Caftens, Kurvehs, and Stille Chuppahs: Organized Jewish Sex Workers and Their Opponents in Buenos Aires, 1900–30

This paper assesses the impact of organized sex work on the lives of Jewish participants and opponents in Buenos Aires from the development of this phenomenon in the 1890s to its decline in the 1930s. In this period, Jews were infamous around the world for their disproportionate role (often exaggerated by anti-Semites) in bringing young women across the Atlantic and organizing their work in and out of the legal, state-regulated brothel system of this booming port city. For forty years, until their prosecution in 1930, several hundred Jewish pimps, traffickers, and madams ran a legal mutual aid society, which operated a cemetery, a synagogue, lavish headquarters, and many brothels both in Buenos Aires and around the country. Jewish men and women in Buenos Aires were also extremely active in opposing this phenomenon, as they fought with pimps and prostitutes for control of the Yiddish theater, worked in Jewish and non-Jewish local and international anti-"White Slavery" organizations, patrolled arriving boatloads of immigrants for possible new recruits, and debated these issues in Yiddish and Spanish-language newspapers.