Missing Jews: the Memory of Dictatorship in Argentina and the Jewish Identity Diplomacy of José Siderman
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chapter 9 Missing Jews: the Memory of Dictatorship in Argentina and the Jewish Identity Diplomacy of José Siderman David M.K. Sheinin The March 1976 coup d’état ushered in seven years of brutal military rule. Within weeks of the takeover, the emerging international human rights community shifted its focus to Argentina, prompting an ongoing secret and sometimes frenzied Argentine government response. One key element of what the military authorities perceived as an international human rights menace to the country’s place in the international community was the characteriza- tion of the dictatorship as Nazi and anti-Semitic.1 Much has been written about anti-Semitism and the Argentine dictator- ship. Anti-Jewish prejudice was present in the Argentine armed forces and in right-wing political circles long before 1976. At the same time, analyses of the dictatorship’s anti-Semitism have often stopped there; the explanation for how the military understood, and therefore treated Jewish Argentines was forged years if not decades before 1976, with heightened hostility in the 1970s primed by suspicions that the banker David Graiver had helped fund the Montoneros (a left-wing Peronist armed insurgent group); by the revival of the canard of a dark Jewish plot to gain control of Argentina’s Patagonia territory; and by the rehashed notion associating Jews with Marxism. The most famous victim of military terror, Jacobo Timerman began to advance this narrative in the late 1970s and scholars have rarely questioned or sought to understand it in greater depth.2 Nor has what some call the collective memory of dictatorship, or the so-called collective memory of Jews under dictatorship, challenged the linearity of that outline. The military came to power in March 1976 fully 1 Susana Sosenski, “Guardianes de la memoria: La conmemoración del golpe militar entre los exiliados argentinos en México,” Economía, Sociedad y Territorio 5 (2005): 379–81; Clara Lida, “Enfoques comparativos sobre los exilios en México: España y Argentina en el siglo XX,” in Pablo Yankelevich ed., México, país refugio: La experiencia de los exilios en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2002), pp. 205–17. 2 An important exception is Emanuel Nicolás Kahan, Memories That Lie a Little: Jewish Experiences during the Argentine Dictatorship (Boston: Brill, 2019). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004432246_010 190 Sheinin prepared for action and bearing decades of ideological, cultural, and tactical anti-Semitic baggage.3 Yet, just as the experience of Jewish Argentines under dictatorship was nuanced and in no way uniform, so too was the military approach to Jewish Argentines and the construction of a Jewish enemy. Just as we still know little, for example, of Peronist and anti-Peronist factions of military officers who participated in annihilation operations against internal enemies before and after 1976, so too has there been little work on a documentary or oral history record of how the Argentine military developed its ideas on a Jewish menace after 1976.4 This chapter examines the disappearance of Jews and anti-Semitism from the post-1983 memory of dictatorship in Argentina. It goes on to consider the unusual case of José Siderman, kidnapped and tortured as a Jew. It shows how an Argentine dictatorship-based Jewish identity—already forged by the Jacobo Timerman case, and a broader resonance of the association in the international community of the Argentine dictatorship with Nazism—shaped diplomacy, politics, and legal action, and how, in turn, the case reinforced those same identity markers. The Siderman case neither subtracts from nor adds to what we know of the force of the dictatorship’s anti-Semitism. It shows, rather, how different constituencies advanced their positions in that context. Moreover, it is indicative of other cases about which we know little but that likely rep- resent a varied and complex Jewish response to the Argentine dictatorship. There is also a parallel between the secrecy of two democratic Argentine presi- dential administrations that fought Siderman in court from 1984 to 1996 and 3 Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 33‒64; Daniel Lvovich, “Historia reciente de pasados traumáticos: De los fascismos y colaboracionismo europeos a la historia de la última dictadura argentina,” in Florencia Levín and Marina Franco comps. Historia reciente: Perspectivas y desafíos para un campo en con- strucción (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2007), pp. 97‒124; James P. Brennan, Argentina’s Missing Bones: Revisiting the History of the Dirty War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), pp. 29‒30; Ezequiel Raggio, La formación del estado military en la Argentina, 1955‒1976 (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1986); Judith Noemí Freidenberg, The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), pp. 114‒22; Hernán Dobry, Operación Israel: El rearme argentine durante la dictadura (1976–1983) (Buenos Aires: Lumiere, 2011). 4 Interview with Ernesto Barreiro by author, December 12, 2016, Ezeiza, Argentina; Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Massera el genocida (Buenos Aires: Página/12, 1999), pp. 123–44; Daniel Lvovich, “Actitudes sociales y dictaduras: Las historiografías española y argentina en perspectiva comparada,” in Gabriela Águila and Lucia Alonso coords., Procesos represivos y actitudes sociales: Entre la España franquista y las dictaduras del Cono Sur (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2013), pp. 142–5..