Moisés Ville—the Jewish gauchos מוֹיְסֶה וִיל
Argentina's first Jewish farming colony: a hundred and thirty families off the steamship Weser settled the pampas in 1889 and took to the plough. From here came the "Jewish gauchos".
In August 1889 the steamship Weser brought eight hundred and twenty people to Buenos Aires—a hundred and thirty families from Podolia and Bessarabia, from around Kamenets-Podolsk. They fled the pogroms and went not to the city but to the land: on 23 October of that year, in Santa Fe province, a colony was founded that Rabbi Aaron ha-Levi Goldman named Kiryat Moshe—Moisés Ville. He chose the name from the Exodus: as out of Egypt, so out of here.
The first year was terrible: typhus took sixty-four people, mostly children. The physician Wilhelm Löwenthal drew up a report on the settlers' condition, and it reached Baron Maurice de Hirsch; in 1891 the baron founded the Jewish Colonization Association, and it led new parties to Argentina.
So was born what Jewish history had hardly known for twenty centuries: a Jew ploughing his own land, on horseback, a knife at his belt. The Jewish Gauchos became a book by Alberto Gerchunoff, and the colonies a school for those who would later raise fields in the Land of Israel.
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The papers of the Jewish Colonization Association — the Weser 1889; 130 families; the colony 23 October 1889; the JCA from 1891
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Alberto Gerchunoff, The Jewish Gauchos (1910)
Basis: documents and evidence.