This collection of essays addresses various aspects of Arab and Jewish immigration and acculturation in Latin America. The volume examines how the Latin American elites who were keen to change their countries' ethnic mix felt threatened by the arrival of Arabs and Jews.

This volume focuses on Jewish, Arab, non-Latin European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and their experiences in their “new” homes. Rejecting exceptionalist and homogenizing tendencies within immigration history, contributors advocate instead an approach that emphasizes the locally- and nationally-embedded nature of ethnic identification.

Situating Jewish-Latin Americans in the larger multi-ethnic context of their countries, this volume challenges commonly held assumptions, accepted ideas, and stable categories about ethnicity in Latin America in general and Jewish experiences on this continent in particular.

A current and comprehensive collection of articles on the Jewish presence in Latin America, this multidisciplinary volume draws on the research and analysis of some of the most prominent scholars in Latin American Jewish Studies from the United States, Canada, Israel, Mexico, and Argentina. These specialists in history, politics, anthropology, and literature present 19 essays, 15 of which are original, three reprinted, and one translated here for the first time from Spanish.The book will be of use to specialists in Latin American literature, immigration history, international relations, and Latin American politics, as well as those interested in Jewish history, literature, and society outside Latin America.

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.

Migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, over a third of the population of the Mashriq, i.e. the Levant, had made the transatlantic journey. This intense mobility was interrupted by World War I but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s under the French Mandate. Many migrants returned to their homelands, but the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Haiti, and Mexico, building transnational lives. The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical ethnography, Camila Pastor examines how French colonial control over Syria and Lebanon affected the migrants. Tracing issues of class, race, and gender through the decades of increased immigration to Mexico and looking at the narratives created by the Mahjaris (migrants) themselves in both their old and new homes, Pastor sheds new light on the creation of transnational networks at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. Revealing how migrants experienced mobility as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, The Mexican Mahjar tracks global history on an intimate scale.

Originally published in 1987, this collection of essays is a major contribution toward developing a realistic picture of the Latin American Jewish communities in the late 20th Century. The book will be of interest to students of comparative studies, Jewish studies and Latin American studies and responds to the need to learn more about the Jewish communities of Latin America, both as a fragment of the Jewish diaspora and as an element in the economic and social life of the continent.