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From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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>> Mary Lou Reker:  My name is Mary Lou Reker, and on behalf of the Library's Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center, I want to welcome you to a lecture today by Dr. Adriana Brodsky entitled "Becoming Jewish Argentines:  Sephardim, marriage choice, and the construction of Jewish Argentina Identity, 1920 to 1960."  And before I introduce Dr. Georgette Dorn, who is going to formally introduce Dr. Brodsky, I would just like to say to please turn off your cellphones.  I would like to remind us all that we're grateful to the legacy of John W. Kluge for the Kluge Fellowships and the opportunities for these talks to take place.  And also let you know that if you should ask any question at the end of this lecture, it constitutes permission for it to be recorded and put on our website.  So let me, without adieu, introduce the head of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, Dr. Georgette Dorn.
>> Dr. Georgette Dorn:  Well, it's a great pleasure to introduce Adriana Brodsky, above all, because my own field is also Argentine history.  Adriana Brodsky grew up in Buenos Aires, went to high school in Buenos Aires, and has a bachelor's degree from the Instituto Nacional del Profesorado "Joaquin V. Gonzalez."   She has a Ph.D. from Duke University where she wrote her dissertation on "The Contours of Identity:  Sephardic Jews and the Construction of Jewish Communities in Argentina, 1880 to the present."  She is currently Associate Professor of History at St. Mary's College in Maryland.  She has written extensively on Jews in Argentina, Jewish identity, Sephardis, and is coeditor of the "Journal of Jewish Identities," the special issue that is dedicated to Jewish Latin American identity and cultural production.  Adriana.
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>> Dr. Adriana Brodsky:  Thank you.  I would like to thank the Kluge Center staff for all their help, the Office of Scholarly Programs, director Carolyn Brown, and the Special Assistant to the Director, Mary Lou Reker, for their support that I received in order to work on this project, which is a completion of a manuscript that details Sephardic immigration to Argentina.  Today's presentation is derived from one of these books, from the book's chapter.  I would also like to thank Dr. Everette Larson who insisted that I apply to the Kluge Fellowship about a year ago, and Dr. Georgette Dorn for her generous introduction to this lecture, both from the Hispanic Division, and to Peggy Pearlstein and Sharon Horowitz of the Hebraic section of the Library of Congress for their help.  Also, I'd like to finish with a quick thank you to Victoria Ivanova [phonetic] for her help during these last few weeks.  Where is Victoria?  She missed it.  John Hessler and Chet Van Duzer [phonetic] for their support with my many, many, many, many questions about maps and all things digital, so thank you.  
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I will begin this presentation with three marriage stories.  The first one is fictional, the romance between Judy and Mirach [phonetic].  The other two are real, the events surrounding the weddings of my grandparents and parents.  "Un romance turco" (A Turkish Romance), was written in 1920 by Pedro Pico and Samuel Eichelbaum, a well known Argentine Jewish writer, and performed in the same year by the Muino-Alippi famous theater troupe.  The play narrates the developing romance between Judy and Mirach, a young Sephardic Jewish woman and a Muslim young man.  Set in the Buenos Aires fabric store of Judy's father, Abuchar [phonetic], Mirach is presented to the audience as somebody who has conquered the affection of all.  It is only through Sohine [phonetic], a sales man in Abuchar's store who is also in love with Judy, that we learn that Mirach has failed to tell her that he is not Jewish.  Although the central plot is clearly centered around Mirach's and Judy's romance, the audience meets Judy's younger brother, Arim [phonetic] who, in turn, is falling in love with Felicia [phonetic], not Jewish herself.  Both Arim and Felicia are young, and while reading together a novel -- they read it -- you find them reading this particular book throughout the play, they recreate, playfully recreate its plot and the characters' behavior in their real lives.  In the last scene of "A Turkish Romance," which takes place on a Friday evening, Sohine confronts Mirach and forces him to tell his secret to his loved one.  Judy is at first shocked and feels deceived, insisting that she could not go against the wishes of her father and her grandmother.  As she's walking away with her family, Mirach pleads, "Aren't I the same as when you believed me Jewish?  We can still be happy, Judy," to apparently no avail.  In a last attempt to convince Judy, Mirach points to the young couple, Arim and Felicia, who are also witnessing the scene, and exclaims, "Look at them, Judy.  They love each other.  For them there are no obstacles, neither in heaven nor on earth.  That's why they love each other so much.  Here, Judy, we represent the old.  With us is the God that divides man.  They represent youth, this new land where one can love without restraint."  The play concludes, literally, two lines after this speech with Judy freeing herself from her grandmother, running towards Mirach exclaiming, "Don't go, Mirach.  You are my god.  Wait for me." 

The second story is about my grandmother, Leda [phonetic], daughter of Moroccan grandparents, living with them and her 12 brothers and sisters in a small, dusty town in the northern province of Corrientes.  She was never very secretive about the fact that her husband, my grandfather Jacobo [phonetic], another Moroccan Jew, was not the love of her life.  The love of her life, as she told me many times, was the town's teacher, El Maestro [phonetic], a Catholic who sent furtive letters to her through my grandmother's sister, and who would arrange secret rendezvous at the house of two sisters.  The key thing here was that that was the best place to meet, the house was on a corner, two doors, one door on one street, the other door on the other street, so nobody could actually see my grandmother and the teacher going into the house at the same time.  Now the end to this platonic relationship came, not because the Maestro decided to take my grandmother away or because they were discovered and forbidden to see each other again.  As my grandmother told me, the sheriff of the town came to ask her father for her hand in marriage.  My great-grandfather was very polite.  He did not want to be disrespectful of authority, after all, but quickly added that it was a true honor, and that if it weren't for the fact that my grandmother was already engaged to be married to somebody who lived in Buenos Aires, they'd be more than happy to accept the proposal.  This, of course, was a ploy.  My grandmother was not engaged to be married.  And even if you could argue that the proposal was an honor and true testament to my grandmother's beauty, the sheriff, Agoym [phonetic], could never have been accepted as my grandmother's husband.  That evening, while at the dinner table, my great-grandfather merely informed his wife that Leda was leaving for Buenos Aires on the next morning's train.  And indeed, she left, leaving behind, what my great-grandfather thought the problem was, the sheriff, and as well, the love my grandmother's life, the teacher.  In Buenos Aires she stayed with friends of the family who found her a nice young man, my grandfather Jacobo.  They were married shortly after meeting for the first time.  It was the mid-1920s.  

The third story took place about 30 years later.  It was a shock for me to learn as a young adult that when my Sephardic mother, Luna [phonetic], met my Ashkenazic father, Sadhil [phonetic] in the late 1950s, both their families expressed great concerns about the match.  Although both Jewish and Argentine born, Luna and Sadhil were not thought to be meant for each other.  Their Jewish traditions were not the same, their families' social circles did not cross paths, and their foods tasted differently, gefilte fish and baklava.  These reservations, not openly expressed and not really fully explained, assumed that there were differences that would be hard to overcome.  The similarities that existed between my parents, both atheist Jews, both Argentine born, both educated and with professional degrees, seemed not to count.  As my grandmother recalls, "But he's a Russian, 'es un ruso,'", was the response she got when the possibility of marriage to Sadhil became clear to her parents.  However, unlike her mother, Leda, my mom was not shipped away to a distant city away from a goy suitor and the love of her life.  She indeed married my father, her own choice, for a husband.  My grandmother's and my mother's options and choices for life partners were always placed against the backdrop of the threat the play, "Un romance turco" portrayed so clearly.  Argentina represented, in the liberal imaginary so prevalent in those days, a land in which religious atavism had no place, a country where maternity was bound to replace traditions brought from the old world.  For the immigrant generation themselves, as exemplified by Abuchar and the grandmother in the play, and by my great-grandfather, marrying out of the faith was a sure sign of the dangers lurking ahead, a sure indication that assimilation, the loss of their culture, was around the corner.  

The story of my mother and the reaction provoked by her decision to marry a Russian Jew speaks about another issue, the existence of different understandings of where the boundaries of the group were drawn.  Who was an acceptable partner, even if Jewish, and who was not, was informed by what each generation considered to be a member of the community.  In this presentation, I will focus on the development of an Argentine Jewish identity by looking at marriage choice in Buenos Aires among Sephardic Jews.  I contend that the data gleaned from marriage records clearly suggests, just like the stories of my family, that Jewish identity was not a static essence, but rather, was delimited by a constructed and changing boundary that was closely related to and influenced by the experiences of this immigrant community in Argentina.  What constituted Argentine identity was also in the process of being constructed by those old and new to the country.  "Argentinian-ness" was not static, either.  But unlike what the previous scholarship and marriage patterns has argued, I am not necessarily interested in discovering either a melting pot or assimilation behind my family's and others decisions.  That is to say, I am not merely looking at marriages among Jews as a sign that they were avoiding assimilation.  In fact, I believe that while my parents' marriage would be read as endogamous, that is to say among Jews, theirs was a decision that was much more Argentine than their marriage record is made to suggest.  Ultimately, I am interested in the construction of identity boundaries, those that define who was in and who was out, and which, of course, were always in flux.  

I will begin with a very brief description of Jewish settlement in Argentina focusing on the Sephardic groups that settled there.  I will then summarize the arguments made by previous historians and scholars, and will finish with the information obtained from the marriage records I worked with.  Just a quick note on methodology.  I have had access to the records of five different synagogues, three Sephardic, and then two Ashkenazi, roughly from the years 1920 to 1960 depending on which of these three congregations I'm looking at.  And then two Ashkenazic congregations.  Interviews with Sephardic women have added an attitudinal dimension to the study, and I have also used various Sephardic magazines.  I understand the obvious limitations that this type of source places on my study, on the study, only religious marriages are examined.  Lots and lots of weddings actually took place outside synagogues and churches of the time, and the fact that no Syrian group of those three Sephardi congregations, none of which is actually Syrian, the largest Sephardi group.  So I understand the limitations, but practical and methodological reasons have dictated this decision and nothing else.  As well, I strongly believe the data from the provinces where the communities were usually much smaller could present a very different picture to the one I present in this paper, yet this picture would ultimately support my overall argument regarding the centrality of "lo nacional" when defining "lo etnico."  

Argentina is perhaps most known as the land that gave birth to the Jewish gaucho, a figure immortalized in the work of Alberto Gerchunoff, a series of tales depicting life in the ever-cultural colonies, written in the context of Argentina's first anniversary of its independence from Spain.  And here we have a picture of Alberto Gerchunoff himself mocked and dressed in the gaucho attire of the day.  The Jewish Colonization Association founded in Europe by Baron Hirsch in the mid-19th century had purchased land in several Argentine provinces and helped relocate many Ashkenazi Jews there providing a safe haven to the Jews suffering the rise of anti-Semitism in the Russian empire.  And here you have a map with the red dots sort of showing where these colonies were located.  The image of the Jewish gaucho, a Jewish man working the land just like an Argentine cowboy, was an apt example, according to Gerchunoff, of the inherent possibilities of the assimilability of Jews into the new country.  Jews, usually imagined as bound by religious precepts and not very keen on physical labor, were rehabilitated and modernized by what the Jewish Colonization Association offered: land and work.  Although not all Jews who arrived in Argentina during the last years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th went to the agricultural colonies, the Jewish colonies and its inhabitants molded the image of Jews in Argentina for many years to come.  And just so that you have an idea of what we're looking at, numbers, immigration numbers are very hard to come by.  Demographers argue that these figures are okay, so in 1935, around 218,000 Jews, and that number sort of grew to 310,000 in the 1960s.  

Sephardi Jews did not come to Argentina as part of the Jewish Colonization Association project.  Starting in the 1890s and until the 1950s, Sephardic Jews settled in Buenos Aires and other provincial towns and cities in Argentina, not as gauchos, but as entrepreneurs, very small entrepreneurs. and shop owners.  And like Ashkenazic immigrants, Sephardim did not have the support from international immigrant organizations, and the migratory process was usually the result of family and group connections.  In Buenos Aires, the various Sephardic groups settled in different neighborhoods.  And at first, they usually settled in the area very close to the port, so in the area of Constitucion and Retiro, and later started moving into the northern parts of the city, but more Moroccans settled in the neighborhood of Constitucion.  Latino-speaking Jews, after moving from this downtown area, moved into Villa Crespo, into downtown and Once, and Arab-speaking Jews also moved into the area of Once, into the area of La Boca, and into the area of Flores.  This last group, the Arab-speaking Jews, were the largest, numerically speaking, and it included both those originally from Aleppo and immigrants from Damascus, and they sort of split, they did not, they founded very different organizations, communal organizations depending on the city of origin. In each of these neighbors, Sephardim created their communal organizations, synagogues, schools, social clubs, medical, and philanthropic societies, usually within walking distance from each other.  In the first few decades of the 20th century, there were not many opportunities for the interaction among the various Sephardic groups, nor between these groups and Ashkenazi.  The distinction based on place of origin that Sephardi groups insisted on in Buenos Aires, however, was not preserved in the provinces where there were fewer settlers and fewer available resources.  Provincial towns and capitals witnessed the creation of single Sephardic communities and cemeteries, and in many cases, a much more fluid relationship with Ashkenazi.  

In the land of Jewish gauchos, Sephardim were rarely identified as Jews.  On the night, and I'm quoting here, "On the night of January 12, 1919," recalled Estella Levy [phonetic] in her autobiography, and I quote here extensively, "violent riots marked the beginning of a working class outburst, which came to be called the tragic week, 'la semana tragica'.  We lived far from Once, the area which gathered a great number of Ashkenazi Jews, and where these virulent acts were taking place.  These Jews suffered, these Jews suffered serious damage to their lives and possessions.  We, the Sephardim, were still protected by people's ignorance of our origin.  We were thought to be 'turcos', Turks."  End of quote.  Estella and her family were saved from attacks, she claimed, not only because of the spatial difference between the center of events and the neighborhood where she resided -- she lived in La Boca, and these were events that took place in Once.  But also, and probably most importantly, because of the imagined distance between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewry, a distance so ample, that Sephardim seemed not to be Jews in the eyes of the Argentine society.  

Of course, I am not the first historian who pays attention to marriage choice as a window onto the existence of ethnic and national identity.  Notable historians of immigration to Argentina initially, Samuel Baily and Mark Szuchman studied marriage patterns amongst immigrants and argued that, Gino Germani, following Gaston Gori's work, had arrived at the wrong conclusion when he claimed that after 1930, Argentine society was characterized by assimilation.  After that decade, Germani claimed immigrants increasingly married Argentines.  Baily and Szuchman attacked his theory by arguing that the data used by Germani had been misread.  While Germani thought that after 1930 the number of marriages between Argentines and immigrants had increased, the U.S. historians realized, paying special attention to parents' nationality, that those Argentines listed as such in the marriage licenses were indeed second-generation immigrants.  This allowed them to verify that these second-generation immigrants continued to marry within their familiar ethnic group.  Although it was clear that the melting pot theory had received a blow, neither Baily nor Szuchman rejected the notion that prior to 1930, endogamous marriages had indeed prevailed.  After that initial attack on Germani's positions, a second generation of historians continued to push Germani's initial assertion and Baily and Szuchman's corrections.  They focused on big cities, small towns, Italian, Spanish immigrants, smaller immigrant groups.  They tested their theory in urban and the rural settings.  Without rejecting the notion that marriage choice had been greatly influenced by the ethnic origin of the partners, these scholars eventually concluded that brides and grooms have paid attention to more than just nationality when making their choices. [Inaudible] ratios, economics, and other variables, like educational and spatial considerations, have played a role, as well.  Without necessarily arguing for abandoning the marriage record as the piece of evidence that would answer all questions, these historians called for the use of other indicators.  

Marriage patterns had also been the focus of historians who work on the Jewish community of Argentina.  Steeped in the same historiographical debate of a melting pot versus assimilation, these historians also addressed questions raised by the Jewish case, in particular.  Diana Epstein wished to test the often-cited argument that Moroccan Jews had assimilated much more easily than other Jewish groups to Argentine society.  And again, she used marriages to Argentines as an indicator of that assimilation.  Geldstein and Tolcachier, working with smaller Jewish groups in areas around a Jewish agricultural colony and an interior capital, also tested Germani's assertion, and concluded that in the province of Salta, intermarriage, in the case of Geldstein's work, was influenced, not just by a declining number of Jews in the region, but by the slow and constant secularization of community.  And in the case of the province of Buenos Aires, Tolchachier's article, a strong loyalty exhibited by immigrants to the same town, city of origin, was slowly changed to incorporate Jews from other points of origin and nearby colonies.  Whether they focused on the Jewish community, in particular, or the immigrant community, in general, all these historians shared the assumption that marriage choice revealed degrees of assimilation.  In this framework, by marrying others, Jews stopped being Jews to become Argentines.  The Sephardi Jewish community in Argentina indeed echoed these assumptions when it published very concerned articles about the fate of those, usually women, who decided to marry outside the faith.  On July 3, 1931, La Luce [phonetic] Magazine, for example, published an article about a Jewish woman living in Rosario [phonetic].  This woman, Esther, told the journalist, and I quote, "It's been five years since I married a goy, and to be frank, I feel quite miserable.  Sometimes I wonder why I made that wrong decision.  I don't know who to blame:  my weakness as a girl, thoughtless and unaware, blinded by love and taken in by the charming and flattering words of a smitten lover; my careless mother, who never took the time to make me understand what I should or should not do, who never took the time to bring me close to the young co-religionists so that in social gatherings and meetings I could get to know them and they could get to know me.  Perhaps had I been warned, I would have chosen from among them a young man I liked and I could have married him, no matter how poor he was.  Or whether I should blame my father for only being Jewish in name."  End of quote.  

My grandmother's father understood, as well, the dangers of intermarriage.  His decision that Leda move to Buenos Aires was likely spurred by the sudden, perhaps, realization that she was of marriageable age, and that the Jewish options in this small little town in Corrientes were likely nonexistent.  Many interviewees commented on the fact that when in those situations, living very far from Jewish centers, men would write back to their homes and their families to request the sending of young women to be married as soon as they disembarked.  Apparently, marriages to non-Jews -- but here I'm going to add a twist -- converted to Judaism, was such a visible event that Aleppine Rabbi Shaul Setton who was in Buenos Aires, together with Rabbi Aaron Goldman of the Jewish Colonization colonies, and Joseph Yedid [phonetic], the rabbi of the Aleppo community in Jerusalem, passed the now famous ban of conversion in Argentina.  Appalled at the lack of religious observation, especially because Jewish men married Gentile women who converted without following the proper rules, he announced in 1927 that since, and I quote, "Life in the city is exceedingly wanton, and everybody does as he pleases, and that there is no rabbi serving the Jewish community who's authority is represented by the government and by any other party, so anyone who wishes, takes an unconverted Gentile woman for his wife, or chooses lay persons at random to serve as witnesses and converts her in their presence.  Therefore, I disperse announcements that it is forbidden to accept converts in Argentina until the end of time."  This is the Takana, and it still is.  So if you're planning on converting, don't go to Argentina, because you won't be able to do it.  

So these stories suggest that Sephardim, but not only them, agreed that marriage outside the group posed a grave danger.  Newspapers, however, never published stories that alerted by the problem of marrying an Ashkenazi Jew, right?  Yet as one may imagine, and the story of my parents reminds us, that was not very common.  In agreement with Germani's theory, which posited that immigrants' groups' first generation acted very endogamously, Sephardi Jews, the sources tell us, tended to marry other Sephardi Jews from their own towns and countries, and not Ashkenazi.  But it is not surprising, then, to observe that marriages between Sephardim was not among Sephardi groups, was not very usual, at all.  So only two weddings in the Moroccan congregation between, from 1920 to 1933, were between a bride and a groom from different Sephardi communities, and I mean from different origins, so Syrian Jews with Moroccan Jews, Ottoman Empire Jews with Syrian Jews and the rest.  Camarho [phonetic], which was the other Sephardic congregation that I looked at, only had four marriages in a 10-year period, and Shalom, only one in the same period.  What about the marriages between Ashkenazi and Sephardim, then.  During the years under study, in the Moroccan congregation, for example, only 4 out of 145 marriages recorded were exogamous.  And I'm using exogamous very playfully here, between a Sephardi, usually men, and an Ashkenazi, usually the bride.  There was only one case in which the Ashkenazi was actually the bride and not the groom.  That represents about a 2.7 percent of all the marriages.  In the records of Shalom, the pattern persists, although in a slightly higher percentage, as 42 out of 599 weddings were between Ashkenazi and Sephardim with only 15 with the bride being Ashkenazi, at 7 percent.  In Camarho, only 17 out of 356 were mixed.  These mixed marriages are late to appear in number two.  In the 1930s, there is no more than one a year in Camarho, and Shalom celebrated its first in 1941.  It is later in the period under study, in the 50s and 60s, that we see the most numbers of marriages between Sephardim and Ashkenazi.  The story that emerges from the documents of the Ashkenazi congregations is slightly different.  

There's almost no intermarriages between Ashkenazi and Sephardim until the very late 50s.  But we find an important number of Sephardi marriages, Sephardi, Sephardi marriages, right.  So that Sephardi couples would Ashkenazi congregations to hold their weddings at, clearly complicates the meaning and boundaries of Jewish identity.  Ashkenazi, to Sephardi parents, were sometimes not kosher enough as marriage partners, but their synagogues were.  Sephardi temple options were plentiful, as you may know, and I will return to this in a minute.  The questions that seemed so easy for Germani, and then to others, what was an exogamous marriage and what was an endogamous one, are quite complicated to answer in this case.  What it a Sephardi marrying another Sephardi from a different locale, or was a Sephardi marrying an Ashkenazi or a Jew marrying a non-Jewish Argentine.  Given the anecdotes published in the newspapers and the reactions of parents to children's decisions, it seemed that all these acts could be defined as exogamous at one point and endogamous at others.  And I am thinking here now, again, of the un-Halakhic practice of today in the case of Jews marrying non-Jews in Argentina to have weddings blessed by a rabbi that follows Jewish ritual.  And this, just to bring myself, the third generation in this story of grandmother and mother, this Jewish practice was, by the way, the one that I sort of followed, which, of course, is Jewish only in name.  There is no Halakhic Jewish understanding of that wedding as a Jewish wedding.  But where is Argentina in all this discussion?  It seems clear to me now that what united my parents was their being Argentine.  That was their strongest commonality.  They had been the children of endogamous marriages, but they had been raised in an Argentine city, educated in Argentine schools and universities, participated in Argentine political parties, and learned to eat Argentine food.  And even my grandmother, who had reacted with, "es on ruso," he's a Russian, to the news of her daughter's wedding, was extremely happy when the wedding was celebrated in Templo Libertad, which was the synagogue associated with the upper middle class elite Jews in Buenos Aires.  It is clear that even she, the product of two Moroccan parents who had married a good Moroccan man, had learned, by 1960, the Argentine Jewish class rules.  Her son-in-law and in-laws could very well be Rusos, but her daughter married in Libertad.  But Argentina was present even before the native-born children selected marriage partners across the aisle, Ashkenazis of other unions.  Argentina was likely the place for many Sephardi immigrant men and women in which the transition from tradition to maternity took place.  And it is not surprising to see that maternity adopted an Argentine style, which, as I said in the introduction to this lecture, was in itself an influx, and it attempted to replicate European, French to be more exact, dictates.  Marriage was seen as the ideal state for women, and achieving that state was both a sign of honor, as well as the provider of it.  This was, of course, also a Jewish ideal.  But how that ideal was celebrated and publicized was in dialogue with the existing conventions of Argentine middle class respectability.  Israel Magazine published a section entitled, "Nuestras Novias," Our Brides.  Just for your information, there was no section called "Our Grooms," by the way, showing the centrality, right, of this status for the young ladies of the community.  The only other announcements in which we find women is when they finished their studies as teachers of music, teachers of piano, and sewing courses, right.  

Jewish marriage a la Argentina was always present in the pages of the Sephardi magazine, Israel, I mentioned above.  In it, we find marriage announcements in the social section of the magazine, in "La Sociales" [phonetic], that also listed births, trips to Europe, and other indications of social mobility, of prestige, like finishing studies or jobs.  And again, if you were to actually check Argentine newspapers, not Jewish, but Argentine newspapers, they would have the same section, "Notas Sociales," that included the same type of announcements about trips, about weddings, and about births.  In many issues, the written announcements were accompanied by photographs of the wedding itself, and sometimes of those were attended the ceremony and/or receptions.  Many of these weddings took place not in synagogues, but in other community buildings, as was the case of Leda and Jacobo, if you remember their picture, and in these, in this other ceremony, so they prepared the Chuppah elsewhere.  The wedding attire, and I'm going to just focus -- I know that some of the pictures are not very clear, but the wedding attire, as you can see from the pictures, is not the traditional type usually worn by women in the old countries.  Although modern clothes had been introduced in the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire and Northern Africa by the [inaudible] School halfway through the 19th century, almost all the picture that appeared in Israel showed local fashion style.  And if we were to compare, if you can just sort of perhaps glimpse at some of these dresses and then compare them with photographs of Argentine, not necessarily Jewish weddings, we can see that, you know, Jewish women are dressed in fashion.  There's two examples however, that I wanted to point out of two women dressed in traditional Moroccan wedding dresses that appeared in the same section in the magazine.  These dresses, however, were very elaborate and expensive dresses.  They have intricate gold designs in them, and they're made of very expensive black velvet, which suggests that they signaled a class position among Moroccan Jews.  Rather than perceive traditional clothes as backward, the dress, as worn by this woman, served to highlight class and status, even in modern Argentina.  

One of the most important changes that we see amongst Jewish marriages, and which my story suggested, is the appearance of love.  Well, my grandmother had to content herself with Jacobo, and many others entered marriage without even having met their future spouses.  Personal choice based on love entered the picture towards the end of this period that I'm looking at.  And while it is hard to make the argument that this was simply an Argentine phenomenon, as many societies underwent this change in gender relations and love, love came to be represented in Argentine stories available on the radio, mostly cinema, and novels.  And this, you know, really is a fertile terrain for research, and the little that has already been done can illuminate the ways in which Jews, in this case, but not just Jews, shaped their own understandings of marriage in conversation with Argentine conventions.  In the Argentine, in the magazine "Israel," there was a short section that appeared in the 19 -- beginning of the 1930s in which young men and women could write in with stories about those whom they loved.  These were usually comical pieces that anonymously described the object of their affection while hinting at the identity of the writer in the hopes of making their love known.  While it is true that this may not be defined as love by today's standards, I believe it speaks about a change regarding whose decision marriage was.  Increasingly, families, fathers really, were left out, and the children chose, whenever possible, partners on their own.  

I believe that Germani's theory of assimilation and cultural pluralism does not help me as conceived to understand the complexity I've described.  These stories assumed the existence of static identities that can be assimilated and/or preserved, chosen to be kept or thrown out, and incompatible with other types of belonging.  Even when we can see a higher proportion of endogamous marriages in the early decades of 20th century, these marriages are immersed in the modern local culture that was shaping gender roles, fashion statements, even class notions.  Sephardim may have married only those from the same town or region at first, and then, perhaps, Ashkenazi, but all the while, they were creating a Jewish Argentine identity.  Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Dr. Brodsky:  Yes.
>> Can you talk about the relative population of the Sephardi versus the Ashkenazi?  I mean, couldn't it be that there are just too few Sephardi by your parents' generation?  Did they have to marry Ashkenazi?
>> Dr. Brodsky:  The percentage of Sephardim was never larger -- I mean, Sephardi, all groups, right, was never larger than 10 percent of the whole Jewish population in Argentina.  I mean, you could argue that it should have been Ashkenazi needing to, you know -- I don't think that options in terms of numbers was necessarily what defined, you know, the need to marry one another.  But I think the birth of places and of identities that made this new generation see each other as similar, as sharing a lot, going to university, meeting in social clubs that were not necessarily defined by place of origin.  So, I mean, the numbers, I think, you know, are there, but there were other things.  Yes.
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[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:44:21
Right.  Great questions.  And I'm going to start by the end, because I think it's sort of, you know, ties onto the others.  Indeed, I have discovered in Argentina, in particular, the Syrian community, both from Aleppo and from Damascus, contributing to, for example, Syrian, Lebanese institutions in Argentina, but were not Jewish, right, so the construction of the Lebanese Syrian hospital, there is money that has been donated by Jews, right, to this particular, you know, fundraising event.  There's also marriage, I mean, partners in terms of people sitting in each other's boards in terms of institutions, banking institutions and financial institutions, but there's not a single wedding that you can actually find between.  So religion in that sense was a marker that defined, you know -- we can all see each other as part of the Syrian diaspora.  We can all actually see each other as part of the Damascus or Aleppo diaspora, and we share all these things, but we don't share our daughters, we don't share -- So I have not found evidence in which, you know, these other fluid connections between these people from the place of origin are sort of broken down when it comes to marriage, which I'm sure was the case back in, you know, in Aleppo or in Damascus, as well.  I completely agree with you in terms of the tendency or the risk here, right, of adopting an [inaudible] view and sort of imagining them as, you know, they're cohesive groups that, you know, monolithic, and I'll just make sure that I don't do that.  But locality, language, and customs, I think that whenever these groups are sort of settling in Buenos Aires, they sort of become very much immersed in one another.  And so, you know, Jews from [inaudible], the first to arrive from Morocco, and they settled their organizations, they create their organizations, they only help the 20s Jews until Jews from [inaudible] arrived and then they're slowly incorporated.  And so, I mean it's hard to, you know, it's hard not to think in terms of locality, because they themselves use it when defining themselves in terms of other Sephardi groups, or even within the Jewish community at large.  And, in fact, localities, sometimes it's very hard to ascertain because a lot of these marriage licenses do not actually record, you know, where they're from.  So unless, unless you're able to use other, you know, other variables, it's also very hard to do.  Latino and Arabic both are lost within the first generation.  The first generation, the Argentine-born Sephardim do not speak Latino and they do not speak Arabic.  They may understand it whenever it's being spoken, but they drop it.  And one of the reasons is that the Argentine-free state schools are educating all these children, and they are learning Spanish.  So they won't use it, even if they marry other, you know, Sephardi Jews from Syria, they don't talk amongst themselves in Arabic.  [Inaudible comment].  What?  [Inaudible comment].  They are, they are, and you know, the problem of Arabic is that Arabic gets dropped very quickly with the decision of a rabbi who, you know, deciding that rather than translating the Bible into Arabic, that it should be better to translate it into the language of the land, which is Spanish, and/or Hebrew, right.  So Hebrew becomes, ultimately if you think about, Hebrew becomes the oath language that, kind of could be shared by all these kids that are going to Jewish schools, Sephardim, not Ashkenazi, right, because Ashkenazi are speaking Yiddish, which is another problem.  Yes.  Let me just move over here.
>> Can you give us a sense of what, do you know what percentage of marriages are outside [inaudible], or, you know, [inaudible]?
>> Dr. Brodsky:  I wish I could, but the Argentine government doesn't let you look at the records that are less than 100 years old, so we are very limited in having access to that.  But that is, that is a fantastic question, you know.  The Jewish community started carrying out these internal demographic studies to try to assess the degree of assimilation into Argentine society, and you know, one of the figures, one of the key figures that they look at is who's married a non-Jew.  And again, those are only possible to people that are still alive, and you can ask them, they can fill out; if you go to the beginning of the 20th century, you cannot do that.  So I wish I could.  There are saying that the percentage is rather large right now, so.  Yes.  Yes.
^M00:49:56
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:50:10
You want the gossip [laughing].
^M00:50:14
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:50:23
>> This is a great feud between my cousin and myself, because my cousin, well, for whatever reason my grandmother, so publicly announcing that Jacobo was not the love of her life.  But her, the way, you know, and this story, of course, I learned after Jacobo had been dead.  She just said, you know, because I asked her, so how did you feel, you know.  Jacobo, she said, you know, he was a good man.  I knew that he would be a good father.  He was a good man.  And it seemed like in those days that was good enough, right.  Perhaps she would have preferred, right, I mean.  I don't know to what degree she would have been ready to, you know, to sort of leave her family behind and marry the Maestro, but to her, the fact that Jacobo was a good man was good enough, right.  So she never really expressed a complete dissatisfaction, I don't think.
^M00:51:25
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:51:54
You're asking whether it sort of, Argentina, the Jewish community was exceptional in how, in terms of gender relations when it came to marriage than the rest of --
^M00:52:07
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:52:21
Well, love, you know, sort of appears and begins to sort of, you know, shape, right, how not only the genders are sort of relating to each other, but also how generations are, you know, relating to each other, right.  And so ultimately I think that my mother could never have imagined, you know, my grandfather agreeing, right, to something that was so clearly against his wishes.  And my mother, perhaps, could have cared less at her point.  But I think that that is not exclusive, and that was my point about, you know, these are not just Jewish elements sort of coming into play here, but they're just societal issues at large that are influencing even, you know, why not, I mean, not even even.  I mean just Jewish, Jewish women, right, that are sort of giving them other options done in the past.  Yes.
^M00:53:15
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:55:06
There's a very, very small percentage of Italian Jews that come to Argentina.  And they tended to participate for religious purposes, for ritual purposes and social purposes with the Ottoman Jews, with the Jews, Ottoman Jews, of the Ottoman -- I have to explain -- the Ottoman Jews coming from present day Turkey, from Smyrna, from Constantinople.  That's the group that they sort of attached themselves to.  They don't find, they don't create their own institutions, because their numbers are so small.  And again, the issue of intermarriage between Italian Jews and Italians, that's something that, again, we would not be able to look at since we're not allowed into the archives, into the sort of Argentine registry of [inaudible].  My hunch is that you won't find many many, that's my hunch, at the very beginning.  And then if you do, my contention is that they themselves feel their Italian is very different from the way in which their parents felt it, and so, I mean it sort of varies, I think in that sense, right.  The argument I'm making is that my parents were Argentine, so children of Italian immigrants would have perhaps also felt that way.  I think that, I mean, you're bringing up an interesting question, but nationalism and sort of this idea of national identity are very different things.  And one could argue that, you know, there was an attempt given a variety of, you know, political crisis to instigate on the part of nationalist groups, to instigate and to foster, right, a sort of a sense of national, national identity which comes at times of political crisis.  I don't necessarily, I'm not saying that my parents are walking around flagging, you know, sort of moving their, they're waving their Argentine flags, but that, I'm sort of, it's a more subtle way of feeling Argentine, by sort of becoming immersed in the cultural reality in which they are living.  So I think that I may be talking about something slightly different, I think than a sort of a declared sense and strongly felt understanding of themselves as truly Argentines and nothing else, which you could find from these nationalist groups in the 30s, and then later on in the 60s who are attacking actually Jews.  And so Jews and nationalism, you know, that relationship is never really a very good one.  You know, Jews, are very, very, wary of nationalist groups because nationalist groups don't want anybody who's not Catholic, you know, in Argentina.
^M00:58:14
[ Pause ]
^M00:58:19
>> All right, folks, I know there's probably going to be more questions, and our speaker will be here.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.
^M00:58:33