The Road to Trans-South American Divorce: Jews, Family, and the Rise of the Immigrant

The paper examines the challenges Jewish immigrants faced with Argentina's family law in the early 20th century by focusing on bigamy as a useful category for studying the legal culture of Jewish immigrants. It examines the critical role of Ezras Noschim (EN), a Jewish-Argentine organization, in resolving marital issues and bridging legal understandings amid the Jewish migration to Argentina, a country characterized by its Catholic and immigrant identity. Caught between their own Eastern European legal tradition of state-negotiated marital dissolution and the absence of state-recognized divorce in Argentina, Jewish immigrants frequently faced multiple dilemmas concerning the formation and dissolution of marriages. The presentation delves into EN organization’s lay categorization of legal and ethical bigamy to shed light on the interpretive strategies employed by its workers and Jewish immigrants in managing the dichotomy of bigamy—as both a condemnable offense and an acknowledged reality of immigration. It focuses on two cases of legal and ethical bigamy to show that EN not only provided ad-hoc solutions but did so by delicately balancing the maintenance of immigrants’ legal culture with the need to forge a cooperative relationship with the unique case of the Argentine state’s policy on family law. Consequently, it shows how EN crafted a contractual bond with the new state, ensuring the integration of Jewish immigrants while preserving their legal heritage.

Fellow

Lelia Stadler is a PhD candidate at the Columbia University Department of History. She earned her BA and MA from Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation project is a social history of Jewish immigration to the transregional space of South America. It focuses on Jewish immigrants’ encounters with the state and asks how competing legal systems and legal norms in the countries of the region impacted the way Jews experienced family, marriage, and divorce.

Respondent

Jessica Marglin is professor of Religion, Law, and History, and the Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California.  She earned her PhD from Princeton and her BA and MA from Harvard.  Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on law.