Structuring Jewish Buenos Aires at the end of the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT A common Jewish Argentine creation story begins in 1889, with 824 Russian Jews disembarking in Buenos Aires and ushering in three decades of massive Jewish migration to that city. In six key themes, this article expands the parameters of that story chronologically, spatially, culturally, and politically. It focuses on the Jewish gaucho (skilled horseman) as an iconic representation of the intersections of Jewish and non-Jewish Buenos Aires; the meanings of neighborhood; the tragedy of ‘white slavery’; cultural institutions; Sephardic porteños (Buenos Aires residents); and the Jewish anarchists and socialists.