Were there ever Jewish Gauchos? The story ‘Unworthy’ by Jorge Luis Borges features a character named Fischbein who is originally from Entre Ríos, a provincia in the north-east of Argentina, between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, that became a magnet for immigrants (Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Belgians, Swiss, French, Lebanese, Syrians, Russians and Jews) and, as such, was an experiment in multiethnic integration with historical implications for the creation of Argentina as a modern nation. In the story, Fischbein tells the narrator: ‘I won't tell you that we were Jewish gauchos – there were never any Jewish gauchos. We were merchants and small farmers’. The authenticity of the Jewish Gaucho has been elusive. Judith Noemí Freidenberg, a native Argentine, ponders it from an ethnographic perspective.
She focuses on Villa Clara, among the most important colonias in Entre Ríos. Through personal interviews, involved on-site research and the interpretation of material culture, she builds a chronicle of the place that showcases the dreams and frustrations of Jewish settlers, Yiddish-speaking, mostly from rural villages called shtetls, and their interactions with other dwellers. To what extent did these newcomers acculturate? Were they encouraged to retain essential elements from their original culture? Freidenberg's composite spans a century, from 1892, the moment the Jewish Colonization Association established Colonia Clara, as it was then known, and 70 families established themselves in nearby Bélez, to 2002, when the village celebrated its first centennial with museums, concerts, plays and other events. In the interim, Freidenberg describes the building of the first synagogue, the arrival of the first physician, the opening of the first mill, and the installation of electrical lightning. Her concerns aren't exclusively about infrastructure, however. She discusses the way Jews from the so-called Pale of Settlement, the locations in Eastern Europe where they had existed since the thirteenth century, sought refuge in Argentina, which they saw as ‘un país de advenimiento’, as journalist Alberto Gerchunoff described it in his autobiography – a promised land where they would not suffer anti-Semitism.
Although only quoted on occasion, Gerchunoff is the central figure in The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho. The debate around the question of what characteristics Jews took from the Gauchos in Entre Ríos, and whether they actually became rooted in the place, stems, in intellectual circles, from the reaction to Gerchunoff's classic The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, a book-bound series of vignettes published in 1910 to commemorate Argentina's first century of independence. Freidenberg shows the extent to which Jewish immigrants devoted themselves to agricultural activities. In 1920, probably at its height in demographic terms, Villa Clara housed 1,500 people. By 1940, the Jewish Colonization Association estimated 1,000 Jews living there. The flight from rural areas had begun, with Jews and other immigrants and their descendants seeking better opportunities in urban centres. Even though the National Census registered 2,794 people in Villa Clara in 2001, the number of Jews living in cities had multiplied in comparison. At the time of his death in 1950, Gerchunoff, who had immigrated to Argentina as a child from a town located today in the Ukraine and spent his formative years in Villa Moisés but like scores of others moved to Buenos Aires, had become a Zionist because he distrusted the idea of his adopted country becoming a place where Jews could thrive.
The author starts with a journey she and her mother took to Entre Ríos in 2001, part of ‘Argentine cultural tourism’, an effort to rescue the immigrant past and, hence, to profit from the manufacturing of a sellable past. The tour was, in many ways, difficult: it took more time than expected, they weren't capable of reaching certain sites as a result of heavy rains, and they reached others only after long detours. The tour was across space as much as it was across time, and therein, according to Freidenberg, was the origin of her ethnographic project.
Unfortunately, Freidenberg does not possess an engaging style. There is no excitement in her sentences, and she writes like a dutiful, trite academic. There is enough pathos in her material to make an epic, yet she delivers it in the monotone that exemplifies scholarly studies: sternly, presumptuously, as if on automatic, accumulating information as if she wasn't telling a tale but crafting an encyclopaedia entry. Yet in spite of its stylistic shortcomings, The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho is a provocative contribution in that it appreciates Villa Clara not in isolation but as a microcosm through which it is possible to comprehend Argentina as a whole. ‘A small sample’, the author argues, ‘illuminates both the history and social organization of the larger society; and, conversely, the local events are better understood within the context of larger units of analysis’.
The fact that Freidenberg works at the University of Maryland is of capital importance. She responds to the question ‘Were there Jewish Gauchos?’ by looking at Argentina as multicultural, a kind of southern-hemisphere United States where assimilation doesn't result in the renouncement of an immigrant's ethnic identity but in its wholehearted embrace through a hyphen: Jewish-Argentines are what the inhabitants of Villa Clara are in Freidenberg's opinion, just as she herself is an Argentine-American. Is the tourist-cum-ethnographer thus imposing the way of thinking in her current culture to the subject she scrutinises? That the processes of acculturation in the two nations are not identical is a fundamental topic she fails to address.
