Historiography and literary essays on latin American jews in the new millennium

Since the beginning of the new millennium, the historiography of Latin American Jews has been enriched by pioneering works and innovative lines of research. A novel analytical lens has been adopted for examining the ethnicity, nationality and citizenship of immigrant communities that have negotiated their particular identities vis-a-vis the national identities of the Latin American countries of which they are citizens by birth or by naturalization. The objective of this essay is to review the impact of this epistemological shift, beginning in the year 2000, within both historiographical research and cultural studies on the past and present of Jews in Latin America. The theory of the novel analytical approach examined here was expressed in brief in 2006 in the first joint article by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein: Challenging Particularity: Jews as a Lens on Latin American Ethnicity (Lesser and Rein 2006). Both historians express an interest in shifting from the dominant paradigm of ethnicity in the study of communities of immigrant origin in Latin America and in returning to the "nation" as a prominent analytical paradigm.