The Jewish Diaspora

Migration

Ladino-speaking Sephardim to South America

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1890–1959 CESalonika (Thessaloniki) → South America

Why it happened

From the 1890s into the 1950s, Jews settled in Buenos Aires and other Argentine towns, often through family and group networks rather than international immigration organizations.1 The Ottoman Empire's decline, the creation of Turkey as a nation-state and early-twentieth-century upheaval in former Ottoman lands contributed to further departures from Turkey and the Balkans.2

The migration

This was a secondary , not a direct voyage from Spain in 1492: descendants of Iberian exiles had preserved in Ottoman Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, then spread onward.2 Salonika is the map's representative anchor, not the route's sole origin; a study of Buenos Aires identifies arrivals from Salonika, Rhodes, Turkey and elsewhere in the Balkans.3 Many early arrivals from Ottoman lands were locally called turcos.2 They founded organizations, synagogues, cemeteries and schools while retaining identities linked to cities and regions of origin.21 Argentina also included Hakitía-speaking Moroccans, a related but distinct Sephardic stream.2 A separate Moroccan route ran from Tétouan and Tangier to the Brazilian Amazon during the rubber boom.2 This line represents the Ladino-speaking Ottoman and Balkan route to South America; it neither depicts the Moroccan–Amazon stream nor implies that South American Jewry was exclusively Sephardic. Its 1959 endpoint marks the end of the decade covered by the cited migration history, not the end of all Sephardic movement to South America.

Sources

  1. BBrodsky, Adriana. 2011. Educating Argentine Jews: Sephardim and Their Schools, 1920s–1960s. Returning to Babel 33–51. doi:10.1163/9789004217669_004
  2. ARoniger, Luis. 2019. The Western Sephardic Diaspora: Ancestral Birthplaces and Displacement, Diaspora Formation and Multiple Homelands. Latin American Research Review 54(4) 1031–1038. doi:10.25222/larr.600
  3. ARein, Raanan, Sheinin, David M. K.. 2023. Structuring Jewish Buenos Aires at the end of the long nineteenth century. Jewish Culture and History 24(4) 486–500. doi:10.1080/1462169X.2023.2253020