The Road to Divorce: Between the Argentine State and the Jewish Community, 1919-1947

• In Event: Rethinking Polish Jewish Immigration to Latin America

Abstract

This presentation examines marriage and divorce as key elements to understanding the intersection ‎of the history of Jewish immigrant families and the history of Argentina as an immigrant nation. My presentation explores this juncture from the vantage point of the complex relationship between Argentina’s family law and its new population of immigrants. Polish-Jewish immigrants were implicated in judicial procedures that crossed multiple legal systems: both religious and secular, in their source countries and their new destinations alike. Drawing on private (“secular”) separation agreements signed by Polish-Jewish immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s found in the collections of the Central Archive for the ‎History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, this presentation argues that Jewish divorce was subject to interpretation ‎‎not only by state actors but also by shadow state actors such as immigrants’ communal ‎‎organizations. The legal impasse in the realm of divorce created by immigration to a ‎‎Catholic nation led the communal organization Ezras Noschim to forge an alternative system of dissolving old ‎‎marriages and forming new ones outside state law. Thus, Jewish immigrants from Poland deliberately and selectively administered their relationship with the Argentine state ‎‎to balance their wish of being accepted into their new society without losing the rights they already held in their country of origin‏.‏‎ More broadly, this paper demonstrates the importance of divorce as a ‎ ‎category of analysis for the study of modern Jewish migration. By focusing on the question of marriage and divorce, and adopting a “Longue Durée” approach to the migration of Polish-Jews to Argentina, this paper challenges previous scholarship on the relationship between eastern European Jews and their ‎‎states of settlement in the Americas. ‎

Author

• Lelia Stadler, Columbia University