The contours of identity: Sephardic Jews and the construction of Jewish communities in Argentina, 1880 to the present.

This dissertation explores the emergence of an Argentine Jewish identity through the study of the Sephardic minorities that settled in that country. Home to one of the largest Jewish communities outside Israel, Argentina received large numbers of both Ashkenazim and Sephardim starting in 1880s. The Sephardim who settled in Argentina came mostly from Morocco, Damascus and Aleppo, and Turkey. With cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions distinct from the Ashkenazic majority, each of these Sephardic groups founded their own cemeteries, philanthropic and religious organizations from the 1880s to the 1920s. During this stage, these Sephardic communities sought to preserve their own distinctive cultural and religious practices vis-a-vis each other and the Yiddish Ashkenazic majority.This early picture of fragmentation changed, however, during the interwar years and especially after World War II and the creation of the state of Israel. At that point, the Sephardim were able to create a new identity partly because Zionist ideology opened up social, political and cultural spaces that did not conflict with national diasporic Jewish identities. Sephardic participation in the movement allowed for the emergence, by the 1960s, of a more inclusive Sephardic identity which, although premised upon becoming Argentine Jews, did not erase the particularities of each Sephardic geographical community; they had become Argentine Jews who were also Sephardic .Drawing on oral sources, the dissertation moves beyond institutional history to explore the actual lived contours of identity. In focusing on food and female philanthropic organizations, the dissertation explores the specificity of Sephardic women's role in the reconfiguration of Jewish communities' identities. Sephardic women, marginalized from participation in religious organizations, used these activities to promote community preservation. Down to the present, women's influence over these mundane tasks places them at the center of identity formation, a process which involved interaction with other Sephardic, Ashkenazic and Argentine cultural practices. Fusing archival sources with my own personal journey of discovery, this study ends with an analysis of family photographs that allows one to explore the visual narrative of identity constructed by the author's Sephardic relatives.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duke University, 2004.School code: 0066