities. Because of format limitations, this review will be restricted to only selected essays. This does not imply, by any means, that those not introduced here are of lesser quality or importance.

In Part One, Judit Bokser Liwerant analyzes the process of globalization today, the worldwide interaction, and their influences in the advent of transnational social fields and spaces, including areas of Jewish mobility. The focus of her study is the flow of Jewish transnational ethnicities and the presence and absence of boundaries among social, cultural, and identity operations in spite of formal frontiers, national borders, or even international gateways. A similar study was conducted by Margalit Bejarano. In her analysis of Cuban, Colombian, Argentinean, Peruvian, and Brazilian Jews, among others, who created their own enclaves in the United States, she observes different degrees of integration and the challenges they faced while constructing their identities as observant or secular Jews. Silvia Schenkolewski-Kroll takes on the field of education to address “Informal Jewish Education: Argentina’s Hebraica Society.”

Daniela S. Segre Guertzenstein’s analysis of the “Brazilian Virtual Orthodox Jewish Education in the Twenty-First Century” stands out in Part Two. As the title of the article suggests, the author examines the inclusion of technology into Orthodox institutes of learning, particularly in the city of São Paulo. Rabbis play a basic role providing instructions on how to use electronic devices without infringing religious laws. Drawn in part from her doctoral thesis, the author discusses the impact of such devices on ten yeshivot and girls’ schools selected for this study.

Susana Brauner’s article in Part Two is the only piece in this volume to present a large portion dedicated to Sephardic themes. Her work focuses on Jews and non-Jews of Syrian and Moroccan origin in Argentina. It bears witness to the limited participation or absence of members of the Sephardic community in academic congresses such as the one that gave origin to this collection. This void is due, most possibly, to the smaller number of Sephardic humanities thinkers studying their immigration to South America, as compared to the interest shown towards the larger Ashkenazi communities there. On the other hand, Latin American Sephardic, Mizrahim, Lebanese, and Syrian-Jewish individuals are largely visible as engineers, architects, economists, and civil construction entrepreneurs, as well as businessmen, bankers, and industrialists. Nevertheless, Brauner’s essay addresses the presence of individual Jews and non-Jews in Argentina who originated from certain Arab states. This analytical article also informs about the relationship between descendants of Jews from Arab countries and non-Jews of same national origins on Argentinean soil, among other topics. Though sometimes the term “Sephardim” is used as an omnibus term that embraces Jews from different Middle Eastern regions, Brauner reminds readers of some of the differences noticed among Syrian and Moroccan Jews and their descendants vis-à-vis their non-Jewish contemporaries, descendants of immigrants from Syria and Morocco. This includes their ease or difficulty in acculturating themselves to the dominant society, their distancing or approaching themselves from their co-religionists, the neglecting or the reviving of old rituals, and more.

The emergence of Zionist feelings slowly grew to include a sizeable number of South American Jews, particularly in Brazil, as pedagogically explained by Michel Gherman, in Part Three in “The Beginning of Brazilian Zionism: Historical Formation and Political Developments.” The first inclinations towards a Zionist home emerged in Brazil with the foundation of a newspaper, Ha Amud (The Column) in 1916. The periodical was established in the state of Pará, in the Amazonian region by David José Perez, a Sephardic man of Moroccan origin. It later moved to Rio de Janeiro. Gherman writes that because the paper was entirely written in Portuguese, and its co-editor, Alvaro Castilho, was a non-Jew it may be among the first attempts by Jews to establish an open dialogue with members of the dominant society. Moreover, the editors of The Column wished for a unified Jewish society. They did not take into consideration either diverse geographic origins or particular ways of practicing the Jewish religion as factors of the division.

As a matter of fact, readers are concisely informed in the book’s Introduction that: “The forerunners of the Sephardic communities in Brazil were Moroccan Jews from Tetouan and Tangier, who immigrated during the nineteenth century, and penetrated into the Amazon region as a result of the rubber boom” (p. viii). This statement is followed on the next page by: “With the decline of the Ottoman Empire, Sephardic Jews began to immigrate to Latin America in large numbers. Jews from Syria, Turkey, and the Balkan countries dispersed throughout the continent since the beginning of the twentieth century, establishing communal infrastructures based on sub ethnic affiliations” (p. ix). The latter kept a low profile, however, generally distancing themselves from the Ashkenazi community, and vice-versa.

Part Four brings together a good number of essays on literature. Four of the five chapters relate to Brazil. Nancy Rozenchan’s “From Batiste Linen to the Empire at Palatnik Villa – Centennial Records of Economic Life in Natal’s First Jewish Community” examines topics related to the establishment of the first Jewish families in the Northeastern Brazilian region and the writings of Tuvia Palatnik, who was a pioneer in writing about the memories of the Jewish experiences in Brazil before moving to Israel. Luis S. Krausz’ “Between Nostalgia and Utopia: Stefan Zweig in Brazil” concerns the Jewish-Austrian author who coined the phrase “Brazil, country of the Future,” homonym of one of his books’ titles. Berta Waldman’s “Representation of the Shoah in Brazilian Literature” divides the texts related to the Holocaust in Brazilian Jewish literature into three moments or ”generations,” delivering a critical analysis of each of several authors such as Jacó Guinsburg, Moacyr Scliar, Cintia Moskovitch, and Michel Laub, in their respective literary niches. The final essay in Part Four is Saul Kirschbaum’s “Samuel Rawet and the Representation of the Holocaust.” Rawet is one of Brazil’s greatest but lesser known writers. His short stories and novels are filled with philosophical innuendos and bleakness of feelings transposed with remarkable dexterity in his treatment of with the Portuguese language.

This volume, with all of its interesting, intriguing, and challenging essays is, after all, a formidable sample of the diversity and extent of the Jewish communities in South and Central America, and in parts of the United States. Its scope presents a variety of subjects, including political ideologies, historical affinities, educational directions, and literary trends. Jews and Jewish Identities in Latin America surely will turn into a reference book for all interested in the Jewish presence in Latin America.

Following the over-used proverb that ”nothing is perfect,” the reviewer noticed that her name was not included in the Index, though parts of her works were quoted not less than five times in one of the essays (see Kirschbaum). Such an oversight can be pardoned given the mission of this collection, to spread the word about Jews in Latin America that is done without skipping a note.

* Regina Igel is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Portuguese Program at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA).