We arrived to Argentina without knowing a word of Spanish and lived in a working class barrio of Gran Buenos Aires. There were few opportunities to meet educated people and my father used to take me on Sunday mornings to the Church to hear the preacher. Sometimes we also went to the synagogue, but it was far away (we had no money and avoided travelling on buses), a chaotic, noisy and badly smelling place full of Yiddisch speaking Jews reciting precipitatedly from dirty books in Hebrew while taking part on the several, simultaneous business congress going on around. Obviously it never passed through the mind of my father that we Jews should not go to a church. We were Jews like an African is black and nothing could change that. And we were immune to metaphysics to the point that it was not even considered. I liked Catholic church ceremonies, the melodic, slow, clear diction of the Padre and the welcoming attitude of the people. In my times, part of the ceremony was in Latin, which helped me to learn good Spanish, and the priests made a large effort to make the cermony and its meaning clearly understandable to the simple people attending. An hour or so each Sunday morning was spent in monotonous repeating of the Padre Nuestro, which I can quote even drunk and sleeping. "De la Tentacion libranos" - free us from temptation is part of it. I had this mantra in the back of my mind because yesterday night I broke my fasting and went into the only open food store around, a Russian non-kosher specialty food store and bought 250 gr cheese and 250 gr hering and devoured it in situ. I should not put my foot in that treyfl tempting Satanic (well, not really) place again. BTW, as temptations are supposed to be, the food was excellent.
17 comments:
Which Argentine dishes do you most strongly recommend?
I love posts like this. You seem so interesting.
Russ
Bife a caballo con papas fritas.
Arroz con leche.
Postre vigilante.
Paella valenciana.
Chorizos y menudos.
Mate cocido con galleta.
I don't understand why your father took you to church. Was he considering conversion so as to fit in in the new land and so that his descendants would no longer have to be called beasts? I can't believe that it was purely for entertainment. Didn't he notice Jesus up on the wall and in the prayers? My father was not a particularly religious man - he did not keep the Sabbath even before the war (even in a shtetl there was a secularizing trend - no more payas, not more beards for men of his generation) but he never would have even considered attending church, not in a million years. Going to church is not like going to the movies except cheaper.
As for your description of the synagogue, it sounds like something from Der Sturmer. These are unserer menschen you are describing. This is who we are. The priest on the other hand was the embodiment of an institution responsible for the death and persecution of countless Jews. As a Jew growing up in a non-Jewish society, it is easy to unconsciously absorb self-hatred and identify with the aggressor. Don't do it.
K
K
Don't worry, K!
In the next installment, J will carefully explain how he escaped being turned into a pervert.
Anon.
K, are you echoing that fraud Goldhagen's thesis? That the RCC was no great friend of the Jews is well known. But neither were the historical Jews in those times and periods when they were ascendant - to put it mildly - well disposed towards Christians. This accounts for much of the of the hostility between Christians and Jews, and not the Christ-killing crap. We have all heard ad nauseum how the Sultan sent his ships to evacuate the Jews from Catholic Spain in 1492-6(?). How about some acknowledgement of the fact that by far the largest number of Jews made their lives under the Catholic Jagellonians in the Polish realms? Broadly speaking, Jews were not some sojourners at the margins of society like the Gypsies, they pursued their interests in the ebb and flow of European life and paid the price for living in a turbulent environment.
The nature of the Nazis was already clear to pious Catholics in 1934 when the Nazi asassins of Engelbert Dollfuss refused him the Extreme Unction in his dying hours. As to why the Church had a Concordance with Hitler and not Stalin, well for one thing there is the little matter of the 200,000(mostly Orthodox) clergy that the Communists butchered in the Soviet Union. A figure that Adolf Hitler would not match in all of his 12 years. For another how is it that Zionists, whose job description it is to be acutely sensitive to the Jews' fate, were able to maintain contacts with the Nazis in Berlin upto 1936? Few if anyone living at that time, foresaw the industrial extermination of Jews.
Perhaps you like many others are labouring under the delusion that German Catholics including Ratzinger's parents put Hitler on the road to power. If so take a look at these maps . Protestant inspired revisionism has always been a monkey on the Catholics' back. Further afield, the relationship between Jews and Christians ( mostly Catholics ) even in trying places such as Hungary was not one-dimensional, as this book on the life of two brothers in Hungary illustrates. I am all for Catholics taking the lumps when it is indeed their fault, but not this post-hoc propaganda, emanating from the likes of fattie Foxman of the ADL and similar anti-Catholic bigots, that paint the Catholic Church in a totally lurid light. In truth carrying out a genocide with the efficient, technoratic state machinery the Nazis possessed is the easiest thing in the world. Usage of IBM's Hollerith machines opened up all the baptismal records of converted Jews. And as Martin van Crevald pointed out, a single trainload can 1,000 to their death. Six million would require only 6,000 train trips. To sense the scale of the infrastucture the Nazis had at their disposal, the rolling stock in defeated France alone amounted to 18,000 locomotives and 480,000 carriages.
K does seem to view the Catholic Church in an unfairly, unidimensionally negative light. As the link to the maps posted above shows, the Catholic areas of Germany did not support Hitler to nearly the degree of the Prostestant regions. Moreover, the Catholic Church did not betray its Jewish converts in the way that some German Protestant churches did. Further back in history, Catholic prelates would sometimes be the force that protected Jews even when rabble-rousing Catholic monks or preachers would be the instigators of pogroms. The relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews has never been so black-and-white as K would like to believe.
K,
Imagine yourself immigrating to the USA without speaking a word of English. You rent a place in, say, Harlem, where people are mostly analphabets and speak a deformed kind of English, something like ebonics. You need to hear correct English (this was much before TV and the internet). You go to night school. Sunday morning and you walk around the barrio, and hear the preaching of the only educated person around. You understand little but he speaks literary language.
In the past the main cultural event available to poor people was the preaching and people went to hear a good preacher form afar.
Regarding the synagogue in the Mataderos barrio, I am sorry, but I do remember it well. It was noisy and chaotic, the cantor stopped every minute and banged on the pulpit, he praying was fast, precipitated, uncomprehensible reciting of something from dirty (oh yes!) old prayerbooks. The people greeted and shouted each other in the hall and the cantor had to turn around and stop to make some order and silence. Unsere menschen were poor like we were, badly dressed, and not neat. There were no stock brokers no university professors among the Jews of my barrio, but there were many cuenteniks (house to house salesmen of used furniture and cloth, on credit), factory workers, workers in the local Jewish cemetery, and yes! schnorrers. There were Jewish men sitting in front of the train station asking for coins. The synbagogue was not ventilated and summertime, for example on Yom Kiper when people spent the whole day in the synagogue, one had to go outside for a breath of fresh air.
I made friends with some boys and visited their homes, and they lived in dark "conventillos" that is a room and shared kitchen and so on, like the Italian and Spanish immigrants. The difference was that Jews had many books and were politically active.
Those immigrants, they were called "rusos", are no more and the Jews in Argentina prospered, like everywhere, and they dont live in Mataderos but in Barrio Norte, the northern wealthy quarter. We too soon moved to the north.
But yes, dear K, there were indigent Jewish immigrants in Argentina and oh, horror!, they had FLEAS ! I dont care if also our enemies said so, truth is truth, and no one can make me forget that I personally got fleas in the synagogue!
And please dont worry, sitting in church a few times did not make me Christian nor made me less Jewish. There was no such danger ever. We were very different from the Argentine people, and our ways soon separated and I went on studying and my father opened a business and so on. But one legacy of my years in the barrio is that I dont, I cant consider latino people or the catholic church as hostile to me, on the contrary, I rather like them.
Ivan and Anon doth protest too much. I mention one word about the Catholic Church and I get a full page essay back defending it. No institution is pure unalloyed good or pure unalloyed evil (even Hamas started with charitable work) and neither is the Church. The Church has made progress since the '60s in its dealings with the Jews but before that the history is generally not good. I understand that in some sense the Church viewed Jews as religious competitors and wanted their team to win and not the Jews, but I also think that this is not how Jesus would have handled such a relationship if he was still around.
K - Your memories are your own and you are entitled to them. My father was also of course confronted with the problem of learning the language when he came here and church was not part of his solution, but I understand that for your father it was. I don't consider most Americans to be hostile to me or Jews - as I said before, I see more anti-Semitism in a week on the comments to this blog than I do in ten years of real life. Maybe I don't hang out in the "right" circles but I have no intention of changing that.
K
The Catholic (= Universal) Church is basically Judaism sans Jewish tribalism. A French King offered to the Jews "Let us be one people", many accepted and became French, others rejected the offer, were expulsed and founded the Ashkenazi branch of Jewry. We Jews reject their message of universal love (aka mixing, aka miscegenation) and are paying dearly for it. Catholic theology, as far as I know it, seems to me Judaism Light. I like best the Chinese Ancestor Cult, it is pure undiluted superstition without any metaphysics at all.
"Let us be one people" followed by expulsion doesn't sound like universal love to me. More like Don Corleone Mafia style "I'll make you an offer you can't refuse."
K
The pre-industrial pogroms were a big sin, to be sure, but I don't think they are an unspeakable infamy in the same way that the Holocaust is. The Christians in question were involved in zero-sum Malthusian economic competition against Jews. And at times in the 14th or 16th century (or something), the Ashkenazi population was growing so fast that I am pretty sure it must have greatly outpaced the growth of the Christians - if so, Jews must necessarily have been progressively displacing Christians from their economic roles, perhaps by dint of superior intelligence. Malthusian competition for calories means either one's little daughters starve, or maybe one has the power to bump off someone else instead - as moderns, this is beyond what we are familiar with. Blood ties are blood ties, that's human nature, and sadly the Jews were outside those ties. At least, that's my theory - that economic competition was ultimately behind it - but I'm not quite sure how to test this notion. I do know that the Russian pogroms were mostly initiated by peasants according to Solzhenitsyn. This comports with my theory because the peasants are of course the ones who starve, or realize stunted bodily growth, under Malthusian food shortage.
The great sociobiologist William Hamilton thought genocide often occurred in context of unequal population growth, and he applied this to 1990s Yugoslavia. He also applied it to the Holocaust, but I believe that this does not hold water at all. When I obtained some rough data on the 19th century, just taking the first data I found, it seemed that Ashkenazi populations grew just ~1.5x as much as Gentile ones over the century (something like that). I do not see this as a salient difference. Maybe the difference was larger in Germany, but probably not by much.
Of course, in the non-Malthusian world after 1800, there is not so much reason in the first place to fear another tribe becoming more numerous, but I guess Hamilton believed that old, hardwired instincts could perseverate at least partially.
Anyway, Hamilton thought eugenics (and dysgenics) was just common sense, and he thought it was common sense to try to restrain any ethnies from having population growth unequal to that of their neighbors. He was fairly mystified that no one wanted to even hear about such ideas, and he got 'in trouble' over a symposium at the Vatican, the very Vatican (SJ Gould was also supposed to attend), in which he sounded off about dysgenics, euthanasia of mis-developed infants, overpopulation, birth control, and so on. Apparently, despite his extremely famous accomplishments, he rarely was a repeat speaker at any venue.
Y'all got to remember how backward Nords were before they got ahold of some Italian and Levantine notions. They had to bray about universal love all day long just to 'universalize' themselves to the extent of remembering to attack and slaughter people living 75 miles away, instead of their in-laws living 10 miles away. Like a guy (me) who has to psych himself up about doing 10 hours of work, in order to do just 5.
Actually, some suggest that the change in Nordish behavior was mainly because grain plants finally adapted well to the north, creating a newly stabler and richer agriculture. I have no clue if that's true.
I think that if anyone really conducted themselves like Jesus in the Malthusian world, they would have been clobbered. It was an 'evil' world. The Spartans stalked and slew their Helots as a military training game, and slaughtered the muscular and agile ones en masse when they grew to threatening numbers. No one even questioned slavery - maybe the Hebrews did with their Jubilee, but I wonder whether they really stuck to these ideals assiduously? And did they liberate foreign slaves or only Hebrew ones? And of course we know that alleged genocides by the Hebrews are recorded by them in the Bible. This was just how it was done back then. We are lucky not to live in a hungry world - in most ways, that is: it was probably kind of fun in a way to dare death with your fellows in a collective struggle, and it was a joyful blessing simply to survive from year to year. The "meaning of life" was obvious, there was probably less "existential" malaise. The plenitude of active violent enmity outside may have increased harmony and closeness within the community.
> It was an 'evil' world.
I forgot a great example. Pericles openly and proudly says: our [Athens'] boldness has gained access to every land and sea, everywhere raising imperishable monuments to its goodness and wickedness.
Rob S.,
If differencial growth causes mas extermination, then the gypsies in Europe have it coming.
But look, When Cecil Rhodes started to settle Rhodesia, it had only 200,000 or so Africans in it. By 1980 there were 4 - 5 million. White settlers in Rhodesia and in South Africa were and are out reproduced by a factor of ten or more, yet no murderous resettlement has taken place. On the contrary, my friend!
If Zimbabwe continues to ring-fence itself, the population will die back to 200 000.
Anon.
Buen comienzo
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