Argentina Wasn’t A Candidate For A Jewish State

A reply to Raoul Neuman’s “The Buenos Aires Bombings.”

The emergence of antisemitic conspiracy literature in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be understood within the broader context of nation-building, mass immigration, and the transnational circulation of European reactionary ideas. Argentina, a young state undergoing rapid demographic transformation, received millions of immigrants from Europe, among them a significant number of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Jewish agricultural colonies established under the auspices of the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA), founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, became highly visible symbols of this migration. Although these settlements were legally established, economically marginal, and entirely devoid of political ambitions, they were nonetheless reinterpreted by nationalist and antisemitic writers as evidence of a hidden Jewish territorial project. This reinterpretation laid the groundwork for a persistent and damaging political libel that continues to resonate in Argentine antisemitic discourse.

Central to this transformation was the importation and local adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document produced in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Originally designed by tsarist secret police circles to justify repression of Jews by portraying them as conspirators seeking global domination, the “Protocols” rapidly spread beyond Europe through translations into French and Spanish. In Argentina, the text was taken up by clerical, nationalist, and later military circles, where it was treated not as a demonstrable forgery but as a revelatory document exposing a supposed Jewish plan for world control. The importance of the Protocols lies not in their factual claims—which were entirely fabricated—but in the narrative framework they provided: Jews were depicted as a collective political actor operating secretly, advancing long-term territorial and financial objectives invisible to the host society.

Argentine antisemitic literature did not merely reproduce the Protocols verbatim; it localised them. Works such as Kahal y Oro played a decisive role in this process. Drawing on Russian antisemitic concepts of the “Kahal,” or Jewish communal self-government, these texts fused European conspiracy mythology with concrete Argentine realities, particularly Jewish land ownership and rural settlement. The existence of Jewish agricultural colonies, established for humanitarian and economic reasons, was reinterpreted as the early stage of a clandestine plan to establish a Jewish state on Argentine soil. In this way, normal patterns of immigrant settlement were transformed into signs of an alleged geopolitical conspiracy.

This rhetorical move was crucial. By framing Jewish immigration as a covert invasion rather than a lawful demographic process, antisemitic writers converted social anxiety into a narrative of existential threat. The absence of any evidence for political separatism was not a weakness of the accusation but its strength: the alleged conspiracy was said to operate invisibly, rendering all counter-evidence suspect. Denials could be dismissed as further proof of secrecy. This logic closely parallels that of medieval blood libels, in which Jews were accused of ritual crimes precisely because those crimes were said to be hidden from public view. In the Argentine case, the accusation was not ritual murder but territorial usurpation—a “land libel”—that functioned in structurally similar ways.

Over time, this territorial libel acquired increasingly violent implications. By portraying Jews as a foreign collective acting against the nation’s integrity, antisemitic discourse framed exclusion and repression as acts of self-defence. During the interwar period and into the 1930s and 1940s, nationalist groups in Argentina openly questioned the loyalty of Jewish citizens, depicting them as agents of an imagined transnational Jewish polity. This occurred despite the fact that no Zionist organisation ever proposed Argentina as a site for Jewish sovereignty and despite the explicitly anti-national character of Hirsch’s colonisation project, which rejected political autonomy in favour of integration through labour.

The durability of this myth can be explained by its adaptability. Although the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 should, in theory, have invalidated claims that Jews sought to establish hidden states elsewhere, the opposite occurred. The narrative simply evolved. Older references to the “Kahal” or to Jewish finance were replaced with new terms such as “Zionism,” “globalism,” or “colonialism,” while preserving the same underlying accusation of collective Jewish duplicity and territorial ambition. In Argentine discourse, this often took the form of retroactively interpreting historical Jewish settlement as proof of a timeless plan, rather than as a response to persecution and poverty.

In the contemporary period, this inherited framework has proven disturbingly resilient. Moments of heightened conflict in the Middle East have repeatedly triggered surges in antisemitic rhetoric in Argentina and elsewhere, with local Jewish communities treated as proxies for distant geopolitical struggles. External propaganda from jihadist or extremist movements does not create these ideas ex nihilo; rather, it activates and amplifies pre-existing myths embedded in national political cultures. The accusation that Jews constitute a foreign, conspiratorial collective seeking territorial control thus continues to circulate, despite having been repeatedly discredited by historical scholarship.

A critical examination of the historical record makes clear that the Argentine territorial libel was entirely baseless. No serious Zionist plan ever targeted Argentina as a site for Jewish statehood, and no Jewish institution pursued sovereignty or political autonomy within Argentine territory. Jewish agricultural colonies were legal, economically precarious, and politically loyal to the Argentine state. The transformation of these facts into a narrative of invasion was an ideological construction, imported from Europe and adapted to local anxieties about nationhood, sovereignty, and modernity.

Understanding this process is essential not only for the historiography of Argentine antisemitism but also for contemporary efforts to counter it. The persistence of these myths demonstrates how conspiracy theories, once embedded in political culture, can outlive the circumstances that produced them. By tracing their origins and mechanisms, scholars can expose the continuity between past and present forms of antisemitic discourse and challenge the false narratives that continue to endanger minority communities.

—Samuel Glembocki