The Latin American diaspora has spun off little diasporas of its own: approximately 110,000 Latin Americans live in Israel. Some kibbutzim are populated entirely by Latins, the ranks of the liberal professions are filled with neo-Sephardim, and two Spanish-language newspapers are published weekly. La Semana of Jerusalem may be the only Jewish paper in the world that carries soccer scores.
This community has not been subjected to research since Fernando Peñalosa’s article, “Latin American Immigrants in Israel” (Jewish Social Studies, April 1972: 122-139). Herman focuses on two areas: reason for immigration, and degree of integration into Israeli society. He utilizes surveys taken by the government of Israel, supplementing them with 150 oral interviews which he himself conducted in 1977-78. He provides tables of responses together with prose summaries, not all of them clearly written. He analyzes results by techniques common to the behavioral sciences. An opening narrative chapter attempts to describe the context from which the immigrants emerged, but falls short because of evident unfamiliarity with the circumstances; the interested reader should refer instead to the bibliography.
For comparative purposes, Herman divides his subjects into pre-1974 and post-1975 arrivals. While three-fourths of the earlier arrivals had completed only high school, the proportion of university graduates rose from one-fourth to one-half in the post-1975 cohort. Earlier immigrants tended to be students, farmers, and independent industrialists. The later group included more members of the liberal professions and more unemployed (pp. 33-35).
We can draw some conclusions from the data: two-thirds of Israeli Latinos are of Argentine origin; they tend to arrive at an earlier age than other immigrants; and they are characterized by a weaker Jewish identification than their counterparts who emigrated from other Latin American countries (p. 90). Yet a clear, overall picture fails to emerge.
The problem arises because Herman does not draw correct conclusions from the data and historical circumstances. For example, underlying the earlier migration was the fear of kidnapping and underlying the later migration was the war against subversion. Although 21 percent of respondents in one sample state that they had been guerrillas (Montoneros or ERP) (p. 35), the responses specific to that group are not broken out of the overall data. Most Jewish Argentine members of subversive groups were profoundly anti-Zionist; their preferred country of refuge was not Israel, but Spain or Mexico. Although Herman finds a declining proportion of immigrants who offer “Zionism” as their principal reason for choosing to resettle in Israel, he fails to make this connection. Instead, a variety of extremely complex motivations get buried under general rubrics such as “Belief one can lead a Jewish life only in Israel” (76 percent of the post-1975 cohort) (p. 45).
Perhaps the most fascinating finding to emerge from this study is that, while the Argentines acknowledge that anti-Semitism exists in their home country, they deny that it influenced their decision to emigrate. Considering that perhaps as many as 15 percent of the dead and disappeared in Argentina’s dirty war were Jews (although Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the general population), that says a great deal for the attachment this diaspora feels to the culture that nurtured it.
