A Trans-National Struggle with National and Ethnic Goals: Jewish-Argentines and Solidarity with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War

This article examines the scope and various manifestations of Jewish-Argentine solidarity with the Spanish Republic. While many Argentines sympathized with the Republic as part of their struggle for a democratic, pluralist and socially just Argentina, Jewish-Argentines had additional reasons to support the Republicans. On the one hand, they worried about the fate of their relatives back in Europe if yet another tyrannical regime rose to power with the help of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. At the same time, they sought to protect their space in Argentina at a time of growing right-wing Nationalist influence in political, military, and intellectual circles. The Jewish-Argentine experience serves as a lens through which to discuss the relationship between transnational solidarity and the ways in which distinct social groups organized for political and social change. It includes Jewish-Argentines in the geographies of 1930s transnational solidarity and, in so doing, adds the ethnic dimension to political mobilization for transnational ends.