UCalgary webinar examines Sephardic Jews in left-wing movements

By Jeremy Appel, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

(AJNews) – The University of Calgary co-hosted a May 8 webinar on the role Sephardic Jews played in left-wing movements in Brazil and Argentina with Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.

The guest speakers were Silvina Schammah-Gesser of the Salti Institute of Ladino Studies at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, who focused on Argentina, and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro sociologist Michel Gherman, who spoke about Brazil.

The event was the sixth and final lecture in a series on Sephardi Jews’ involvement with global left-wing politics, which was organized by UCalgary anthropologist Angy Cohen and Brandeis sociologist Yuval Evri.

Schammah-Gesser began her remarks by pointing out some key differences in the formations of the modern Argentine and Brazilian states.

Argentina fought an anti-colonialist war of independence from the Spanish monarchy between from 1810 to 1816. Four years later, Brazil declared independence from Portugal, but replaced the Portuguese monarchy with one of its own, which ruled until the establishment of the Old Republic in 1890.

“Here we have the very first great divide between Argentina and Brazil,” said Schammah-Gesser.

Another important distinction, she added, is the “crucial” role slavery played in Portuguese colonialism, which is “marginal in the Argentine case.”

“The markers of national identity in the Argentine case would be ethnicity and class,” Schammah-Gesser said.

General Juan Peron, who ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and again from 1973 to 1974, “emphasized a participatory democracy that will actually intend to provide multicultural membership.”

“This is very important,” Schammah-Gesser emphasized. “Jews or Arabs or Italians or Japanese could be good Argentines … while at the same time keeping their belonging to their different diasporas.”

Despite having only about a quarter the population of Brazil, Argentina’s Jewish population of around 180,000 is about double Brazil’s.

Of that population, about a quarter are Sephardic, with a majority of them tracing their origins to Syria.

A problem Schammah-Gesser identified with existing literature on Sephardic Jews in Argentina is that it is “generally Ashkenazi or Eurocentric in its perception,” depicting Sephardic people as “homogenous, orthodox, inward-looking [and] isolationist.”

“It happens to be that there are many heterodox cases and trajectories that present a much more complex and interesting portrait,” she said.

Schammah-Gesser presented playwright Ricardo Halac as a case study, describing him as a “non-conformist socialist voice who manages to portray Argentine socio-political transformations while being able to maintain dialogue with his own ethnicity and religious origins.”

Halac pioneered the literary style of “reflexive realism” after visiting European Communist countries, including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland, in the 1950s, which “revolutionized the theatre in Argentina, especially the independent theatre,” she added.

“He was part of the left wing in Argentina, but he wanted to see first hand and have his own testimony about what was going on in the Soviet-influenced countries,” Schammah Gesser explained.

The military dictatorship that ruled over Argentina from 1974 to 1983 disappeared and murdered an estimated 30,000 people suspected of leftist sympathies, with 10 per cent of them being Jews.

In his presentation, Michel Gherman identified three waves of Sephardic immigration to Brazil.

The original Sephardic Jews in Brazil came from Morocco during the 19th century, fleeing the war between Morocco and Spain after Brazil became independent.

Gherman identified David Jose Perez, an influential Zionist leader who was involved with the Brazilian and international socialist movement at the beginning of the 20th century, as a descendant of this wave.

In the 1920s, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, there was a wave of Jewish immigration to Brazil from Syria and Lebanon. Another wave occurred in the 1950s, owing to persecution Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian Jews faced after the State of Israel was created.

While Brazil’s Jewish population was 305 people in 1900, with the bulk of them in Sao Paulo, by 1940, the population was 48,391, and by 1950 it was 61,922, with the community more dispersed between San Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul.

As is the case in Argentina, most Brazilian Jews are Ashkenazi.

A major figure in modern Brazilian history is Getuilo Vargas, who was president from 1930 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1954. Vargas sought to turn Brazil into the “country of the future,” a concept that was developed by Ashkenazi writer Stefan Zweig, who immigrated from Austria after the Nazis came to power.

An important blind spot in this forward-looking national identity, Gherman emphasized, was the legacy of racism and slavery in Brazil.

Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1995, disappeared and killed several prominent Ashkenazi figures who were involved in political debates about Jewish burial rights and suicide, including Chael Schreier, Yara lavelberg, Vladimir Herzog and Ana Rosa Kucinski.

“It was very important for the regime to convince the Jewish community that they committed suicide,” said Gherman.

Antisemitism, he added, was a feature of the Brazilian military dictatorship’s worldview.

“They understood [Jews] as the enemy from within,” Gherman explained.

Gherman presented a document from a military commander explaining the death of Herzog, an Ashkenazi journalist who was accused of being a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, which claimed “that the media in the West is in the hands of Jewish organizations, interfering in all communities and the cultural processes of each one, being a racial minority and a society apart.”

The dictatorship often conflated Judaism and Communism. The regime had a list of 20 Communist Jews, which included the names of Ana Christina Zahar, a Lebanese Christian, and Badih Melhem, a Lebanese Muslim.

The only Sephardic Jew on this list was Milton Nahum, whose family came from Morocco. Nahum was exiled to Israel.

Nelson Levy, a renowned physicist at the University of Rio De Janeiro, and Helena Salem, a journalist, are two Sephardic figures who weren’t on the list but were involved in the Brazilian Communist Party. They were exiled to Portugal.

While she was a very prominent Jewish figure in Brazil, Salem wasn’t accepted by the broader Brazilian Jewish community due to her anti-Zionist views, Gherman noted.

Jeremy Appel is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.