The Jewish Working Class of Buenos Aires, 1905-1930

WALTER L. KOPPMANN

Moscú

Congreso; 27th International Conference on Jewish Studies; 2021

Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) y Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization

The aim of this paper is to analyse the history of the Jewish workers immigration that arrived at Buenos Aires during the period 1905-1930. My main goal is to contribute to the study of the Jewish working class, its links with the left political cultures and the forms that the urban experience took in the context of capitalist modernization. This project represents a continuity of my doctoral research and it is part of my postdoctoral research, within the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). Attending to the ethnical particularities of the Jewish community, one of the principal obstacles to carry out this research was the access to primary sources written in the Yiddish language in addition to the knowledge of this language?s specific expression in the Global South at the historical time, from which it results the ?Castídish? (CastilianCastilianCasti/Spanish plus Yiddish). Moreover, many of the documents, journals and personal archives related to that first period of the Jewish immigration in Argentina were burnt in the AMIA?s attack, in 1994, while other materials were simply lost or destroyed, in the absence of policies or projects regarding their protection. In the last few years, however, the role played by the IWO Foundation of Buenos Aires and the ?Pinnie Katz? Centre of Studies should be highlighted, for their staff has gathered and recovered documents and other key elements, such as letters, photos or personal diaries. Within the field of Jewish studies, with a few notable exceptions in the 1980s, this type of research has rarely been undertaken. Therefore, either because of the difficulties of Yiddish understanding or due to the availability of primary sources, we are almost obliged to study the Jewish workers through the eyes of the non-Jewish labourers, hence, to cross this information with the scarce data belonging to the Yiddish archives. In this sense, the main sources for our research came from the socialist and anarchist journals -La Vanguardia and La Protesta, respectively-; the different workers? and trade unions? press; state archives like the National Labor Department and the General National Archive of Argentina; and specialised literature. The daily frequency of publication of both La Vanguardia and La Protesta, make these two newspapers unique and indispensable materials to deepen the study of workers? subjectivities through accounts of their day-to-day experiences as well as of labour and social conflicts. This paper is focused on four dimensions within the Jewish working class: the labour market and the main trades they practiced (woodworking, tailoring, baking; among others); labour struggle and trade unionism (either joining the established unions or creating new ones, the fahrein); political organisation and militant trajectories; ídishkait background. To examine these two last aspects, we must take into account the political networks and the global flows flux of peoples and objects through the continents. In other words, we must adopt a transnational insight that could link the experience from the Global South with the European countries.