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Private Life and Identity Construction: Memories of Immigrant Jews in Uruguay

2009; Routledge; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17442220802681472

1744-2230

Teresa Porzecanski,

Jewish Identity and Society

Abstract On the basis of biographical accounts and interviews, this article examines the processes of identity construction in the private lives of Uruguay's immigrant Jews. It is argued that the integration of the Jewish immigrants into Uruguayan society did not take the form of automatic dissolution in a social and cultural ‘melting pot.’ Instead, the Jews recreated their identity on the basis of the autonomy that they were able to exercise in their private sphere. In the process, they came to occupy a distinctive place of their own as a minority within the national society. Keywords: Jewish immigrantsUruguayprivate lifeidentity constructiontransculturation Notes Notes [1] Ashkenazi Jews (Ashkenazim in Hebrew, Ashkenazíes in Spanish) trace their ancestry to Jewish communities in medieval Germany. Many Ashkenazi Jews later migrated, largely eastward, forming communities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. They took with them Yiddish, their Germanic Jewish language, customs and institutions that provided the basis of a Ashkenazi Jewish cultural tradition that had its center of gravity in Eastern and Central Europe. Today Ashkenazi Jews represent about 80 per cent of all Jews worldwide. [2] Sephardic Jews (Sephardim in Hebrew, Sefarditas in Spanish) are the descendants of Jews who lived in Spain or Portugal before the expulsion of 1492. While some accepted conversion to Catholicism, the majority moved away, mostly to the Ottoman Empire, which included Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and the Arab lands of the Middle East and North Africa. The exiles took with them Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of the Jews of Spain, which was preserved in Turkey and the European regions of the Ottoman Empire, but was largely replaced by Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa. Today Sephardic Jews represent about 20 per cent of all Jews worldwide. [3] Responding to the unfavorable conditions created by economic crises, political violence, and military dictatorship, many Uruguayan Jewish families emigrated to Israel and other countries during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, it was estimated that the Jewish community had shrunk to about 24,000 (Reicher et al., 2007, pp. 424–426). [4] A book-length study based on the interviews compiled in the volumes of the Centro de Estudios Judaicos was published in 1986 and revised into an expanded second edition in 1988 (Porzecanski, Citation1986, Citation1988). [5] See Gilbert (Citation1978, pp. 71–72, 96–97). Before the French Revolution and the subsequent Jewish emancipation, European cities made segregated ‘neighborhoods’ for Jews, as in the case of the juderías, aljamas and Gettos in medieval Spain, Portugal and Italy. In the 19th century, the Czarist regime in Russia defined a ‘pale of settlement’ to which Jewish communities were confined. In the occupied cities and towns of World War II, the German Nazi state concentrated the Jews in ‘ghettos.’ [6] Interview with David Werbsky, Montevideo, April 1996. [7] Interview with David Werbsky, Montevideo, April 1996. [8] The most notorious case was the Zvi Migdal, an organization of Jewish gangsters who specialized in prostitution and trafficking of women from Eastern Europe. Its main center was Buenos Aires and, in its heyday during the 1920s, it had contacts and branches in many other cities, including Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Santos, New York, and Warsaw (Mirelman, Citation1987; Londres, Citation1927). [9] Interview with David Werbsky, Montevideo, April 1996.