The contemporary Sephardic communities in Latin America were created by Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, most of whom emigrated to the continent between the 1890s and the end of the 1920s. They combined religion with ethnicity by creating communal frameworks that united Jews from a common ethnic origin around the synagogue as the central institution.
During the four generations that have elapsed, new Sephardic organizations have come into being, others were transformed, and functions were centralized to meet the evolving needs of their members and their social mobility. New waves of immigration invigorated ethnic identities.
The Sephardic institutions form part of a comprehensive religious framework that continues to be identified with the communities of origin of their founders.
The most Orthodox communities, of Syrian as well as of North African descent, are strongly identified with the town or city where their founders came from.
An important factor in the transmission of a particular ethnic identity is the size of the community. Large communal frameworks are essential not only for the provision of social and cultural needs but also to guarantee communal seclusion and to prohibit assimilation.
Other mechanisms of ethnic survival are based on links of exchange between communities of the same origin living in different countries, or through merging with communities of a similar origin.
A crucial factor in the transmission of religious/ethnic identity is the possibility of finding or creating a new rabbinical leadership that would be accepted as an authentic continuity of the cultural tradition of the communities of origin or as a relevant source of inspiration and authority. Ladino-speaking communities become dependent on “imported” rabbis, while Arabic-speakers create a bridge between continuity and transition by sending locally born students to Sephardic rabbinical schools in Israel.
One of the goals of the Sephardim is to stop assimilation. The Caribbean Jews are the oldest Sephardic group in Latin America. Following the decline of the Dutch and English colonies, they settled on the mainland and formed the oldest Jewish communities in Hispanic America on the coasts of Venezuela and Greater Colombia. Most of the Caribbean Jews were gradually assimilated into the community. The only surviving organized community of this group is that of Kol Shearith Israel in Panama.
Assimilation happened mainly due to the small size of the Jewish-Portuguese communities and their affinity with their host community. The persistence of small communities depends on the presence of larger Jewish groups that can shelter the separate identity, offering communal services and Jewish spouses.
North African Jews were able to resist assimilation due to the constant immigration from Tetuan and Tangier. The small communities founded in the nineteenth century along the Amazon River were gradually abandoned or disintegrated, but the communities in Belém, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Cordoba and Rosario survived due to the continuous relations with the mother communities, as well as among the new communities.
The largest Moroccan community developed in Caracas as a result of several waves of immigration. Constant mobility and family relations with other Spanish-Moroccan communities in Latin America, Spain, North Africa and Israel helped to maintain the traditions of the communities of origin.
Cooperation with other Jewish groups in education and other communal services facilitates the defense against trends towards assimilation. Jews from Turkey and the Balkans were able to benefit from the presence of a spiritual leadership, educated in the Sephardic rabbinical schools of the Middle East, whose tolerant attitude towards trends of modernization helped to bridge the gap between strict religious observance and integration into the Latin American environment.
The Ladino-speaking communities are dispersed throughout the continent, the largest being in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Montevideo, Santiago, and practically in every capital as well as in the large provincial towns.
Jews from Aleppo and Damascus have historically been the most religiously observant among the Latin American communities.
The Orthodox Syrian communities developed large educational networks that supply two major needs: the educational preparation of the Jewish woman as the pillar of the family in order to assure Jewish continuity, and higher religious education for men, in order to create the future religious and communal leaders.
As Orthodox Jews, the Syrian communities are less affected by assimilation than the Ashkenazim and the internal balance between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi population is gradually changing. The study conducted by DellaPergola and Lerner in 1990 on the Jewish community of Mexico showed that the dominant Ashkenazi group was losing its majority: the Ashkenazim then accounted for about 45% of the Jewish population, the Ladino-speaking Sephardim for 13%, and the Syrian communities for 42%.
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The information from this article came from Ort.edu.
