Origins of the Semana Tragica Pogrom (Buenos Aires, 1919)

Munck, Ronaldo, Ricardo Falcon and Bernardo Galitelli. Argentina: From Anarchism to Peronism: Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855-1985. (London: Zed Books, 1987), 86.
Oved, Yaacov. Estudios Interdiciplinarios De America Latina Y El Caribe. "The Uniqueness of Anarchism in Argentina". Last modified June, 1997. http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/VIII_1/oved.htm.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 1890-1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 81.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 81.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 86.
Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1980-1910 (Oakland: AK Press, 2010), 1.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 80.
Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia, 16.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 86.
Oved, Yaacov, "The Uniqueness of Anarchism in Argentina".
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 93.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 36.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 94.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 38.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 78.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 38.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 80.
Ibid., 78.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 37.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 81.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 72.
Ibid., 75.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 88.
Oved, Yaacov, "The Uniqueness of Anarchism in Argentina".
Ibid.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 38.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 36.
Rock, David. State Building and Political Movements in Argentina, 1860-1916 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 214.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 38.
Ibid., 37.
Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia, 3.
Ibid.,196.
Rock, David. State Building and Political Movements, 202-4.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 83.
Rock, David. State Building and Political Movements, 205-6.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 58-62.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 40.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 81.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 123.
Ibid., 83.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 82-3.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 170.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 170.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 91-2.
Ibid., 92.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 94.
Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia, 227.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 94-5.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 94-5.
Ibid.
Ibid., 96.
Ibid., 87-8.
Ibid., 95-6.
Ibid., 87.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 161-2.
David Apter, and James Joll, Anarchism Today, (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 184.
Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia, 5.
Ibid., 17.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 171.
Ibid., 160.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 87.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 171.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 86.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 43.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 84.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 158.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 162.
Ibid., 168.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 86-7.
Ibid., 85.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 168.
Oved, Yaacov, "The Uniqueness of Anarchism in Argentina".
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 79.
Ibid., chap. 4.
Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 44.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 173.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 43.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 48.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 180-1.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 87.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 178.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 45.
Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa, 46.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 45.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 87.
Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 158.
Munck, Falcon and Galitelli, Argentina, 86.











Origins of the Semana Tragica Pogrom
by
Joel Remland











In the wake of a general strike involving anarchist and syndicalist labor in January of 1919, the Argentine police, army and right wing paramilitary launched a pogrom against the Russian-Jewish community of Buenos Aires, leaving 700 dead and 4000 injured. That the violence of the Semana Tragica was directed not at the strike participants but rather targeted the immigrant enclave presents a seemingly incongruous historical development. Some scholars have theorized the episode as a reaction of hysteria to a fabricated Bolshevik plot, predicated on an erroneous association of the city's Russian-Jewish population with Bolshevism. While there was no conspiracy in the making, the impact of the Russian Revolution did resonate with working class and Russian-Jewish neighborhoods, cross-pollinating with anarchist currents and contributing to a revival of labor activism.
However, the popular receptivity of the Bolshevik Revolution was predicated on a series of historically embedded, interrelated conditions – namely, the predominance of militant anarchism over moderating socialist tendencies within the Russian-Jewish community, the pervasiveness of Argentine nativist sentiment manifest in the project of immigrant assimilation, and a legacy of contentious state-labor relations that reflected a crisis of national political integration. After 1917, the effect of the Bolshevik threat combined with an intensification of these social tendencies, together with wartime depression conditions and escalating government repression to precipitate a cascading sequence of events that would culminate in the Semana Tragica.
Focusing on Buenos Aires in the period 1910 to 1919 to demarcate two significant instances of general strikes coinciding with pogroms, this inquiry will chart the shifting alignment of structural social forces in their dynamic relation to vacillations in state response that ranged from legalistic and socially incorporative policies to active repression in an effort to contain the immigrant-radical threat, in its real and perceived dimensions.
Historical Context
The historical developments of modernization and urbanization taking root in Buenos Aires beginning in the 1870's laid the groundwork for broad-based social crisis, as the conditions of class immobility and government failure to address the working class plight fueled a burgeoning politics of discontent. In the late 1890's, socialists vied with anarchists for working class support and control of the unions. Drawing on the ideological legacy of Spanish and Italian immigrant propagandists, militant pro-organizational anarchists consolidated their dominance under the FORA union banner in 1904. Coordinating resistance among the city's significant immigrant population, the anarchists facilitated the working class in contesting its political marginality through propaganda, union organizing, strikes, and confrontation with the state. Failing to control the labor unrest, the Argentine government initially resorted to repression and restrictive legislation, imposing martial law and passing the Residency Law to expel immigrant radicals in response to the general strike of 1902. A cycle of government repression and massive general strikes - as well as industry-wide strikes - ensued, culminating in the Red Week of 1909 that marked the onset of violent worker unrest. By 1910, anarchist influence was in decline and though it continued to pose a threat to government legitimacy, the movement's failure to capitalize on burgeoning trade unionism rendered it increasingly irrelevant in the face of syndicalist integration into the state political apparatus.
Radical Roots of the Argentine Jews
While the violent pogrom during the Semana Tragica might appear a clear case of ethnically-motivated scapegoating of a distinct, marginalized population, the Russian-Jewish community of Buenos Aires in fact boasted a tradition of involvement with leftist labor activism dating to the late 1800's – one that substantiates the elite association of the immigrant group with militant radicalism. The vast majority of the nearly 100,000 Russians who had immigrated to Argentina by 1914 were ethnic Jews, a quarter of whom settled in insular enclaves within the city. This wave of immigration brought refugees fleeing the Kishineff pogrom and the Russian Revolution of 1905, whose exposure to socialist parties in Europe instilled a general predisposition to labor radicalism. Upon arrival, some joined the Socialist-Zionist party and others the Bund, a socialist Jewish workers' organization that published Russian language journals like Avanguard, which propagated socialism among working class Jews, opposed anti-immigration legislation and supported Jewish trade union formation.
Finding that it failed to address their real needs, many more Russian Jews eschewed the hierarchical centralization proffered by the Socialist Party in favor of the anarchist appeal to the immigrant experience of cultural isolation and aspiration for social mobility. The particularly oppressive work conditions of the city's Jewish bakers galvanized their militant union activity in the anarcho-communist FORA, reflecting the tendency for anarchism to resonate more deeply with the unskilled, low wage-earning immigrants in the small industrial and service sectors, while socialism's relative ideological moderation endeared it to the middle class. Indeed, the anarchists denounced the socialists' reformist gradualism as betraying working class interests.
Assimilation and National Loyalties
While the socialists sought to break immigrants of their national loyalties and individualist aspirations for social advancement, the anarchists embraced the ethno-national identities of its immigrant membership, publishing Yiddish language editions of the journal La Protesta to accommodate the substantial number of Russian Jews who joined the anarchist movement. By promulgating inclusive politics, anarchists incorporated Russian Jews who actively contested their dually marginalized status by participating in massive general strikes from 1902-1910 despite government repression and restrictive policies that explicitly targeted immigrant anarchists for expulsion or otherwise barred their entry.
While the immigrant appeal of anarchism earned the movement loyal support, the syndicalists came to eclipse the anarchist domination of the unions by capitalizing on the shifting demographic constitution of the working class. Native workers outnumbered foreigners in the unions by 1914 as a result of declining immigration with the onset of World War I, while a trend towards emigration compounded the imbalance as many foreign workers returned to their native countries to enlist for battle.. The syndicalists in turn played on ultra-nationalist perceptions of citizenship that coincided with native Argentine predominance in the skilled industries over unskilled immigrant labor, thereby propagating the notion of a new working class predicated on Hispanic national identification. The comparably moderate program of the syndicalists thus prevailed over the anarchist vision in the unions, and would later be manipulated by the Radical government as a bulwark against more militant labor tendencies.
Anti-Semitism & The Pogrom of 1910
1910 witnessed the first widespread, organized attack on the Buenos Aires Jewish community. Anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Semitic sentiment was heightened after a young anarchist Jew murdered the police chief for his role in the May Day massacre of 1909, precipitating a period of martial law. Emboldened by a poorly-executed general strike, proto-fascist gangs of Patriotic Autonomous Youths launched a pogrom, attacking both working class and Jewish neighborhoods. Framed within a nativist discourse of "nationalist restoration" that denounced immigrant schools and demanded Argentine education for all, the emerging violence by right-wing extra-governmental elements coincided with the implementation of the Social Defense law to specifically restrict anarchist-immigrant naturalization.
That this first pogrom was directed against anarchist, socialist and Russian-Jewish neighborhoods alike indicates the conservative elite perception of a general association between militant political doctrine and immigrant communities. By 1919, the general strike was conflated with Bolshevik infiltration, resulting in repression explicitly directed against the Russian-Jews with government support, suggesting a differentiation between social groups and institutionalization of resistance over the intervening decade. While it will be demonstrated that the Russian Revolution undoubtedly fueled the hysteria that resulted in the Bolshevik plot and consequent pogrom, the legacy of militant affiliation among the Russian-Jewish community contributed to the escalating cycle of labor activism and differential government response that would culminate in the Semana Tragica.
Electoral Reformism and Incorporation:
Because state-sanctioned repression and anti-immigrant legislation had yet to effectively discipline militant tendencies by 1910, the Argentine government under conservative president Saenz Pena sought to address the crisis of integration by resorting to measured reform to institutionalize political participation. Reassuring his urban oligarchic elite base of its strategic efficacy, Saenz Pena instituted mandatory voting for native-born adult males in 1912 as a means to incorporate the opposition Radical Party into partisan politics, with an aim towards mitigating labor unrest and stabilizing state authority. Fearful of an immigrant takeover, neither Saenz Pena nor his congress had any intention of strengthening their opponents by extending citizenship rights to foreigners, lobbying instead for even stricter immigration restrictions than contained in the anti-anarchist laws already in place. The conservatives sought to reinforce Argentine national consciousness through compulsory electoral participation in hopes of moderating public opinion among middle class native-born citizens, while allowing minimal growth of the Socialist Party in Buenos Aires as a means of tempering anarchist-immigrant influence among the disenfranchised.
While the threat posed by anarchist agitation prior to 1910 may have inadvertently pushed the government towards this reformist approach, the electoral reforms of 1912 had the effect of constricting the political space available to their activity and contributed to undermining anarchism's popular appeal vis-a-vis parliamentarism. And to ensure this notion of political integration as the only acceptable avenue by which to contest politics, Saenz Pena persisted in his expulsion of suspected anarchists and affiliated immigrant radicals under the Social Defense Law, which even provided for the prosecution of native-born militants. Saenz Pena's unconditional support for capital over labor further reveals the elite refusal to acknowledge that immigrants had any legitimate grievances, suggesting that they were simply being manipulated by foreign agitators.
Radical Party Accommodation of Syndicalist Labor
Triggered by the economic instability accompanying World War I, a depression in 1914 provided the opportunity for the Radical Party to contest conservative control of national politics, and introduce a moderating populist force into labor-state relations. Abandoning their position of "abstention, intransigence, and revolution," Yrigoyen's Radical Party compromised its aversion to partisan politics to capitalize on newly-instituted political reforms while garnering the support of landowning elite and local bosses to defeat Saenz Pena in the national election of 1916. With few links to immigrant-worker communities, the Radicals proceeded to extend the conciliatory politics of integration hinted at by their predecessors, retaining the existing socio-economic framework while incorporating the city's sizable foreign working class by intensifying state intervention in industrial relations to address the deeply-embedded social crisis of nationality through a cross-class alliance.
Yrigoyen expanded the social welfare state and courted the support of the Russian-Jewish community by printing propaganda in Yiddish. To accommodate the unions, the National Department of Labor implemented workplace legislation, initiated regulation of the labor market and repeatedly sided with labor in arbitration disputes during the maritime workers strikes as a means of directing their demands through the proper channels.
The success of the Radical Party's effort to integrate labor was made possible by syndicalist domination of the FORA following their split from anarcho-communism in 1915. Like the Radicals, the syndicalists initially eschewed political participation as collaborationism, but espoused a decidedly less militant platform by the time they came to dominate the unions in 1916, advocating for pragmatic economic changes, parliamentary gradualism and political negotiation that endeared them to the oligarchic establishment. The explosion in FORA IX membership between 1915-1920 owing to the aforementioned contraction of immigration during World War I helped consolidate syndicalist predominance.
Yrigoyen's conciliatory disposition towards syndicalist-led labor served as a tactical counterweight to the waning, though still potentially threatening, anarchist anti-party platform. Indeed, between Saenz Pena's electoral reforms, the Radical Party's conciliatory politics, syndicalist labor's state incorporation and anarchism's declining influence, the trend during the period 1910 to 1917 emerges as one of general political moderation. However, mobilization of the repressive state apparatus in response to a general strike in 1917 signaled the end to government tolerance of union organizing, coinciding with an upsurge in labor strikes and militant activism that was exacerbated in part by external political upheaval.
Conflation of Russian Jews with Bolshevism
The ethno-national coupling of Jews with Russians was a logical perception rooted in immigration and residency patterns, while the anarchist connection to the Russian-Jewish population also owed to the historical reality of their overlapping membership. But with the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, elite paranoia became reframed in the ungrounded realm of a global conspiracy, predicated on the perceived Bolshevik threat. Conservative elements came to perceive a connection between militant labor strikes and political conspiracy, with fears of a communist takeover proliferating despite the absence of any Bolshevik agents or Moscow-directed activity in Buenos Aires. However, while there was no Bolshevik conspiracy in the making, the paranoia was largely a response to the overwhelmingly positive reception of the Russian Revolution among the fractured political left.
Impact of the Russian Revolution
Early depictions by the bourgeois press of the Russian Revolution as a peasant uprising initially led militant Argentine labor to denounce the movement as a barbaristic endeavor, until the foreign revolutionary press reported more fully and accurately on the genuine social revolutionary character of the Bolshevik program. A flood of propaganda altered the prevailing Argentine worker interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution, reinforced by a widely circulated 1918 lecture by influential intellectual Jose Ingenieros on the historical significance of "Muscovite maximalism", as Bolshevism was known. This influx of information exacerbated elite fears, as did the nascent support for the revolution among anarchists, socialists and syndicalists.
The Bolshevik Revolution became a political rallying point, with various radical tendencies interpreting the events in Russia in line with their political predispositions. The revolution galvanized a reunification of disparate political currents within the Russian socialist movement, while earning the solidarity of anarchists as some even adopted the Bolshevik line after 1917. Like other groups, the anarchists appropriated the revolution to legitimize their philosophy and tactics, some even aspiring to identify anarchist elements in its development. The Russian-Jewish community enthusiastically embraced the revolution on the basis of national affinity for their homeland, while the predominance of anarchism within the community reinforced an egalitarian, social revolutionary reading of the Bolshevik takeover among Russian Jews. The anarchist identification with the Russian Revolution was unassailable until La Protesta reported Bolshevik repression of anarchists in Russia, leading some to condemn the new regime as a dictatorship and distance themselves from it.
The Russian Revolution had the effect of shaking up the Argentine labor movement, forcing the various factions to redefine their position towards the Third International. The diffusion of the new Bolshevik ideal led to a brief but substantial increase in anarchist influence in the unions and ideological cross-pollination, as it prompted the anarchist group FORA to regroup and affix a "C" to its name to denote communist affiliation, thereafter abiding in its support for the Soviet regime. The Anarcho-Bolsheviks became the dominant group in the South American Federation of Russian Workers, wielding considerable influence between 1918-1921, even managing to block the International Socialist Party (later the Argentine Section of the Third International) from claiming exclusive representation of Bolshevism in Argentina. The labor movement realignment triggered by the external development of the Bolshevik Revolution thus inspired an infusion of political activity and heralded a definite turn to the political left among organized labor.
While the political reawakening and radicalization may have renewed the idea that capitalism's end was near within the discourses of the militant left-wing intelligentsia, some scholars maintain that the Argentine working masses, the majority of whom did not belong to the dominant syndicalist FORA or other organized labor groups, were largely unaffected by this watershed historical event. While the unfolding of events that immediately precipitated the violence of the Semana Tragica would contest this reading, the true significance of the Russian Revolution resides not in the extent of expressly pro-Bolshevik content of the 1919 general strike and subsequent pogrom (which was negligible) as in the ease with which the conservative elite redirected its ideological antagonism away from the immediate threat of labor militancy towards unsubstantiated Bolshevik infiltration. Indeed, while the violent response of the Argentine masses to police repression dates to the Red Week of 1909, the targeted violence against Russian-Jews during the Semana Tragica indicates a fundamental redirection of repressive state force.
The Threat of Bolshevik over Anarchist Ideology
That Bolshevism became the focus of conspiracy theory paranoia while militant anarchist agitation persisted was partly a function of the latter's acclimation in the Argentine political milieu, with the propagation of European anarchist influence dating to the 1870's. Anarchism, along with the less intransigent dispositions of syndicalism and socialism, were organizational forms familiar to the Argentine elite. Eschewing state incorporation, alliances, individual leadership, and political power generally, the disposition of the pre-1915 FORA resulted in self-exclusion from the political process, while its social divisiveness rendered it prone to integrative state strategies of reform and enfranchisement. While it posed a very real threat to transform worker discontent into social unrest during periods of repression, the anarchist movement often reverted to "organizational incoherence and programmatic disunity" once the crisis passed.
Bolshevism, while equally immigrant-affiliated, was only recently introduced into the political vocabulary of the Argentine establishment, and so manifested in elite perceptions as a fear of the unknown. Unlike anarchism, Bolshevism demonstrated an ideological and programmatic potential to take hold of national politics as it did in Russia, where party centralization under an iconic leader with world revolutionary aspirations posed a threat perceived by elites as highly-organized and conspiratorial, with an aim towards seizing state power.
Anti-Bolshevik Hysteria of 1918-19
In the wake of the Russian Revolution and its enthusiastic reception by militant labor and the Russian-Jewish community, a series of uncoordinated events transpired that would serve to exacerbate anti-Bolshevik hysteria in Buenos Aires. A massive labor march through the city on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik triumph, followed by the Socialist Party unfurling its red flag at an armistice parade served to antagonize misguided middle and upper class conceptions of a Russian conspiracy. Then came the short-lived but highly publicized jail break of Simon Radowitzky, the anarchist Jew who had assassinated police chief Falcon nine years prior, further stoking the mounting paranoia through the perseverance of social memory. The succession of student strikes for educational democracy that initiated the university reform movement of 1918 may also be considered a destabilizing factor. Compounding this national hysteria was the propagation of rumor by foreign dignitaries, including the US ambassador to Argentina, who believed the general strike to be masterminded by the Bolsheviks.
The subsequent confluence of unrelated developments within a few short days in 1919 - including a planned anarchist rally, a police strike, a bomb scare and unfounded rumors of a Russian landing - further inflamed elite hysteria. Exploiting these palpable fears to incite nationalist animosity, city police fabricated a report of a Bolshevik cell uncovered in the Russian immigrant community, and moved to arrest Pedro Wald, the Russian-Jewish journalist and editor of Avanguard, in connection with the Communist plot. That Wald was released a week later revealed the charges as a baseless ploy, but in the context of heightened nativist animosity, this episode would serve to designate a target for the violence ensuing from an otherwise unrelated labor uprising.
The General Strike of 1919
Coinciding with the anti-Bolshevik hysteria of 1918, city workers responded to war-induced inflationary pressures that raised living costs and depressed wages with intensified activity, resulting in an explosion of union membership and an increasing incidence of strikes. The conservative elite in turn began to contest the Radical Party's capacity to control labor, forcing Yrigoyen to abandon the progressive policies of conciliation and realign in the interest of foreign capital, with an accompanying reversion to state repression.
Following strikes in the railway and refrigeration industries in 1917-18, workers at the Vesena metallurgical plant reacted to severely exploitative working conditions with a strike of their own in late 1918 that was met with brutal police repression and consequent worker retaliation. Despite initial syndicalist FORA calls for restraint, the grassroots upsurge escalated, resulting in violent clashes with police and military that left scores dead. Initiating the Semana Tragica, this incident provoked a "chaotic outburst of mass emotion" in the form of a general strike – the first of its kind since 1910 - that proceeded as an ephemeral series of unarticulated riots, lacking any hallmark of the organized left. Though the anarchist FORA V initiated the call for the strike while the role of the syndicalists is a matter of historical controversy, what is clear is that while perceived by the government and conservative elite as being led by labor militants – perhaps owing to the anarchist identification with the tactic - neither group took responsibility for coordinating or providing objectives for the general strike. Developing outside the framework of political organizations and trade unions, the general strike drew many participants from the ranks of unaffiliated, politically marginalized youth, while also garnering the support of the non-union working class population that comprised the vast majority of labor. This particularity indicates the crisis of political integration as persisting among the non-union masses, and reveals the futility of Radical Party efforts to incorporate organized labor.
In contrast to the anarchist and syndicalist-led strikes of industrial workers to which the Argentine state had become accustomed from the late 19th century, the 1919 general strike's organic genesis, its heterogeneous composition, lack of union leadership and seemingly ascendant popular appeal presented a new manifestation of resistance coalescing outside the parameters of the organized militant left. This development served to confound perceptions and antagonize the prejudices of the conservative elite. In the absence of an identifiable group to readily ascribe blame for the strike, and provoked by rumors of a Bolshevik plot, the state moved to unleash its repressive force against the city's Russian-Jewish community.
The Pogrom of 1919
While the police, army and right wing militias attacked some workers, anarchists among them, the pogrom was not primarily directed against the striker's center of activity in Nueva Pompeya as it had been in 1910, but rather specifically targeted the Russian-Jewish community of Villa Crespo that housed the largest segment of the Jewish community, as well as other Jewish barrios. Ghettoization restricted Jews within identifiable, highly demarcated and self-sufficient neighborhoods, clarifying the intentional nature of the pogrom's focus and dispelling any potential claims of mistaken identity, insofar as the Russian Jews were perceived as a distinct social grouping from the anarchists, despite their overlapping membership. While this might suggest that elite antagonism was blind to social divisions, that the violence was not applied broadly against anarchists, syndicalists and Jews alike as it was in 1910 conveys a clear intentionality stemming from nativist prejudices that in turn fueled anti-Bolshevik hysteria. The vast majority of victims were identified as Russian Jews in what some historians consider a more brutal pogrom than any that had occurred in Russia, replete with grotesque acts of violence.
Leading up to the Semana Tragica, anti-semitism was codified in Argentine school textbooks, while the Catholic Church and other groups blamed Jews for the nation's economic woes and wartime shortages. When the pogrom erupted, senior military officials issued specific orders to the patriot movement to attack Jews, prompted by the Yrigoyen government's call on patriotic Argentines to defend the country from Bolshevik foreigners, stirring latent xenophobia, and adding an anti-semitic dimension to what was formerly a class-based struggle.
Counter-mobilization
In contrast to the strikers, the patriotic counter-mobilization was well organized and led, uniting the police, army, and a right-wing paramilitary group known as the White Guard. Initially populated by sons of the oligarchic elite, the Guard transformed into the Argentine Patriotic League as it drew together diverse segments of the bourgeoisie, eventually incorporating the church, urban middle class, sons of immigrants, elements of the Radical Party and even wealthy Jews under the banner of its virulent class-constituted nationalism. Consolidating power with the pledge to continue the fight against foreign ideologies and agitators, the League emerged as the most powerful political association in the country after the Semana Tragica.
The emergence of this nationalist counter-mobilization was largely a backlash against the perception that Yrigoyen's lost control over the general strike. In fact, the ruling party was in a bind, weakened by rival factions within, including elements sympathetic to the patriot movement, and beleaguered by pressures to join the Allies in the war effort. Forced to side with the police in blaming "the traditional scapegoats, the anarchists," the Radicals sanctioned the attack on the Russian-Jewish ghettos, as they sought to protect the relationship with their syndicalists collaborators by negotiating an end to the general strike with a wage raise for Vasena workers.
Russian-Jewish Reaction
Following the terror of the pogrom, a Russian-Jewish community committee denounced the violence and demanded indemnity, while others like the Argentine Zionist Federation undertook a public relations campaign to distance the Jewish majority from a "hotheaded minority" of the militant workers within the community. Revealing intensified class differentiation that mirrored division on the national scale, members of an upper-class synagogue pleaded with Argentines to refrain from persecuting the innocent. Jewish community leaders even gained audience with Yrigoyen, but conveying the class interests of the Jewish entrepreneurs, made no effort to secure community protection. The experience of the Semana Tragica turned many Jews against Yrigoyen and the Radicals, galvanizing the founding of a marginal political party of Jewish Argentinians that advocated for collective defense, social welfare legislation and the easing of naturalization and immigration laws, which by 1921 had contracted, significantly restricting the entry of Jews into the country.
Impact of Semana Tragica
The Tragic Week polarized Argentine politics, shattering the myth of a classless society as the oligarchic elite successfully pressured Yrigoyen to abandon his politics of conciliation with organized labor and revert to the established system of patronage and repression to reassert governmental authority. The electoral reform of 1912 and integration of labor under the Radicals had failed to address the crises of either political or national integration, as suggested by the brief resurgence of FORA V anarchism, trade union expansion, an increase in strike activity, and general worker radicalization following the Semana Tragica.
However, the developments with the deepest significance for Argentine society were the birth of the militant right wing counter-insurgency and political entrenchment of the military. Revealing the weakness of the political system, the Semana Tragica institutionalized the ever-present threat of the army's involvement in politics, a circumstance that would dictate subsequent political formations that culminated in the military coup of 1930.
Conclusion
In the most immediate sense, the pogrom of 1919 was incited by a general strike that provoked a bout of misdirected government repression, rationalized by mounting anti-Bolshevik hysteria stemming from the impact of the Russian Revolution. That the Russian-Jewish community of Buenos Aires had a legacy of militant labor activism with anarchist and communist tendencies reinforced this connection. Impaired by the pervasive, underlying conditions of an unresolved project of immigrant assimilation, crisis of political integration and unstable economy, a decade of Argentine state efforts to contain the social unrest culminated in the bloodshed of the Semana Tragica, emboldening reactionary elements within civil society that would pave the way for military government.





























Apter, David Ernst and James Joll, editors. Anarchism Today. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.

Munck, Ronaldo, Ricardo Falcon and Bernardo Galitelli. Argentina: From Anarchism to Peronism: Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855-1985. London: Zed Books, 1987.

Oved, Yaacov. Estudios Interdiciplinarios De America Latina Y El Caribe. "The Uniqueness of Anarchism in Argentina". Last modified June, 1997. http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/VIII_1/oved.htm.

Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 1890-1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Rock, David. State Building and Political Movements in Argentina, 1860-1916 Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Sofer, Eugene F. From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982.

Suriano, Juan. Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1980-1910. Oakland: AK Press, 2010.