Moya - Positive Side of Stereotypes

The Positive Side of Stereotypes: Jewish Anarchists in Early-Twentieth-Century Buenos Aires Author(s): Jose C.
Moya Source: Jewish History, Vol. 18, No. 1, Gender, Ethnicity, and Politics: Latin American Jewry Revisited (2004), pp. 19-48 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20100922 . Accessed: 29/08/2013 17:00
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II'
Ill.
Jewish History 18:
2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
19-48, 2004.
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The positive side of stereotypes: Jewish anarchists in early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires
JOSE C . MOYA
E-mail:
UCLA, Department ofHistory, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A. moya@ucla.edu
Abstract. During the late 1 9th century and the beginning of the 20th, anarchism represented
the most important faction of the radical left in the Atlantic world. This movement attracted a disproportionately high number of Jews. During the same period Buenos Aires became both an important magnet for Jewish immigration and one of the main centers of anarchist activism in the world. This article shows how the Jewish presence in the anarchist movement of the city became, in an amazingly short time and almost ex nihilo, so visible that it turned into a stereotype. The article then attempts to provide an explanation for this phenomenon that relies on a sociological and comparative perspective and questions notions of Jewish exceptionalism and arguments based on the eschatology and ethics of Judaism. Finally, it explores how stereo types that function at one level as signifiers of alterity and mechanisms of exclusion, can, at another social level, promote acceptance and check anti-Semitism.
During the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Jews were often imaged through the paradoxical stereotypes of compulsive capitalists and anti-capitalist radicals . The contradiction lay mainly at the conceptual level. Functionally, both images served, literally, to decenter, that is, to exclude from the mainstream and locate on the margins . 1 Thus the capitalist stereo type rarely included notions or figures that connoted normality or respectabil ity (production, ownership, investment, middle-class, corporate, the "busi ness community," industrialists, entrepreneurs) . Instead, Jews were usually assigned the extreme roles of petty peddlers or big-time financiers, which, again despite the apparent gap, share implications of unproductivity, prof iteering, chicanery, and alterity. Similarly, the anti-capitalist image rarely included forms - like populism, nativism, economic nationalism, and anti colonial struggles - perceived as homegrown and autochthonous . It stressed instead otherness and subversion, and few movements fitted the bill as suit ably as anarchism. 2 Stereotypes, of course, are more than mere instruments of exclusion. They can also function as cognitive mechanisms that handle bewildering diversity by organizing knowledge into formulas that, although simplified, reflect real traits. 3 Yet finding out the degree to which the Jewish anarchist stereotype represented this type of generalization is not an easy task. There is little in formation about Jewish participation in anarchist activities in regions (such as
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North Africa and the Middle East) where they were numerous and the move ment small or, conversely, in places (such as Spain, Italy, and S witzerland) where the movement was widespread and the Jewish population small. Given the fact that most of the evidence on the topic comes from impressionistic observations by contemporaries rather than from quantitative comparisons of the participation of different ethnic groups, it would be precisely in these two situations that any exceptional Jewish predisposition toward anarchism would become more apparent. That is, a few remarks by contemporary observers about Jewish involvement in the anarchist movement would be much more significant if made about, say, Cairo or Rome rather than Warsaw or New York. We have more information for places where both the Jewish population and the anarchist movement were important. As stated above, these studies rarely include data that actually show Jewish under- or over-representation. But using qualitative sources they have shown what seems to be a remark ably high level of participation among the Ashkenazim. Various historians have asserted that in Russia the anarchist movement was born and attained its highest intensity in the Jewish towns of the western and southwestern borderlands . 4 From the towns and shtetls of the Pale, emigrants took this militancy to the ghettos of European and American cities. In London's East End they founded in 1 885 the Arbeter Fraynd, apparently the first Yiddish anarchist newspaper, which by 1 905 reached a circulation of 5,000, and a federation of Jewish anarchist associations in 1 902. Scholars have offered diverging assessments of the relative importance of these institutions.5 But they were active and visible enough to convince the well-known German gentile anarchist Rudolf Rocker to learn Yiddish and become the editor of Der Arbeter Fraynd and the community's principal leader.6 A similar, although apparently less numerous, community existed in Paris . 7 Rocker himself first learned about the existence of Jewish anarchists while living there. 8 The community of Jewish anarchists in New York' s Lower East Side developed a few years later than London' s but eventually surpassed it in importance. Another German goy, the fiery Johann Most, became an early apostle for immigrant anarchists . 9 But Russian Jews soon developed a leadership that came to transcend the immigrant milieu. 1 0 By the early decades o f the twentieth century, Jews, along with Italians, had replaced Germans and Bohemians as the mainstay of the anarchist movement in the urban centers of the East Coast and the Mid-West. 1 1 Buenos Aires offers an appropriate case to study this international phe nomenon. By the outbreak of World War I, the city had become the second largest metropolis in the Atlantic World, after New York, and probably the second most important center of anarchist activism, after B arcelona; 1 2 and
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it boasted a large and expanding Jewish population ( 1 6,500 in 1 909 and 1 20, 1 77 by 1 936) . 1 3 Temporally, the most salient feature of Jewish radicalism in Argentina is its belated appearance one or two decades later than in London or New York. Although one can find isolated pioneers, like the German socialist Augusto Kuhn, one of the organizers of the first May Day celebration in 1 890, and his better-known comrade Enrique Dickman, Jews were noticeably absent from the local radical scene until the middle years of the first decade of the twentieth century. A 1902 police registry of 66 1 anarchists included 3 89 Italians, 149 Spaniards, and 2 1 Frenchmen, but only one Russian, and he does not appear to be Jewish. 1 4 None appears either before 1 904 in a database of some 3 ,500 anarchists and labor militants that I have constructed from various sources. Iaacov Oved does not mention any in his thorough book that goes up to the same year, and neither do other studies.15 The principal reason for such belated appearance is the timing of Jewish arrival in Argentina. Jewish transatlantic migration in general, with the ex ception of sporadic crossings of Sephardim during the colonial period and of German streams from the middle of the nineteenth century, forms part of the "new" migrations out of Eastern and Southern Europe that began, around 1 880, some decades after the "old" waves from the western and northern regions of the continent. But unlike Italian migration, which acquired massive dimensions in Argentina before it did so in the U.S . , the Jewish movement to South America takes off even later than to the North. By 1 890 only 5 , 160 immigrants had arrived in Argentina from the Russian empire, the principal source of the Jewish exodus at the time, compared to a quarter of a million to the U . S . The next decade 1 7 ,466 headed for Argentina and half a million for the U . S . The yearly flow to Argentina first surpassed 1 0,000 in 1905 and the bulk of the immigrants from Russia ( 14 1 ,000) arrived between the beginning of the century and the outbreak of World War 1. 16 Moreover, much of the early Jewish settlement in Argentina took place in organized agricultural colonies so that as late as 1 887, there were only 289 Jews in Buenos Aires. 1 7 This relatively late arrival did not stop Jews from a precocious, and domi nant, participation in a different sort of "antisocial" activity. Of 164 pimps in a police file of 1 893-1 894, no less than 1 2 1 (74%) and as many as 1 50 (92% ) were Jewish. 1 8 The relationship o f this group, and others like them, to com mon immigration is not clear. Unlike most immigrants, who tended to come from specific localities through chain migration mechanisms, they formed a motley crew originating in nineteen different countries . 1 9 The linkages that made possible such an extensive international network differed from those of common immigrants in that they clearly could not have been based primarily on hometown and kinship relations. But some local clusters existed. Sixteen
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were born in Constantinople, fifteen in Warsaw, ten in Odessa, nine in Vienna, eight in London. Intriguingly, all those born in Turkey had Ashkenazic, rather than Sephardic, surnames, which suggests family ties with Eastern Europe. Nine pairs shared surnames . More than half were married and half of these had been in Argentina for more than five years, suggesting the existence of family connections. About a dozen had arrived in the 1 870s, making them veritable pioneers of Jewish immigration in Argentina. It is indeed likely that many of them played that role: that through letters, remittances, and visits they sent to their hometowns and families the information and assistance that made later immigration, and thus the growth of Argentine Jewish anarchism, possible. Was this the only possible connection between Jewish prostitution rings and anarchism? Unlike orthodox Marxism, which viewed the proletariat as the only revolutionary class, anarchism embraced all sorts of marginal groups . The mere titles o f newspapers illustrate such a difference. Instead o f the usual "Worker" or "Proletariat" of socialist newspapers, anarchists every where used a broad array of titles that connoted inclusiveness: Universal [Moscow] , Mother Earth [New York] , El Oprimido [The Opressed- B uenos Aires, New York, and Algeciras, Spain] , fl Grido def Popolo [The Cry of the People - Turin] , El Esclavo [The Slave - Tampa, Florida] , Espartaco [Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro] , Los Parias [Lima] , A Plebe [Sao Paulo] . The embrace was ample enough to include the lumpenproletariat, petty delin quents, and ruffians (a term that, coincidentally, retained in Argentina its original French/Italian meaning of pimp) . Anarchist rhetoric elevated, instead of disdaining or dismissing, as socialists normally did, the "dregs of society." An editorial published in Spanish, Italian, and French by one of the earliest anarchist papers in Buenos Aires on its first issue in 1 890 and titled "Who are we and what will we do," phrased it this way : "We are the vagrants, the malefactors, the rabble, the scum of society, the sublimate corrosive of the present social order." 20 This may have reflected the anarchist penchant for shocking rhetoric. But the police consistently maintained that anarchist demonstrations, unlike their socialist counterparts, attracted all sorts of "an tisocial elements" that were not part of the movement or marginally related to it. Common delinquents often couched their activities in the language of anarchism and hung around anarchist centers. Police raids of anarchists at times included petty criminals and pimps. During normal times, they identi fied the putative offense of those apprehended. But in 1 909- 1 9 1 0 the raids became so massive that they stopped doing this, making it difficult at times to differentiate between anarchists and pimps among the hundreds of individuals being arrested in the Jewish quarter. S ome pimps were deported along with
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the more than three hundred anarchists who were expelled from Argentina during the first decade of the twentieth century. W hy would the authorities pick only these few specific pimps for depor tation? Could it be that they had some relationship with anarchism? Some documents suggest this was so. A week after the passage of the Residency Law, which allowed the deportation of dangerous foreigners, on November 23, 1 902, the police contacted a "person from the Jewish community" who confidentially gave information about three characters that had applied for Argentine citizenship. According to him or her, the first individual ran a pros titution house, the second "imported women for prostitution," and the third had given up pimping and now imported lamps instead of women. The repen tant pimp, however, appeared three years later in a police list of anarchists. 21 These schemes to avoid deportation by procuring naturalization papers were, according the British ambassador, quite common among "undesirables, es pecially pimps and anarchists." 22 A 1 905 internal report by the Argentine police connected anarchism and prostitution at a different level. It warned that almost every day new anarchist groups appeared "with thundering names befitting their violent mission." They were made up by a "foreign, demagogic, and seditious element that fuel the conflagration they have already provoked by making the apotheosis of crime and prostitution as integral parts of human emancipation." 2 3 A British diplomatic dispatch of 1 909 suggested an even closer connection between pimps and anarchists. It stated: His Majesty ' s Consul received one [a letter] some days ago purport ing to have been issued by an Anarchistical [sic] Society, warning him that he has been condemned to be blown up by means of a bomb within the year, because he has not rendered sufficiently energetic assistance to Russians, bearers of British passports. The letter says that he is to be blown up "by means of one of the bombs now in circulation, one of which is intended for the President of the Republic ." It is possible that the letter is a hoax, but it has been placed in the hands of the police, and the foundation of the charge may exist in the fact that two Russians, bearers of British passports, and believed to be connected with the White Slave traffic have been arrested recently. 24 The "Russians" turned out to be English-born Jews, and two weeks later an other report informed the Home Office that seven of them, expelled as pimps, were aboard the S . S .R. de Grimonllie on their way to London. 25 The matter reached the highest levels of government, involving Secretary of State Sir Ed ward Grey and Winston Churchill. 26 The British authorities worried that the
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Argentine Government may "make a practice of sending to this country any one whom they wish to expel and who says he was born here." They observed that the names of those expelled were "foreign" and wanted to know how the Argentine authorities ascertained their birthplace. 2 7 The Argentine Foreign Minister, Victorino de la Plaza, responded that his government tried to verify the nationality of deportees with documents that certified their birthplace, and that when these were not available, it relied on their own declarations, double checking them, whenever possible, through other investigations. 28 Such con cern at the highest level of government suggests that, regardless of whether the anarchist letter was a hoax, it was taken seriously. Foreign Ministers and heads of state do not usually become involved in cases concerning a few common pimps. About the same time, the French embassy in Argentina also informed its government of the expulsion of a French Jewish anarchist as a pimp and a thief; and the French Minister of the Interior called for collabora tion between the police forces of the two countries to repress anarchism and white slavery. 29 One may wonder whether the Argentine police was simply trying to tar nish the anarchist movement by associating it with prostitution. But the fact they did so in internal memos that were never made public indicates that this was not the case. Indeed, they had no incentive to do so. The expulsion law of 1 902 specifically targeted anarchists. And, after two assassination attempts on Argentine presidents, a successful one on the Chief of Police, and a string of bombs that killed several police officers, "anarchist" was definitely a more damming tag in their eyes - and in those of the upper and middle classes than "pimp." The connection between Jewish prostitution rings and anarchism, how ever, was neither consequential nor mutual. That is, some pimps may have gravitated toward a movement that was a constant presence in the working class neighborhoods of the city, including the Jewish quarter of "Once," and an ideology that denounced bourgeois morality and self-righteousness. In deed, anarchism's contempt for social conventions and decorum must have had a natural appeal for a group that has traditionally represented, more so than prostitutes, quintessential ignominy in conventional propriety. But the reverse was not true. Although anarchists, and other revolutionaries, have at times engaged in criminal activities or established ties with criminal groups to raise funds for the cause, there is no such evidence in this case. Even xeno phobic writers, such as Francisco Stach, who denounced Jewish immigration ("the so-called Rusos") as "the most undesirable element, full of anarchists, pimps, and prostitutes all capable of criminal acts," did not maintain that for mal ties existed between the first and the last two groups . 30 Some anarchists, particularly of the individualist or Nietzschean type, did dismiss condemna-
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tions of prostitution as strait-laced and pharisaical, as one more example of liberal society 's inability to accept individual freedom and difference when it truly conflicted with accepted mores. But the majority shared the com mon view - expressed by the entire ideological spectrum from conservative Catholics to socialists - of prostitutes as victims and pimps as exploiters. Anarchist apologies for delinquency embraced crimes directed at the power elite and property (for example, assassinations of political leaders or theft, defended as expropriation) but not those that victimized the dispossessed. Pimping was usually placed in the latter category. The Dreyfus affair provided the background for the first, and a very dif ferent, expression of common interest between anarchists and the Jewish community in Buenos Aires. As in France itself, many anarchists originally viewed the affair as a dispute within the bourgeoisie and hesitated to support an army officer. But as it became evident that Dreyfus ' denouncers repre sented a fusion of just about every group abhorred by internationalist rad icals, their support for Dreyfus became unequivocal. In an article of Au gust 1 5 , 1 899 titled "Montjuich Dreyfus," the newspaper El Rebelde blamed the same block of forces for the "infamies" committed against anarchists in the infamous B arcelona prison and against Dreyfus : national chauvinism, "military-bourgeois corruption," and the "Jesuit reaction." It urged the people of B arcelona and Paris to demand justice with "chemistry." The allusion to bombs was clear to readers but the fact that the front-page article appeared next to an eulogy to S ato Caserio (the assassin of French President S adi Carnot) made it more poignant. In subsequent denunciations, the newspaper began to group the anti-Dreyfus "dark forces" under the generic rubric of "antisemitas."3 1 Another anarchist newspaper in Buenos Aires, L' Avvenire, maintained that as a people driven by a sense of justice rather than politics, an archists had supported Dreyfus long before political opportunists jumped on the Dreyfusist bandwagon. 3 2 A subsequent article titled "L' Antisemitismo" argued that this movement, despite its name, could not spring from racial animosity, since Jews had mixed with other Europeans for so long that there was little "Semitic" or racially distinct about them. 33 Instead, the article lo cated the source of anti-Semitism in religious obscurantism and its modem reincarnation: patriotism. Capitalists manipulated these superstitions to use a historically-persecuted people as scapegoats for popular resentment and to weaken workers ' solidarity. Anarchists thus had the duty to illuminate the people and prevent such stratagems. Three years later, when news of Emile Zola's death, on October 16, 1 902, reached Buenos Aires, labor unions orga nized a meeting in his memory. Four to five thousand people marched through the city ' s streets. The French ambassador noted the irony that while anarchists speakers, who "claimed Zola as one of their own," stressed the anti-religiosity
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of his oeuvre, a funeral service was held at a synagogue in recognition of his successful intervention in the Dreyfus affair.34 Jewish anarchist activism in the city became more visible in 1 905. In Rus sia, the outbreak of revolution in January of that year produced an upsurge of both anarchist militancy and official repression. More so than the pogroms of 1 903 , which were generically anti-Semitic and attracted limited attention from the international left, those of 1 905 targeted radicals specifically and shocked revolutionaries everywhere.3 5 Anarchists in particular felt that the B loody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg would be avenged by the dispos sessed and lead to their long awaited, and apocalyptic, S ocial Revolution. Police spies in Buenos Aires reported a rush of activity in anarchist circles .36 On January 26, the group Caballeros del Ideal organized a meeting that "packed the house." Orators, according to the informer, outdid each other in threatening that "the dagger and sweet dynamite" would soon avenge their fallen Russian comrades . In the midst of the "pandemonium characteristic of these anarchist gatherings," they called for a street demonstration two days later for workers to engage in "revolutionary gymnastics." There, the Uruguayan anarchist Virginia B olten denounced Czarist atrocities and com pared the Argentine government to the Russian autocracy - a rhetorical device that became a leitmotiv of anarchist discourse. That same day, five thousand people marched in B olten's hometown, Montevideo, to denounce the Russian massacre.3 7 On February 2, four hundred leaders [cabecillas] met in Buenos Aires. One of them called for another street demonstration, urging his com rades to go armed, so that they could take target-practice on the police - an idea dismissed by the next speaker who questioned the "need for handguns today, when chemistry is readily available to the entire proletariat." Two days later an attempted military revolt, the only one to occur between 1 890 and 1 930, put a temporary hold on the planned demonstration and on all leftist militancy. The Radical Party, which orchestrated the uprising, was despite its name, which indicated going back to "roots" rather than extremism - a mainstream organization that would win the presidency eleven years later. But rumors had it that the Radicals planned to arm socialists and anarchists during the revolt. Three days after the outbreak of the revolt, the Argentine president himself told the British ambassador that bombs had been found in anarchist centers and that the anarchists had planned to seize the arsenal, break open the prisons, and capture him and his ministers, describing the sit uation as "tres grave." 38 The leftist press - and most historians - later denied such a connection. But regardless of whether it existed, it would not have been out of character for a group thirsting for "direct action" to take advantage of the situation. B ands of armed anarchists roamed the streets hoping to tum a bourgeois revolt into a revolutionary upheaval. Authorities clamped down,
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arresting hundreds and deporting twenty-five. 3 9 Although the revolt was put down in less than a week, the state of siege lasted more than three months, preventing street demonstrations, including those on May Day itself. Under cover of the apparent calm, anarchists continued their activism within the city (indoor meetings were actually not prohibited during the state of siege), from exile in Montevideo, and- as the authorities later discovered even from within prison. On May 14th alone they held twenty-four meetings at labor union halls and called for a street demonstration on May 2 1 st to protest the abuses committed by the government during the state of siege, a proposal that the socialists j oined. The authorities granted the permit under condition that no flags other than the "national emblem that unites us all" might be waved. Not a group likely to be moved by such patriotic appeals, many among the thirty thousand marchers raised their red and black banners. When the police tried to prevent this, the marchers responded with shouts of "down with the Cossacks," again revealing the impact of the 1 905 Russian Revolution, and with something more lethal than words. Who began the shooting was, as usual, disputed.40 But the result provides some evidence of Jews' participation in the movement during a period when their recent arrival and inability to write in Spanish led to their presence going unrecorded in common historical sources such as newspapers. Three of the fourteen persons wounded (other than four police officers), and one of the two killed, were Jewish.4 1 Because it is highly unlikely that in the midst of the turmoil, the police would, or could, have aimed their guns at Jews, a group that was not physically distinguishable from other protesters, the numbers must be random. This does not mean that because a fourth of the casualties were Jewish this proportion applies to all the demonstrators. The shooting took place in Plaza Lavalle, a neighborhood where many of the early Jewish arrivals had settled.42 Two of the wounded were merely nine years old and all claimed they were there by coincidence. On the other hand, neither the definition nor the meaning of childhood was the same a century ago as it is today. Nine-year-old "children" often worked, spent a larger proportion of their time on the streets, and participated in "adult" activities . Contempo rary photographs often show young boys and girls in street demonstrations . And all the wounded, Jewish or not, claimed that they were at the site by coincidence. It would have been odd had they told the authorities otherwise, incriminating themselves in the shooting of police. Thus the ethnicity of the casualties may indeed indicate a relatively high Jewish presence in local an archism already by 1 905. A newspaper in Montevideo, edited by an anarchist expelled from Argentina, alluded to this connection with the following line: "Exiles, tortured, hanged, victims of San Petersburg and Warsaw : add to the black list the name of Buenos Aires ! "43
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Police reports provide further evidence of the Jewish presence in the move ment in 1 905.44 Among those arrested at the May 2 1 st demonstration was Julio Herschenbaum, a 23-year old, Russian-born furniture-maker who had arrived in 1 903 and - failing to "withdraw from subversive activities," as he had promised authorities in 1 904 - became the first Jewish anarchist de ported from Argentina. Another of the protesters, David Bernstein, a 24-year old day-laborer who had arrived right after the Russian B loody Sunday of January 1 905 via Hamburg, this time evaded authorities, but five years later, he was expelled. On September 29, Jose Weisman, a 33-year old stevedore and j ournalist from Trieste, appeared as an orator with other anarchists at a conference in the Centro Escuela Moderna, a school organized on the prin ciples of the famous Catalan anarchist pedagogue Francisco Ferrer, and later that same day, at a reunion of the store clerks ' union. On October 6, Bernardo Sernaguer, a 2 1 -year old Russian-born immigrant described by the police as a particularly exalted and eloquent anarchist, addressed a group of rent strikers. Twenty days later, anarchists turned a funeral march for a comrade shot dur ing the rent strike into an occasion to "vituperate the Russian government for the massacre of Jews." In December, detectives reported on meetings of the Sociedad Rusa de Desarrollo Intellectual y de Socorros Mutuos, described as non-subversive, which must be the Yiddisher Arbeter-Farband, a mutual aid society founded in 1 896, and of the Agrupaci6n Rusa Amigo de los Obreros, described as anarchist. The latter must be the Arbeter Fend, a group founded in 1 905 by immigrants who had been in London and influenced there by Peter Kropotkin and Rudolf Rocker.45 The cover for the December 2, 1 905 issue of Caras y Caretas, the mag azine with the largest circulation in Buenos Aires, offers a different sort of evidence about the impact of the Russian Revolution of that year and the in creased arrival of Jewish anarchists. Under the caption "Los Inmigrantes," the illustration shows a line of long-haired and bearded immigrants disembarking from a ship. On the dock, a police officer watches with surprise while a figure with a top hat representing Argentina or its president exclaims : "Onward, Russian gentlemen. Come in, you will find yourselves right at home." The first Russian on the line holds a suitcase stamped Odesa-Buenos Aires with one hand, and a bomb in the other. The arrest on March 2, 1 906 of twenty-two Jewish anarchists for carrying weapons provides a rare, though incomplete, demographic portrait of activists during this period.46 All were listed as being born in Russia (although one appears in a different document with "Israel" as his birthplace) . Their ages reflected the youthful character of the movement. The youngest was sixteen, the oldest thirty-four, and the median age twenty-three. Their place of res idence, however, diverged from the norm. While most anarchists resided in
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the southern districts of the city, particularly in the heavily Italian and Spanish neighborhoods of La Boca and Barracas, all but two of the Jewish anarchist arrested lived in the older Jewish neighborhood of Plaza Lavalle or in the Jewish quarter then forming to the north of Plaza Once. This suggests their recent arrival in the country and reflects the fact that Jews, with a segregation index of 47 .5, were at the time the most segregated group in the city after the Sirio-Lebanese (SI 49) . Although these indices were high, it must be noted that they were lower than those of the Jewish population in North American cities, London, and Paris, and that they declined faster.47 In 1906 a Zionist-Socialist organization, the Poale Sion, was founded in Buenos Aires. Its two leaders, Zalman Sorkin and Leon Jazanovich were denounced as anarchists and expelled in 1 9 1 0. But neither had been active in the anarchist movement, and Jazanovich, who had been a member of the Socialist Party in Russia, felt that the denunciation had come from the Jewish Colonization Association, which he had battled in his efforts to radicalize Jewish agricultural settlers.4 8 The relationship of Jewish anarchists with this association is difficult to determine. The Italian historian Furio Biagini claims that some of the anarchists "developed a sincere sympathy for the socialist Zionism of the Poale Sion."49 Anarchists considered themselves the true so cialists, often describing themselves as revolutionary- or libertarian-socialists as opposed to the "legalitarian" or "authoritarian" socialists of the Party. They constantly denounced the Socialist Party's reformism and participation in parliamentary politics and competed with socialists for the allegiance of the working class. But they also cooperated with them, and with other progres sive groups, in the struggle against common enemies. On April 15, 1 906, for example, the Liberal Party organized an anti-clerical demonstration attended by about three thousand persons. The police noted the presence of social ists and particularly of anarchist agitators who sang revolutionary songs and shouted "viva la anarqufa . . . down with the police . . . lets burn the convents" [which they attempted to do] . 50 Interestingly, the protest took place in the Jewish neighborhood of Once, and it included the participation of the Jewish anarchist group "Ruso Compafiero de los obreros" (Arbeter Friend) led by B oris London or Gelman, one of those arrested in the raid of the previous month. Another of the individuals arrested for arms possession in the March 1 906 raid, Abraham Hartenstein, a nineteen-year old boilermaker, used his craft to move on quickly to bigger "things." On September 1 7 of the following year, the Spanish embassy in Buenos Aires telegraphed Madrid that this "dangerous anarchist" had departed for Barcelona to j oin his comrades in their bombing campaign.5 1 We do not know if he accomplished his putative goal in B arcelona - the Spanish authorities were not able to find him. But
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he soon returned to Buenos Aires. On January 1 8 , 1 908, Caras y Caretas printed his photograph and an article describing him as the founder of the group Banda Negra and as the introducer of anarchist terrorism in Argentina. The police had arrested him, together with five other Spanish, Italian, and Argentine anarchists (which, as much as his trip to B arcelona, shows how cosmopolitan the movement was) at the headquarters of the boilermakers ' union. The magazine included pictures of the chemical laboratory and the cache of weapons and bombs that the police had found. The Black Gang had planned to use their "chemistry" to blow up the public waters building and the main electrical power plant in the city. Spanish authorities were searching again for another Jewish anarchist from Argentina later on in 1 908. On March 16, they received a telegram from B uenos Aires reporting a conversation overheard in a cafe about a "ruso polaco" by the name of Hago or Jacobo Hantover traveling with an Argentine passport to Vigo and Madrid to assassinate King Alfonso XIII. Two days later, they boarded the steamer as it stopped in Lisbon, but they could not find him among the six hundred or so returning immigrants. The captain, however, did remember a tall man with a short dark mustache registered under the name of Aye Antever, whom he thought was Spanish because he spoke that language well and who had retrieved the money he had kept in the safe-deposit box that day. He later telegraphed Spanish police: "man not on board." How Hantover reached Vigo thus is unknown. But police arrested him there two days later. He turned out to be a 24-year old electrician born in Warsaw, who claimed he was going to Madrid to visit a Candida Mendez de S amper, whom he had met in Buenos Aires. The Spanish detectives did not find any anarchist documents on him and soon received a telegram from Buenos Aires saying that Hantover did not have a previous record and that the denunciation may have been born of a personal vendetta.5 2 Apparently, the Spanish diplomats ' research was less than thorough. Argentine court records do include an entry for Hantover, although the actual documents have been destroyed.53 Whatever the case, this, and various other examples like it show that some of the Jewish anarchists in Argentina during this early period were transnational radicals whose range of action transcended the boundaries of the River Plate. The printed page provided a vehicle for both transnational and local con nections. In 1 907 , the Arbeter Friend group founded Das Arbeter Lebn, the first Yiddish-language anarchist periodical in Argentina. This monthly, di rected by A. Shapiro, lasted only a few months. In 1 908 Pedro Springberg and E. Edelstein published another anarchist periodical, the Lebn un Freiheit. This one also had a short life, and on June of the same year the police reported about a meeting of the Grupo Ruso La Protesta. 54 The meeting included the presentation of two plays, El cristo moderno and Resurreci6n de Los heroes.
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The report does not indicate whether these were performed in Yiddish, but the purpose of the meeting was to plan the publication of a section in that language in the anarchist daily La Protesta, which began to appear the next year. Around the same time (the first citation I encountered dates from 1 908) a Jewish library, the Biblioteca Rusa, was founded, which, although usually identified as anarchist, seems to have congregated - telling by the speakers at its functions - leftists of different stripes (socialists, syndicalists, Bundists, and anarchists).55 By 1 907, there were also trade unions, or "resistance societies," as an archists called them, that were either officially or de facto Jewish. On Feb ruary 23, a police spy reported on a meeting of about one hundred strik ing hat-makers at a union hall, stating that he could not inform on the sub stance of the speeches because they were delivered in Russian.56 References to the Russian language also appeared in La Prensa, Buenos Aires' principal daily, which noted during the anarchist May Day demonstrations of 1 908 and 1 9 1 0 that "Jewish agitators [agitadores israelitas] gave speeches for their co nationals in Russian." Some Jewish radicals did prefer to use that language as an indication of their internationalist, or at least non-particularist, class consciousness. 57 But since immigrants also came from regions within and outside the Czarist empire where Russian was not widely spoken, the lan guage heard by the police informer and the reporters of La Prensa must have been Yiddish. Jewish anarchism became particularly visible during the May Day demonstration of 1 909 and the disturbances and repression that follow it. From April 24th, the police had reported a high level of activity among "subversives ." Dozens of meetings were taking place daily in union halls and anarchist centers. On the 26th, a street march against the rising price of bread attracted fifteen hundred participants. Anarchists were reportedly stocking up on bullets, and at 1 AM on May 1 st, they were still meeting, planning how to bring public transportation to a halt by bombing the tramways. Still, police arrested less than a dozen militants before May Day, which seems lax compared to preventive measures taken in European cities. 5 8 On May Day, eight thousand people marched in a parade sponsored by the Socialist Party that began at 3 PM and ended two hours later in "absolute order." The anarchist march drew as many as 30,000 people and ended, soon af ter it had begun, in a shootout that left five dead and forty wounded.5 9 As usual, the police blamed the anarchists. But this time, according to press reports, they were more specific, maintaining that the first shots had come from a group of Russian anarchists.60 They also found banners abandoned by three groups of demonstrators : the union of waiters, that of masons, and "an association of Russian anarchists called Burevestnik" that met at calle Lavalle 2 1 96, in the heart of the Jewish quarter.61 The banners of the latter had
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inscribed in "Hebrew" [ebreo] "Death to Capital and Long Live the Anarcho Communists."62 Referring to these "anarchist trophies left on the asphalt," the Buenos Aires Herald (May 4, 1 909) proposed that 'The only way to deal with these gentry is to proclaim a state of siege and rush them off to Russia, where there are policemen carefully trained to deal with wolves and wild beasts." Most of the rest of the local press, according to foreign diplomats, blamed the police for the events - although the American and British ambassadors observed that this was the opposition press and defended the conduct of the police.63 Anarchists claimed, with little diplomacy but considerable logic, that had they started the shooting, police casualties would have been higher (four police officers, and five police horses, including one shot with five bullets, had been wounded).64 Whoever started the gunplay, the civilian ca sualties - whom the French minister observed were mostly shoot in the back as they were fleeing - were principally, if not entirely, protesters, not casual bystanders. All of them resided more than five blocks away from the scene of the shooting, and three-quarters more than ten. The chances that any of them were there on work-related business, on a day that had become a de facto holiday, were low. Three-quarter of them were in their teens and twenties, which also fits the demographic profile of the anarchist movement. Of the five demonstrators killed one was Jewish, as were six of the thirty-six wounded, which again suggests, that the participation of Jews in the anarchist movement was disproportionately high, as had also been the case during the events of 1 905 . The May Day mayhem was followed by a week of protests, riots, and repression that came to be known in Argentine history as the Semana Roja.65 The anarchist and socialist labor federations called a general strike that par alyzed the city and much of the country. On May 4, sixty to eighty thousand people marched during the funerals for those killed on May first. On May 10, the American Charge d' Affaires informed the State Department that "for the last nine days the city of Buenos Aires has been under the dominion of mob Law."66 La Prensa (May 3-8, 1 909) called attention to the omnipresence of "anarquistas rusos" during the protests and riots and to the zeal of their militancy. Close to a thousand people were arrested. Humidity has rendered illegible much of the relevant documentation, and so the ethnicity of those arrested is difficult to determine. But the police archives contain an intriguing report dated May 8, 1 909. It states: Through confidential sources I have learned that the carter C aurro told the anarchist Ramon Martinez that he had met with Mr. Benito Villanueva [the interim president of the Argentine Senate] , who manifested his desire to solve the present labor conflict and to that
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effect promised to procure the reopening of all workers ' halls re cently closed, the repeal of the Municipal Code of penalties [on cart drivers] , and the release of all those detained, with the exception of the Russians.
It may seem implausible that the President of the Argentine Senate would hold a secret meeting with a humble carter. But transportation workers, in censed by the municipal ordinance mentioned in the report, had been the backbone of the strike, and the fact that Benito Villanueva was trying to negotiate a solution to the conflict became public knowledge soon after this. It is less apparent whether Villanueva actually mentioned excluding "Russians" from the proposed release of detainees, and if so, why. Possibly, the carter or the confidential informant made up the alleged statement about Russians. But what incentive could they have had to invent such a specific detail? If the incident indeed took place, does this indicate that the government, or sectors within it, considered Jewish anarchists more dangerous than their gentile "coreligionists?"67 Up to this point there was little ground for such an interpretation, but, then, prejudice is rarely grounded on rational analysis. A more calculating motive could have been the desire to promote splits within the working-class. The police had admitted, in internal documents, to using this tactic during previous commotions when they selectively repressed anar chists rather than socialists, hoping to exploit in this case ideological rather than ethnocultural differences.6 8 If this was the intent, it did not work. Subsequent police reports describe the formation of a negotiating commission of anarchist and socialist groups, which demanded and obtained the release of all those detained after May first. During this period a new anarchist Jewish group had emerged: the "grupo ruso pro-victimas del primero de mayo." On May 23, about 150 of them, "of both sexes," met to watch a Yiddish version of the French anarchist writer Octave Mirbeau 's play The Bad Shepherds. 69 A workers' demand during the Semana Roj a that was not met had been the removal of the chief of police Ramon Falcon. One of the Yiddish banners con fiscated by police during the May Day protest recommended the assassination of "Cossacks." On November 14, 1 909, a Yiddish-speaking teenager who had taken part in the May Day protests fulfilled the unmet demand of the Semana Roja. Before dying, the "Big Cossack" supposedly exclaimed: "the anarchists finally got me." Enrique Millier, the officer who subdued the bomber, declared that he tried to commit suicide rather than surrender - a detail that added to the aura which soon encircled him. 70 The detainee refused to give his name, saying only that he had avenged the workers fallen on May Day and that he still had plenty of bombs left to throw at the police.
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Subsequent interrogations of both the detainee and others revealed that his name was Simon Radowisky, he was eighteen years old, and he had been born in a shtetl in the province of Kiev. In Russia, he had worked as a smith and mechanic since the age of ten. During the 1 905 Revolution, at the age of fourteen, he was shot, wounded, and arrested as an anarchist, spending six months in j ail. He migrated to Argentina in April 1 908, and, like most other arrivals, he at first stayed within the confines of the immigrant community. He had come to j oin a brother, worked in a Jewish-owned metal shop, found a tenement room in the Jewish quarter, and frequented the radical Biblioteca Rusa.7 1 But he began to move beyond those boundaries sooner than most arrivals . Within a year he left his j ob to work at an Italian-owned shop where the salary was higher, found non-Jewish anarchist room-mates and acquain tances, and learned sufficient Spanish so that his interrogation, unlike that of other Russian immigrants, was conducted without an interpreter. 7 2 Appar ently, he read Spanish-language newspapers regularly, because he had learned of the whereabouts of the Chief of Police on the day of the assassination while reading the local daily La Argentina. Some months later, he wrote a letter in proper Spanish to the Director of the National Prison, threatening to go on a hunger strike, if he was not transferred to a facility where he could work to relieve the boredom; the letter contains a few orthographical errors, but these are ones commonly found in similar documents written by working-class native speakers.7 3 Belonging to what could be described as a trans-ethnic ideological community seems to have facilitated the integration of arrivals like Radowisky into his new host society, or at least into a wider milieu beyond the confines of immigrant networks. The interrogation of another witness suggests a gendered dimension to the process. Sofia Lisichsky, a twenty-five year old seamstress, had also been j ailed in Russia as an anarchist and now resided in Once. She did not deny her political views, which she attributed to her reading and interest in female emancipation, stressing that women should struggle hand in hand with men for these ideals, which she also referred to as "agrarian socialism" (a syn onym of Tolstoyan anarchism) that envisioned a return to an egalitarian rural society and denounced political violence. Yet, despite her belief in female emancipation, she described a rather cloistered existence. She did not leave the home often, because there was a telephone in the tenement building, and she used it to order groceries delivered to her apartment. She did not go out with her husband, Pablo Karaschine, another Russian-Jewish anarchist, because he would come home from work, eat, and leave for the Biblioteca Rusa. Besides, he was very jealous and acted so nastily towards male visitors that they stopped coming. Her interaction with the outside world was limited to delivering dresses to her clients, most of whom lived in brothels (another
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instance of contacts between anarchists and prostitution) . Unlike the interro gated males, who at least acknowledged knowing Radowisky, or of him, she claimed she had never seen him nor any of his acquaintances. She noted that their surnames indicated that many of them were ethnic Russians, and that there was a big division between these Russians and (Russian) Jews. Yet it would be well to take declarations made during an interrogation about the assassination of a police chief with more than a grain of salt. Lisich sky was clearly trying to distance herself from anything having to do with the case and from her husband, who had been caught a week before trying to blow up a church where a funeral mass was being held for Carlos de Borbon. This and some contradictions in her testimony imply that she exaggerated the seclusion of her daily life. She had maintained that she always ordered home-delivery of groceries and that her relationship with her husband was strained to the point that she had asked him to leave the house. But the day she was arrested she had been shopping for groceries to prepare food to take to her j ailed husband and actually tried to visit him three times that day. She had claimed that male visitors had stopped coming to her house. But she also mentioned a discussion there with a Jewish anarchist who, during the protests against Francisco Ferrer's execution, barely a month before, had ar gued that demonstrations were not enough and that more violent means were required. Not surprisingly, she claimed to have kicked this anarchist out of the house for expressing such violent views and asked him never to come back. Nonetheless, it is likely that however much she exaggerated her seclusion, her daily routine placed her more in the home and her immediate community than did that of her male coreligionists. To wit: although Lisichsky had been in Argentina a year longer than Radowisky, she needed an interpreter during the interrogation. The prosecutor' s presentation of the case illustrates contemporary official attitudes towards Jews and radicalism. The prosecutor first asserted that the assassination of the chief of police and Alberto Lartigau, his twenty-year old personal secretary, represented the most savage example of what a police spokesperson had defined as "neo-mysticism" and "today is known as terror ism." The act was the more heinous because it had taken place in a democracy whose economic and political opportunities and liberal laws annulled "even the pretext of the revolutionary explosions in which the lower depths of Eu ropean societies relieve their caste hatreds in conditions that are completely foreign to our social organization."74 He then asserted that: Simon Radowisky belongs to that caste of helots that germinate in the Russian steppes, dragging their miserable lives between the harshness of nature and an inferior [social] condition. Pariahs of the political absolutisms of that milieu, subjected to the discretionary
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powers of the master, persecuted and massacred by the ignorance and fanaticism of a people that see in the Jew an enemy of society, they finally emigrate, like Radowisky, after having suffered sen tences for the mere fact of professing subversive ideas . And when their entry into a free society, like ours, generously returns to them their rights of men, opening to them wide horizons of regeneration and prosperity, when they should consider these societies as a true promise land, the instinct of perversity in them bursts out, poorly disguised under the pretext of vindications that no longer have any justification, perpetrating assassination, devastation, and disorder. Rather than anti-Semitism or overt class prejudice, this language corre sponded to a standard liberal discourse in countries of immigration about Old World miseries and repressions, New World liberties and opportunities, and ungrateful radical immigrants ; a discourse that could have been as easily heard in a New York or Chicago courtroom. The prosecutor added that "ex cessive development of the lower mandible, preeminence of the zygomatic and supracilial arches, depression of the forehead, light facial asymmetry" constituted the somatic characteristics that revealed in Radowisky "the crim inal type." Again, it would be specious to read these phrenological "obser vations" as an effort to racialize Jews; they were quite common, one could even say de rigueur, in contemporary criminology and applied regardless of ethnic background. Yet, perhaps one can detect in the text the incipient construction of the Jewish radical stereotype as a mechanism of exclusion like that discussed at the beginning of this article. Indeed, the Radowisky affair, added to the bombing attempt the previ ous week by Pablo Karaschine and the events of the Semana Roj a, seem to have cemented, in a surprisingly short period, the association of Jews with anarchism in the Argentine political imagination. Even before the identity of the assassin of the police chief was established, diplomats from the U . K . the U . S . , France, Spain, and Brazil had informed their home governments, based on local police reports, that he was, or appeared to be, Russian.75 The decree for the state of siege sent by the President to Congress on the day of the assassination used language similar to that of the prosecutor about ungrateful immigrants but it also referred to Radowisky's and Karaschine's deeds as part of a "sinister plan." The police investigations centered on a conspiracy by a group of Russian anarchists referred to as "La Comuna." Some of the putative members of this cabal were actually white Russians. But the term "ruso" had become so identified with Jews that these ethnic differences went unnoticed. The state of siege prevented the local press from printing anything about the police repression following the assassination, but letters from anarchists to their friends in Montevideo refer to massive detentions that included "the
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majority of the Russian comrades."76 I have not yet transferred the surviv ing arrest records from the period into a database. Yet a cursory look at the material suffices to show that the arrests were indeed massive and that Jews were highly over-represented. Data on expulsions provide a measure of the trend. Jews accounted for none of the 68 anarchists deported from Argentina before 1 905 ; for 6 of the 159 expelled between 1 905 and 1 908; and for 38 of the 1 72 expelled during 1 909- 1 9 1 0, representing 22% of those expelled at a time when Jews made up only 2. 3% of the foreign-born population of the city. This was by far the highest relative rate of deportation for any ethnic or national group during those years. Apparently, more were banished from the country without being officially deported. On March 8, 1 9 1 0, "a Russian who declined to give his name" told the American consul in Buenos Aires that Argentine authorities had paid the captains of two ships, one sailing from Buenos Aires to New York and the other from La Plata to Pensacola, six pounds for each of nine Russian anarchists (all suffering from trachoma ! ) they were taking on board as seamen.77 The identification of Jews with anarchism became so strong that even those who supported Jewish immigration felt the need to specify that anarchists and revolutionaries must be excluded.7 8 To return to the questions we raised at the start: what was the relationship between the stereotype of Jews as anarchists and social reality, and could such a stereotype function only as a signifier of alterity and/or a mechanism for exclusion. To begin with, it should be pointed out that the existence of the stereotype does not necessarily support the notion of Jewish "exception alism." Another group in Buenos Aires was also consistently identified as anarchist, something that offers an opportunity to place the Jewish case in comparative perspective. Less than a month before the Radowisky affair, the American ambassador noted that Argentines blamed the events of the Semana Roj a on Catalans and felt that the danger posed by the radical minority com ing out of B arcelona offset the benefits of Spanish immigration in general.7 9 The newspaper La Tribuna (May 8, 1 909) complained that if authorities did not stop the entry of foreign anarchists, the image of Argentina overseas would soon change from a land of opportunity to "a comer of Russia or a branch of Barcelona." Two days after the assassination of Falcon, The Times of London maintained that "the bomb-throwing party consists of foreigners recruited from Europe" and that most of the 1 1 ,000 militant anarchists known to the police in Buenos Aires were "Italians, Russians, or Catalonians." 80 The mention of Italians is neither surprising nor particularly telling. They accounted, after all, for more than half of the foreign-born population of the city. But Catalans were a small minority that represented, like Russian Jews, only about two percent of the immigrant population. Instructively, they were often referred to as "the Jews of Spain" and had been traditionally imaged
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through the same paradoxical stereotypes of rapacious capitalists and anti capitalist radicals. In what is often considered the first anti-Semitic novel in Argentina, La bolsa, the two miser characters are a Catalan and a Jew. 8 1 The figure of the Catalan anarchist also became a stock character in Argentine theater. 82 During the labor riots and right-wing reaction of May 1 9 1 0 and of the "Tragic Week"of January 1 9 1 9, Catalans became, along with Jews, the main targets of nativist vigilantes. 83 Right after the "Tragic Week," the Spanish embassy in Rio de Janerio reported that the Brazilian government had restricted entries into the country fearing an avalanche of anarchist refugees from Argentina, particularly Russians and Catalans, who were considered the most dangerous because they had led the revolt. 84 To be sure, the majority of anarchists in Buenos Aires were neither Jewish nor Catalan. It would have been almost impossible for this to have been true, since, together, Catalans and Jews represented less that five percent of the foreign-born and less than three percent of the total population of the city. But this does not mean that the stereotypes simply reflected anti-Semitism and anti-Catalanism. Jews and Catalans each accounted for about a tenth of all the anarchists expelled from Argentina between the passing of the Residency Law in 1 902 and the outbreak of World War I, by far the highest relative proportions of any ethnic groups . It could be argued that this still may have been a sign of discriminatory behavior from the authorities rather reflecting the relative participation of members of these two groups in the anarchist movement. But Catalans were also, as we saw was the case with Jews, highly over-represented among casualties during anarchist demonstrations and dis turbances, and, once again, as with the Jews, it would be hard to attribute this result to police discrimination. Like Jews, Catalans were not physically distinguishable from other demonstrators, less so in the heat of street turmoil. Nor can stereotypes explain the fact that Jews and Catalans had com mitted the most visible acts of anarchist terrorism in the country. The fact that three of these had taken place within a span of a month (October 1 7 to November 14, 1 909) increased their impact on the public and the identifi cation of Jews and Catalans with anarchism in both the official and popular imaginary. 8 5 That the perpetrators were recent immigrants with a history of anarchist activism in their home countries buttressed the notion that radi calism was a preexisting and essential characteristic of Jews and Catalans rather than the result of their experiences in the new land. And the widespread image of B arcelona, since the 1 890s, and Russia, since 1 905 , as hotbeds of revolutionary ferment reinforced the notion. The stereotypes could have been, and were indeed, used as mechanisms of exclusion, but at the most primary level they represented generalized and simplified accounts that nonetheless corresponded to social reality.
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What could explain, then, this disproportionately high participation among the two groups? For Jews, a line of argument has centered on the overlap of Judaism's eschatology and ethics and the anarchist worldview. A historian of Jewish anarchism argued that "the prophetic exigency of social justice, the model of liberation of Exodus, and the messianic idea" created an affinity for libertarian socialism. 86 Like similar arguments based on intellectual history, Weber's idea of the link between Protestantism and capitalism would be a parallel case, this one is difficult to confirm or refute empirically. Logically, it is not amiss. Anarchism did contain, to a greater degree than socialism, a pro nounced transcendental element. Its demand for social justice was as absolute as its invocation of individual liberty and usually expressed in the righteous tone of a jeremiad. Its faith in the regenerating power of the "Social Rev olution" bore a striking resemblance to the religious notion of redemption. The revolution itself had clear apocalyptic overtones. And anarchists ' proph esies about the imminent coming of the libertarian utopia were millenarian by definition. There are, however, at least two problems with the argument (besides the generic one related to the intensely disputable notion of collective mental ities or attitudes). One is that it fails to explain the intense participation of non-Jewish groups, like the Catalans (or the lack of participation of non Ashkenazic Jews for that matter) . The other is that all the quasi-spiritual traits of anarchism mentioned above are as akin to Christian as they are to Jewish eschatology. Indeed, eschatological notions such as redemption, salvation, messianic hope, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgment form the very core of Christology and of much of Christian theology in general. And if the philosophical affinity of anarchism is to Judeo-Christian principles in general, how could this explain the high participation of Jews and Catalans and the relative lack of participation of countless other "Judeo-Christian" groups, including many with a similar history of emigration. In Buenos Aires, for example, British and German gentiles were more numerous than Jews and Catalans up to the early years of the 20th century and Lebanese Maronites became as numerous later. But the participation of all of these groups in the local anarchist movement was insignificant. It seems that the best explanation for Jewish, and Catalan, anarchist mil itancy lies in two more mundane facts . One is somewhat tautological. They simply came from regions where the anarchist movement was particularly developed. Although less intensively and visibly than Jews and Catalans, other immigrants who originated from similar regions, like southern An dalusians and Tuscans, were also over-represented in the Argentine anarchist movement. In the case of Jews, the Russian Revolution of 1 905 must have radicalized many on both sides of the Atlantic and produced a stream of
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anarchist refugees to Argentina and other host societies. The Argentine elite ' s definition o f anarchism a s an imported disease was clearly self-serving. B ut the recent arrival of Jewish immigrants during this period, and the histories of the few dozen for whom I was able to cull sufficient biographical information, indicate that their radicalism had indeed pre-migratory roots . 8 7 Those roots then found a fertile soil in a local anarchist movement that, by the time of their arrival, had already become one of the most vibrant in the Atlantic world. Their arrival, in turn, further energized the movement. The second explanation has to do with the groups ' socio-occupational makeup. Compared to almost all other immigrant groups, both Jews and Catalans were highly under-represented among unskilled laborers and factory workers and highly over-represented among skilled workers and artisans. It was precisely this class of literate typographers, tailors, bakers, shoemakers, and so on, working independently or in small and medium shops that made up the bulk of the anarchist movement just about everywhere. In Buenos Aires, ninety-eight percent of the anarchists were literate. Sixty percent were skilled workers, a proportion twice as high as that of the city ' s labor force in general. The only other significant occupational groups were port and transportation workers, and to a lesser degree store clerks, j ournalists, and students. S amples that I have gathered in Italian and German archives show a similar occupational structure for anarchists in Europe. 88 Not only did the stereotype of Jews as anarchists capture a basic reality, albeit in an exaggerated form, but it also had a positive side. The image, and the realities behind it, no doubt intensified anti-Jewish feelings among the ruling groups and much of the native and immigrant middle-class. But it had the opposite effect on the working class maj ority. In London or in New York, the anarchist leanings of Jews separated them from the mainstream trade unions and from a native working class that was much less radical. In Buenos Aires, three-quarters of the working class was foreign-born and anarchists had played the key role in its organization. Moreover, the other im portant labor organizers were the socialists, who may have argued endlessly with anarchists about tactics but shared a similar vision and definitely did not hold against them a visceral animosity. In this context, the stereotype made Jews more, not less, acceptable. It undermined, rather than bolstered, popular anti-Semitism. It made Jews the object of emulation, not rejection. Anarchist pamphlets, newspapers, and speeches are replete with appeals to follow the example of "our Russian [or our Catalan] comrades ." In this light the Radowisky affair takes on a different meaning. Because Argentine law exempted minors from the death penalty, Radowisky was con demned to life in prison, something that turned his freedom into one of main goals of anarchists in Argentina. On January 1 9 1 1 , they dug a tunnel under
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the national penitentiary. S alvador Planas Virella and Francisco Solano Regis, who had tried to assassinate two different Argentine presidents, escaped and were never heard of again. Radowisky had been sent to the prison's printing shop a few minutes before and lost this opportunity, but not the next, or almost not. On November 1 9 1 8, anarchists used a boat to ferry him out of the national penitentiary, which had been moved to Tierra del Fuego; yet the Chilean police captured them later. The campaign never stopped. Gen eral strikes were called in Radowisky's support. 89 More than a dozen books and thousands of newspaper articles and leaflets appeared to eulogize "our Simon." In none of these books or articles are the words murderer or assassin - the common terms employed in the "bourgeois" press - used. Radowisky was always the "avenger," the "retaliator," the "justice giver" [el justiciero] , the "martyr of Ushuaia" [the town where the prison was located] , the "lib ertarian saint" [santo acrata] . 90 On May 1 9 1 8, thousands of pamphlets filled the streets accusing the saint's j ailers of sexual sadism. Other accounts give an opposite twist: that the charisma, the kindness, the mystical magnetism of this libertarian (Jewish) St. Francis had turned him into a hero for jailers and common criminals alike. Graphic artists contributed hundreds of sketches and reproductions of photographs. The consistency and intensity of the anarchist hagiography had the desired effect. Radowisky became a martyr of the working class in general rather than of anarchists. Even bourgeois j ournalists began to write of him sympatheti cally, which, in tum, aroused the empathy of many within the middle classes. Eventually, popular pressure reached such a point that President Yrigoyen pardoned Radowisky in 1 930, despite Yrigoyen's fears of a military coup. In this light, Radowisky's crime became another feather on the collective Jewish cap rather than a stigma. This and the general stereotype of Jews as anarchists actually does much to explain the relative absence of working-class anti-Semitism in Argentina during the first third of the twentieth century. Whether, and how, this attitude changed after the inroads of nationalism into the labor movement during the 1 940s is an important question. It is also one that is beyond this present essay ' s scope.
Notes
I . Contemporary dictionaries of argot illustrate this function of the stereotype. For example,
Aristide Bruant, Dictionnaire francais-argot: L 'Argot de xxe siecle (Paris: Flammarion, 1 90 1 ) lists fifteen terms for juif, more than for any other ethnic group, which despite the variety seem to share the connotation of otherness.
2. The stereotype was exploited even within the labor movement. A good example of this can be found in a booklet on the perils of anarchism written under the pseudonym of
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Max Nomad and published by the Retail, Wholesale and Chain Store Food Employees Union in New York in 1 944, titled The Jewish Conspiracy. For the gender dimensions of the stereotype see Naomi Shepherd, A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1 993). 3 . In a less functionalist, and more totalizing, definition, Roland Barthes maintained that "All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology." The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1 975), 2. 4. Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 967), 1 7 , 40-44. Furio B iagini, Nati A/trove: fl movimiento anarchico ebraico t ra Mosca e New York (Pisa: BFS, 1 998), 6 1 . Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, National ism, and the Russian Jews, 1 862-1 91 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 98 1 ), 230. Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 995). 5 . William J. Fishman, Jewish Radicals: From Czarist Stet[ to London Ghetto (New York: Pantheon Books, 1 975) stresses the disproportionate weight of Jews in London's anar chist movement. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York, 1 962), 284, maintains that they furnished more recruits to the movement than all the rest of the British population. But H. Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 983), while highlighting the cosmopolitan nature of the movement, does not privilege their par ticipation over that of gentile German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and French expatriates, devoting only a few lines to Jewish militancy (pp. 5, 20-2 1 , 50-5 1 , 65-66) . 6. Mina Graur, An Anarchist "Rabbi " : The Life and Teachings of Rudolf Rocker (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 997). Although Rocker was well known in international anarchist circles as a theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, he acquired a legendary stature among Jew ish anarchists. Two of the earliest books published in Yiddish by anarchists in Buenos Aires were his Di parlamentarishe tetigkayt in der arbayter bevegung-ratensistem oder diktatur? [Parliamentary Activity in the Workers' Movement: Soviets or Dictatorship] ( 1 920) and Bolshevizm un anarkhizm ( 1 922) . 7. Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siecle France (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press) has more to say about anti-Semitism than about Jews, but does refer (pp. 46-47) to a "considerable number of Jewish anarchists [most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe] among the proletariat and the litterateurs." 8. Rudolf Rocker, La juventud de un rebelde (Buenos Aires, 1 947), 309. 9. Furio B iagini, "L' anarchia nel ghetto: Appunti per una storia del movimiento anarchico di lingua yiddish negli Stati Uniti," in Antonio Donno, ed. , America anarchica, 1 850-1930 (Rome: Piero Lacaita editore, 1 990), 2 1 4. 10. These leaders included the poet David Edelstadt, one of the first editors of what became the largest Yiddish anarchist newspaper in the world, the Fraye A rbeter Shtime; Alexander Berkman, who in 1 892 attempted to assassinate steel magnate Henry Clay Frick and had a long international career even after spending two decades in prison; and Emma Goldman, who purchased the revolver in 1 892 and later became the best-known anarchist in the U . S . See Ori Kritz, The Poetics of Anarchy: David Edelshtat's Revolutionary Po etry (New York: P. Lang, 1 997); Kenneth C. Wenzer, Anarchists Adrift: Emma Goldman and A lexander Berkman (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1 996); and Candace Falk, ed. , Emma Goldman: A Guide to her Life and Documentary Sources (Alexandria, VA:
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43
Chadwyck-Healey, 1 995) . For a filmic treatment see Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher, The Free V oice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists, a 60-minute documentary produced by the Pacific Street Film Collective in 1 989. 1 1 . The U.S. had an autochthonous tradition of individualist anarchism with its roots in the Protestant upper-middle class of New England. As a mass movement, however, it was always an immigrant phenomenon and tied to the socialist, rather than individualist, current in anarchism. 1 2. Richard Yoast, "The Development of Argentine Anarchism: A Socio-Ideological Analy sis" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1 975) begins categorically on the is sue: "The Argentine anarchist movement was the largest, most coherent libertarian effort of its time" although a few lines later he wonders whether "Buenos Aires or Barcelona, was, in its time, more the focal point of world anarchist thought." If the attention of the international press is an indication, the Argentine capital came in second. I checked The Times of London from 1 909 to 1 9 1 4 and it contained more anarchist related articles on Buenos Aires than on any other place, with the exception of Barcelona. 1 3 . Buenos Aires' municipal censuses of 1 909, vol. I, pp. 3- 1 7 ; and 1 936 vol. III, pp. 295299. Eighty percent of the city's Jewish population in 1 909 was foreign-born, a proportion that declined to 39% by 1 936. 14. Archivo de la Policfa (Chacabuco St., Buenos Aires), [APC from now on] Policfa de la Capital, Division de lnvestigaciones, Seccion Orden Social, Antecedentes de Anarquistas, 1 902, No. l . 1 5 . El anarquismo y e l movimiento obrero en A rgentina (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1 978); Edgardo J. B ilsky, La F. O.R.A. y el movimiento obrero, 1 900-1 910, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1 985); G. Zaragoza Ruvira, Anarquismo argentino, 1876-1902 (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1 996); Juan Suriano, Anarquistas: Cultura y politica libertaria en Buenos Aires, 1 890-1 91 0 (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 200 1 ) . 16. I t i s estimated that about a quarter o f a million Jews arrived i n Argentina between 1 880 and 1 940. 1 7 . Censo general de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1 887, Vol. II, p. 22. 1 8 . Centro de Estudios de la Policfa (Lavalle St. 2625, Buenos Aires), Policfa de la Capital, Division de Investigaciones, Planillas de rufianes, 1 893-1 894. The records did not have information on religion. But they included the individuals' age, marital status, place and country of birth, length of residence in Argentina, first and family names, and at times those of their parents, which I used to identify Jews. The 1 2 1 I identified as such were relatively clear cases (e.g., a Moises Zukerman born in Galitzia to Abraham and Esther). The 29 identified as likely Jewish had more ambiguous fore- or surnames (e.g., Mauricio Shiffman from Vienna with no information on parents) . If anything, the method undercounts the number of Jews since it excludes those without typical naming patterns. 1 9 . Thirty-six had been born in Russia, 25 in Austro-Hungary, 2 1 in Turkey, 19 in Poland, 16 in Rumania, 1 3 in England, and the rest in Germany, France, Greece, Egypt, Bulgaria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, the U . S . , Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and India. 20. El Perseguido, V oz de Los Explotados, May 1 8, 1 890. My UCLA colleague Carlo Ginzburg felt that the use of certain terms suggests that the Italian version of the editorial must have been the original: "Noi siamo i vagabondi, i paltonieri, i randagi, la canaglia, i malfattori, ii precipitato putrido, ii sublimato corrosivo della dierna organizzazione sociale." The fact that two-thirds of the paper was written in that language supports his opinion. "Sublimate" is used in the text in its chemical meaning, the psychological sense of the term did not exist yet.
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2 1 . APC, Policfa de la Capital, Division de lnvestigaciones, Seccion Guardia, Copiador de Notas, December, 1 902; and Idem, Orden Social, Copiador de notas n. 1 2, 1 905 . 22. Public Record Office [PRO], London, FO 37 1 825 , Sept. 20, 1 9 1 0 . El Diario, October 27, 1 905, made similar claims about people who made a lucrative business of obtaining citizenship papers for anarchists and other dangerous characters. 23. APC, Policfa de la Capital, Division de Investigaciones, Seccion Orden Social, Copiador de notas n. 1 1 , January 9-April 7, 1 905 . 24. PRO, London, FO 37 1 598, 1 909, p. 2 1 9 . 25 . PRO, London, F O 369 272, 1 9 1 0, December 6, 1 909. 26. PRO, London, FO 37 1 823, January 29 and April 14, 1 9 1 0 . 27 . PRO, London, F O 37 1 823 , December 6, 1 909. 28. PRO, London, FO 37 1 825, June 30, 1 9 1 0. See also FO 37 1 825 , September 20, 1 9 10. 29. Archives des Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Paris, Correspondence Politique et Com merciale (Nouvelle Serie), Argentina, Politique Interieur, 3, 1 9 1 0-1 9 1 7 , pp. 59-60 and 68. 30. Francisco Stach, La defensa social y la inmigraci6n (Buenos Aires, 1 9 1 6), 26-28. 3 1 . El Rebe/de: Peri6dico Anarquista [Buenos Aires], September 3, 1 7 , 1 899. 32. L' Avvenire: Periodico Comunista-Anarchico [Buenos Aires], October 1 6, 1 898. 33. L' Avvenire, September 1 0, 1 899. For other articles on the Dreyfus affair see issues of August 27 and September 23, 1 899. 34. Archives des Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Paris, Correspondence Politique et Com merciale (Nouvelle Serie), Argentina, Politique Etranger, 1 902, pp. 32-3 3 . 3 5 . Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 17-18, 4 2 , 60. 36. APC, Policfa de la Capital, Division de Investigaciones, Seccion Orden Social, Copiador de notas n. 1 1 , January 9-April 7, 1 905 . 37. El Obrero, Montevideo, February 1 1 , 1 905 . 38. PRO, London, FO 6 490, p. 4 1 . 39. In a column devoted to news from various countries and under the ironic title of "Rusia Argentina," the newspaper L 'Agitatore Indivudualista Anarchico from B ahia Blanca, in the south of the province of Buenos Aires, claimed that about 300 had been arrested and 60 to 70 expelled to Montevideo (March 30, 1 905 , p. 4). But internal police sources only list 25 individuals expelled. 40. At least one policeman, in a loud discussion with a fellow officer on a tramway, blamed his own institution for provoking the shooting. Such insubordinate interpretation was quickly reported to a district sheriff. 4 1 . Archivo General de la Nacion, Buenos Aires, Ministerio del Interior, legajo 1 5 , letter from the Chief of Police to the Minister of the Interior, May 24, 1 905 . 42. Eugene F. Sofer, From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of Jews in Buenos Aires (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1 982), 66-69. 43 . El Obrero, May 27, 1 905 . 44. APC, Policfa de la Capital, Division Investigaciones, Seccion Orden Social, Reuniones Sociologicas, 1 905 . 45 . Furio Biagini, Nati A/trove, 1 52. 46. The principal void here is the absence of women. They played an important role in the local anarchist movement but, for reasons that I have discussed elsewhere, were less likely to appear in police records. See Jose C. Moya, "Italians in Buenos Aires' Anarchist Movement: Gender Ideology and Women' s Participation," in Donna Gabaccia and Franca
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45
Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the W orld (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) . 47. Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1 850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 998), chapter 4. The segregation index indi cates the percentage of a given group (in this case Jews) who would have to move in order for the group to be completely integrated residentially with the rest of the population. 48. David Schers, "Inmigrantes y politica: Los primeros pasos del Partido Sionista Social ista Poalei Si on en la Argentina, 1 9 1 0- 1 9 1 6" in studios lnterdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe [Tel Aviv], vol. 3, r;. 2 (July-Dec. 1 992). 49. Biagini, Nati A/trove, 1 52. 50. Archivo General de la Nacion, Buenos Aires, Archivo de Figueroa Alcorta, non-cata logued. I thank Dr. Olga Bordi and archivist Liliana Crespi for making this document accessible. The anarchist attempt to bum the convent of Caballido during the protest resulted in a shootout that led to eighty arrests and left three wounded. A police officer was shot in the chest but the bullet miraculously hit his pocket watch. The humorous magazine Caras y Caretas [April 2 1 , 1 906, n. 394] published a photograph of the watch with the incrusted bullet and a comic strip on "Preventive means for all types of demonstrations." One of the cartoons included a man with a huge pocket watch and the caption "Buy a 1 2 caliber watch, the best shield against police bullets." This bullet in particular was not likely to have come from the police, unless they were shooting each other. But the fact that the magazine described it as such is in line with its position that police excesses caused the turmoil. 5 1 . Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid, Polftica Intema, Orden Pdblico, legajo H2750. 52. Ibid., legajo 2754. A similar case is that of Russian-born Gregorio Fleischmann, who was deported from Argentina in 1 9 1 9 and apprehended in Spain with his wife because the British embassy in Madrid denounced him as dangerous. The Spanish authorities were going to expel him when word arrived from Buenos Aires that an Argentine colonel vouched for Fleischmann as a philosophical anarchist and an honest person. 5 3 . Archivo de Tribunales, Buenos Aires, Division Antecedentes Judiciales, cards in file cabinet. Hantover again appears in the police arrest records during the turmoil of May 1 9 10. APC, Policfa de la Capital, Division lnvestigaciones, Seccion Guardia, Entrada de Presos, vol. 1 6 . 5 4 . APC, Policfa d e l a Capital, Division lnvestigaciones, Seccion Orden Social, Reuniones Sociologicas, 1 908. 5 5 . Ibid., These "popular" libraries were not peculiar to Jews and anarchists. Other eth nic and ideological groups also founded many and they existed in most working-class neighborhoods of the city. 56. Ibid., Copiador de Notas, Febrero 1 907 . 57. According to P. Katz, an early secretary of Buenos Aires's Poalei Sion quoted in David Schers ' "Inmigrantes y politica . . . ," the use of Russian and depreciation of Yiddish was particularly noticeable among socialists. 58. The Parisian police, for example, normally arrested scores of radicals before May Day and actually prohibited street demonstrations. Prefecture de Police, Paris, Cabinet du Prefet, Archives, PP, Serie BA, I , carton 1 628 (manifestations du l er mai, 1 899- 1 932). 59. La Protesta, May 2, 1 909 reported higher casualties: 8 dead and 1 05 wounded.
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60. La Prensa, May 3, 1 909. The day before, the paper had quoted police as saying the first shots had come from the anarchist anti-militarist group Luz al so/dado. If both statements were correct, it would mean that many Russians belonged to that group. 6 1 . APC, Policfa de la Capital, Division de lnvestigaciones, Seccion Guardia, Copiador de Notas, May 1 909. 62. Anarcho-Communism, which envisioned a future society where resources would be allo cated according to need, instead of productivity as proposed by anarcho-collectivists, had become the dominant strain of anarchist ideology in Argentina, and in the Atlantic world in general, since the early 1 890s. 63. Archives des Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Paris, Correspondence Politique et Com merciale (Nouvelle Serie), Argentina, Politique Interieur, 2, 1 903-1 909, pp. 1 5 3- 1 56. National Archives [NARA], College Park, Maryland, M862, 20058 . PRO, London, FO 368 269, May 1 2, 1 909. 64. La Prensa, May 2, 1 909. 65 . How the term Red Week originated is not clear, but the daily El Tiempo used it already in May 8, 1 909. 66. NARA, M862, 20058, May 1 0, 1 909. 67. This was actually the term most commonly used by contemporary anarchists and social ists to refer to their comrades. It defines, after all, not only those who have the same religion but also those who share an ideal or ideology. 68. APC, Policfa de la Capital, Division de Investigaciones, Seccion Orden Social, Copiador de notas n. 1 1 , February 26, 1 905 . 69. Idem., May 1 909. Although other leftists, such as socialists and syndicalists, also used theater as a didactic tool, the practice was much more common among anarchists. Moya, "Italians in Buenos Aires' Anarchist Movement." 70. Archivo General de la Nacion, Buenos Aires, Tribunales Criminales, R-5 , p. 10. 7 1 . In the annual report sent to London by the British ambassador (PRO 37 1 1 824, p. 4 of the report), he wrote that it had been proved that Radowisky and his brother had participated in the rioting of the Semana Roj a and that the brother had been confined in an asylum for the insane. 72. The British ambassador was "assured that he [Radowisky] spoke very pure Spanish under the stress of his first emotions." PRO, FO 37 1 598, p. 476. 73. Archivo General de la Nacion, Buenos Aires, Tribunales Criminales, R-5, pp. 53, 5 3 . 5 , 63-90, 204, 236. 74. Ibid., pp. 1 69-1 72. 75. PRO, FO 371 598, telegraph of November 15, 1 909. NARA, M 862, 45 1 9/6 1 . Archives des Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Paris, Correspondence Politique et Commerciale (Nouvelle Serie), Argentina, Politique Interieur, 2, telegram n. 32. Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid, Politica Interna, Orden Pllblico, legajo H2750. Archivo Historico do Ministeno das Relacoes Exteriores, Rio de Janerio, Missoes Diplomaticas Brasileiras, Buenos Aires, 206-2-06. 76. La Nueva Senda, Montevideo, November 19, 1 909. The letters also mention that the police occupied the offices of the anarchist daily La Protesta, destroying its printing press and taking the money that had been collected by the "committee pro-Russian revolution aries." 77. NARA, M 862, 23894/2.
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78. A good example is the ex-minister of agriculture Damian M. Torino, El problema def inmigrante y el problema agrario en la A rgentina (Buenos Aires, 1 9 1 2), 30-3 1 . He found "much good" in Jewish immigrants and maintained that "The Jew is dangerous or damaging only in poor and lethargic countries. It is a microbe that harms weak and tired organisms but adapts well to potent and virile ones. His laborious intelligence and com mercial instinct strains the social fabric of weak peoples who see in them a whip. Among peoples who, on the contrary, are endowed with similar aptitudes, or even superior ones to that of the Jew, he competes with equal rivals, and his arrival yields in these prosperous environments nothing but extra vitality." He considered Argentina such an environment, but explained that this welcome of course did not extend to Jewish anarchists. 79. NARA M 862, 87 1 7/ 1 6, August 23, 1 909. A report of May 1 5 , 1 9 1 0 (NARA M 5 1 4, 77) also stated that Argentine authorities feared that Catalan anarchists would try to assassinate the Infanta Isabel de Borbon, then visiting Argentina for the celebration of the independence centennial (the first member of the Spanish royal family to have done so), as revenge for the execution of Francisco Ferrer. 80. The Times, November 1 6 and 1 7 , 1 909, p. 5, c. 6. 8 1 . Julian Martel, La bolsa [ 1 89 1 ] (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1 975), 2 1 4-2 16. Ironically, Martel' s real surname was the unmistakably Catalan Miro. 82. Moya, Cousins and Strangers. 83. Maria Ines B arbero and Fernando Devoto, Los nacionalistas, 1910-1932 (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1 983), 40. Although I have not found any corroborating source, a letter of May 19, 1 9 1 0 sent by an Italian anarchist in Buenos Aires to a compan ion in Italy claimed that "the Russian anarchist group that was attacked defended itself heroically forcing the assailants to retreat with many wounded and some dead." II Terrore nella Repubblica A rgentina (Castellammare, Italy: Camillo di Sciullo editore, 1 9 1 0), 2 1 . The repression of the Tragic Week did not stop the development of Jewish anarchism in the city. Soon after it, the Yidishe Ratsionalistishe Gezelshaft began printing what seem to be the first Yiddish-language anarchist books published in Argentina. See The Kate Sharpley Library Yiddish Anarchist Bibliography (London, 1 998). 84. Archivo de! Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid, Politica Interna, Orden Ptiblico, legajo H2753. The ambassador added that although the restriction was "in open opposi tion to the letter of the [Brazilian] Constitution, it has been highly praised by the press and politicians, who declare that when its founders wrote the policy of 'open doors' to all the world, they could not have conceived that there would exist individuals whose only purpose would be to ruin it and destroy it." 85 . On August 1 2, 1 905 , Salvador Planes Virella, a 23 year-old typographer from Barcelona, had attempted on the life of President Quintana. On October 1 7 , 1 909, Jose Matabosch, a 22 year-old mason, and Pascual Primo Valero, a bookbinder of the same age, both from Barcelona, planted a bomb on the Spanish consulate in protest for the execution of Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona. Two weeks later Pablo Karaschine tried to blow up a church for the same reason. And on November 14, Radowisky killed the chief of police and his secretary. On May 25, 1 9 1 0 a bomb exploded in the Cathedral. The bomber was not caught but was rumored to be Jewish. Exactly a month later, another bomb exploded during an opera performance at the Colon Theater. One of the two accused was Russian. 86. Furio Biagini, Nati A/trove, 22 and ff. 87. The degree to which this is true for immigrant groups that had been in Argentina longer than Jews is more difficult to determine. About half of a group of 220 Italians for whom I was able to find documents in Italian archives had been identified as anarchists by the
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Italian police before they emigrated to Argentina. This, however, likely underestimates the proportion with a history of pre-migratory radicalism since it does not include those who were ideologically anarchists but had not been arrested or investigated by the police before they left the country. 88. In a random sample of 1 75 Italian anarchists I took from the Caselario Politico Centralle at Rome's Archivio Centralle dello Stato, 54% were skilled workers. Data from a three volume file on 1 ,465 European anarchists assembled by the German police around 1 900 and held at Hamburg's Staatsarchiv shows a similar proportion of skilled workers (57%) for the 244 Italians in the file with occupations listed, and higher proportions for most 260) ; Austrians, 73% (N 62) ; Bohemians, 63% other groups : Germans, 79% (N (N 65), French, 49% (N 66) .
= = = =
89. L' Allarme, foglio anarchico di propaganda e d' agitazione, Buenos Aires, October 20 and November 1 3 , 1 928. The general strike was called, poignantly, on November 14, the anniversary of Radowisky's assassination of the Chief of Police. 90. A good example is the book written by the Spanish anarchist militant and historian, Diego Abad de Santillan, Simon Radowitzky, el vengador y el martir (Buenos Aires: F.0.R.A., 1 927).

Moya - Positive Side of Stereotypes

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The Positive Side of Stereotypes: Jewish Anarchists in Early-Twentieth-Century Buenos Aires Author(s): Jose C.

Jewish History 18:

2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The positive side of stereotypes: Jewish anarchists in early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires

UCLA, Department ofHistory, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A. moya@ucla.edu

J E WISH ANARCHISTS IN EARLY-TWENTIETH-CEN TURY BUENOS AIRES

JEWISH ANARCHISTS IN EARLY-TWENTIETH-CE NTURY BUE NOS AIRES

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JEWISH ANARCHISTS IN EARLY- TWE NTIETH-CENTURY BUENOS AIRES

JEWISH ANARCHISTS IN EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY BUENOS AIRES

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JEWISH ANARCHISTS IN EARLY-TWE NTIE TH-CE NTURY BUENOS AIRES

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JEWISH ANARCHISTS IN EARLY-TWE NTIE TH-CENTURY BUENOS AIRES

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