Argentina holds the largest Jewish community in Latin America, and it is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi — the Baron de Hirsch colonies, Moisés Ville and the Entre Ríos “Jewish gauchos”, and the great migration from the Russian Empire.
But the Sephardim were there first. Moroccan Jews from Tetouan and Tangier were arriving from the 1860s and 1870s, a generation before the Ashkenazi mass migration began, and they founded Buenos Aires’ first Sephardi congregation in 1891.
Why does it matter that there were four communities?
Because it decides which archive holds your family.
There was never one Sephardi community in Argentina. There were four. They arrived from different places, spoke different languages, settled in different neighbourhoods, built separate institutions and, crucially for the genealogist, buried their dead in separate cemeteries. They did not much mix, and for the first two generations they barely intermarried.
The Moroccans. From the Spanish zone of northern Morocco — Tetouan, Tangier, Larache, Alcazarquivir, Arcila — arriving from the 1860s. They spoke Haketía, the Judeo-Spanish of northern Morocco, and Spanish. Their congregation, the Congregación Israelita Latina of Buenos Aires, was founded in 1891 and is the oldest Sephardi institution in the country.
The Aleppans (halebim). From Aleppo, arriving from around 1900. Concentrated in Once and later Villa Crespo in Buenos Aires. Judeo-Arabic speakers.
The Damascenes (shamim). From Damascus, arriving on the same timetable — and entirely separate from the Aleppans, with their own synagogues, their own burial society and their own leadership. Concentrated around Boca and Barracas, and later Flores.
That the Aleppans and Damascenes kept apart in Buenos Aires will surprise nobody who has read our Syria page: they were distinct communities in Syria, with distinct rites and rabbinates, and they exported the distinction intact.
The Ladino-speakers. From the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia — İzmir, Salonica, Istanbul, Rhodes, Bulgaria — often called turcos in Argentina regardless of where they actually came from. Judeo-Spanish speakers, and the group with the most direct claim to Iberian descent after the Moroccans.
The practical rule. Establish which of the four before you do anything else. The community determines the synagogue, the burial society, the cemetery and the surviving records, and searching the wrong one will produce nothing.
The Moroccans: the ones who could already speak Spanish
This is the group that matters most to this site, and their story has a feature no other immigrant community in Argentina shared.
They arrived already speaking the language. Haketía is a Judeo-Spanish dialect, and northern Moroccan Jews had lived under Spanish cultural influence for centuries; many had been educated in Spanish.
Where Yiddish-speaking and Arabic-speaking immigrants faced years of linguistic isolation, the Moroccans could trade, litigate and marry into Argentine society from the week they landed. It made them exceptionally mobile — and it took a great many of them out of Buenos Aires and into the interior.
They spread as pedlars. Moroccan Jewish cuenteneros — travelling credit salesmen — worked the towns of Rosario, Córdoba, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, La Rioja, Salta and the smaller settlements of the interior, often as the only Jewish family for a great distance. Small communities formed where enough of them settled. This is the least documented part of Argentine Sephardi history and the hardest to research.
How did they get there?
Frequently by way of somewhere else, and the routes are documented.
Via Gibraltar — many northern Moroccan families held or acquired British protection there, so British records may hold the departure. See our Gibraltar page.
Via the Brazilian Amazon — Moroccan Jews had been settling in Belém and Manaus since 1809, and when the rubber boom collapsed after 1912 a substantial number moved south to Argentina. A family that appears in Buenos Aires around 1915 with a Tetouan surname may well have spent a generation in the Amazon. Our Brazil page is the intermediate step.
Directly from Tangier and Tetouan, often through Cádiz or Gibraltar.
Why this group matters for nationality applications
Moroccan Sephardim in Argentina descend directly from the Megorashim — the Iberian exiles — usually retain recognisably Iberian surnames, and can frequently be documented back to Tetouan or Tangier where the records are good. They are among the strongest candidates anywhere for Spanish or Portuguese nationality.
Note also the Primo de Rivera decree of 1924, which offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim abroad. Some Argentine and Balkan Sephardi families took it up, and where they did there will be a consular file.
Was there a colonial layer?
Yes, but it is not connected to the modern community.
Long before any of this, there were Portuguese New Christians in the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires was founded in 1580 and grew as a smuggling port, much of the trade in Portuguese hands — and after the Union of the Crowns of 1580 that meant, in large part, New Christian hands. There were New Christians in colonial Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Tucumán.
They fall under the Inquisition of Lima, not any local tribunal — the same structure as Macau, Hormuz and Manila on our other pages, and for the same reason.
The most famous case is Francisco Maldonado da Silva, born at San Miguel de Tucumán around 1592, the son of a Portuguese New Christian surgeon, who circumcised himself, was arrested in Chile, spent twelve years in the cells and was burned at Lima in the great auto-da-fé of 1639.
There is no continuity between this layer and the modern community, and this page does not pretend otherwise. But the records exist, they are in Lima and Seville, and our Peru page is where that trail runs.
What records survive?
Argentina is, by the standards of this site, very well documented. Much is online and free, and the state records are good.
Immigration — start here
CEMLA, the Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos in Buenos Aires, maintains a searchable database of passenger arrivals from 1882 to 1960. Entries typically give name, age, marital status, occupation, nationality and religion, port of embarkation and ship.
For a community that arrived by sea across a defined period, this is the single most productive source in the country.
Two cautions: the database has gaps, and the original registers are held by the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones and the Archivo General de la Nación, so an absence from CEMLA is not proof of absence.
Civil registration
Argentine civil registration began in 1886 in the city of Buenos Aires, with the provinces following at various dates. Births, marriages and deaths are recorded by the Registro Civil of each jurisdiction, and the records are detailed — marriage records in particular name parents and give birthplaces.
Because the Sephardi arrival straddles the start of civil registration, expect the first generation to be recorded at marriage or death rather than at birth.
Censuses — better than most people realise
The national censuses of 1869, 1895 and 1914 are indexed and largely available online through FamilySearch. They record birthplace, nationality, year of arrival, literacy, occupation and household composition.
The 1895 and 1914 censuses are the key documents for the Sephardi arrival. They catch the Moroccan community established and the Syrian and Ladino-speaking communities arriving, and the year-of-arrival field will often date an immigration that no other source records.
Later censuses (1947, 1960) are less accessible.
Naturalisation and identity records
Cartas de Ciudadanía — naturalisation files, held in the federal courts and at the Archivo General de la Nación — give birthplace, arrival and residence. Libretas de enrolamiento and cédulas de identidad are the identity documents families are most likely to hold.
Community records — and a warning
Jewish communal records in Argentina are held by the individual kehillot and burial societies, and which one depends on which of the four communities the family belonged to.
- Congregación Israelita Latina — the Moroccan community, from 1891
- Separate Aleppan and Damascene institutions and burial societies
- Separate institutions for the Ladino-speakers
- AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina) is the umbrella body, but it is historically Ashkenazi in origin and its registers will not necessarily hold Sephardi families
The AMIA bombing of 18 July 1994, which killed 85 people, destroyed the building and with it a great deal of the community’s central archive. Some material was recovered or reconstructed; much was not. This is a hard limitation and researchers should know about it before they start writing letters. The Israeli Embassy bombing of 1992 killed 29 more.
Cemeteries — the community key
This is the most useful structural fact in Argentine Jewish genealogy.
Burial in Argentina is organised by chevra kadisha, and each of the four Sephardi communities maintained its own burial society and its own ground, distinct from the Ashkenazi cemeteries such as La Tablada.
So the cemetery in which a person is buried tells you which community they belonged to, and therefore where to look for everything else. It is the same principle as the Grana and Twansa registers of Tunis and the separate Sephardi series in Vienna: an institutional division that doubles as a research key.
Where do you go after the arrival?
For most families the Argentine records will take you back to the arrival, and no further. The generation before that is recorded in the country of origin.
Morocco — and note that the Tetouan burial register (Libro de Metim, 1897–1971) and the circumcision register of R. Yitzhak Bar Vidal Ha-Sarfaty (1881–1940) cover exactly the years of the emigration to Argentina. A boy circumcised at Tetouan in 1890 and recorded by Sarfaty may appear at Buenos Aires in CEMLA twenty years later. That is a joinable pair of sources and nobody appears to have joined them.
Syria — Aleppo’s circumcision register (1868–1945) and marriage database, and the Damascus material.
Turkey and the Ottoman Empire — the İzmir community registers, the Salonica kehalim, and the Ottoman population registers.
Gibraltar and Brazil for the intermediate steps.
What has and hasn’t been researched
The Tetouan–Buenos Aires link has never been traced. Both ends are documented — Sarfaty’s register at one end, CEMLA at the other, covering the same decades — and nobody has matched them. This is the single most valuable piece of work available on this page, and it is desk work.
The Amazon–Argentina movement after 1912 is known in outline and unreconstructed.
The interior communities are almost entirely undocumented. Moroccan pedlar families across Rosario, Córdoba, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero and the smaller towns left little communal record, and the generation that remembers them is going.
The 1994 bombing’s effect on the surviving record has never been assessed from a genealogical point of view. Knowing what was lost, what was recovered and what was always held elsewhere would save researchers a great deal of wasted effort.
The 1924 Primo de Rivera applications — where Argentine Sephardim took up Spanish nationality, there are consular files, and nobody has looked for them.
Further reading
Adriana Brodsky, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880–1960 (Indiana, 2016) — the book on this subject, and the one to read first. It is precisely about the four communities and how they became, and did not become, one.
Haim Avni, Argentina and the Jews: A History of Jewish Immigration, and his work on Argentine immigration policy — the standard scholarly account.
Victor A. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890–1930: In Search of an Identity — includes the Sephardi communities and their separateness.
Margalit Bejarano, on the Sephardim of Latin America, and her comparative work on the Syrian communities of the Americas.
Ricardo Feierstein, Historia de los judíos argentinos.
For the colonial layer: our Peru page, and Seymour Liebman and Stanley Hordes on the New Christian networks of Spanish America.
Organisations and repositories
CEMLA (Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos), Buenos Aires — the passenger database
Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires; Dirección Nacional de Migraciones
Registro Civil of the City of Buenos Aires and of each province
Congregación Israelita Latina de Buenos Aires — the Moroccan community
AMIA and the Centro Marc Turkow / IWO, Buenos Aires — the IWO archive survived the bombing and holds significant material
Museo Judío de Buenos Aires
FamilySearch — the 1869, 1895 and 1914 censuses
Genealogía Judía Argentina and JewishGen’s Latin America SIG
Help us find records
Argentina is well served by state records and poorly served by communal ones. We are looking for:
- Records of the Congregación Israelita Latina and of the Aleppan, Damascene and Ladino-speaking burial societies
- Cemetery transcriptions from any of the Sephardi grounds
- Family papers documenting the move from Tetouan, Tangier, Aleppo, Damascus, İzmir or Salonica to Argentina — passports, protection documents, letters
- Anything on the Moroccan families of the interior, who left almost no institutional trace
- Documentation of the Amazon to Argentina move after 1912
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.
Research services
Argentine Sephardi research is straightforward at the Argentine end and demanding at the other. CEMLA, the censuses and civil registration will usually take you to the arrival; after that the work is in Tetouan, Aleppo, Damascus or İzmir, and often through an intermediate stop in Gibraltar or the Brazilian Amazon.
The first question is always which of the four communities the family belonged to, because it decides everything else. Moroccan families in particular are frequently strong candidates for Spanish or Portuguese nationality, and we are glad to advise on that. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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See also: Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Morocco · Sephardic Jews of Gibraltar · Sephardic Jews of Brazil · Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Syria · Spanish and Portuguese Nationality