Juifs syro-libanais de Mexico (Halabis et Shamis)

At the heart of the Jewish diaspora of the American continent, the Syro-Lebanese community of Mexico City occupies a singular place. Born of the two great centers of Syrian Jewry — Aleppo and Damascus — it reproduced on Mexican soil a centuries-old distinction that already structured Jewish life in the Levant. This distinction rests on two place names that became identities: Halab, the Arabic name of Aleppo, from which the term halabi (or halebi) derives, and Al-Sham, the name of Damascus, from which shami derives. Aram Tzova in Hebrew designates Aleppo, whose Arabic name is Halab, and its Jewish inhabitants are called Halabi; Damascus is designated by Syrians as Al-Sham, and the Jews of Damascus and their descendants are called Shami.

This dual belonging is not a mere geographical nuance. It encompasses distinct liturgical traditions, onomastic usages, culinary practices, and registers of language, which survived the transatlantic crossing and the rooting in Mexico. In Mexico City, the designations of halabi and shami persist; they have taken on many strata of local meaning and serve to index styles of religiosity, naming traditions, dietary practices, and linguistic practices.

The aim of the present work is to retrace the history of this community from the arrival of the first Levantine immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century to the contemporary institutional organization, distinguishing what belongs to the established archive from what belongs to transmitted memory. For the Syro-Lebanese community of Mexico City presents a particularity that few other Jewish diasporas know: the perpetuation, within a single host country, of parallel institutions founded on the city of origin of the founders. The Syrian Jewry of Mexico is unique in that it divided in the 1930s into two separate communities, those who were originally from Aleppo (the "Maguen David" community) and those who came from Damascus (the "Monte Sinaí" community).

To understand the community of Mexico City, one must go back to the two Jewish metropolises of the Ottoman Levant. The Jewish presence in Syria is attested since Antiquity. Before 1947, there were some 30,000 Jews in Syria, forming three distinct communities, each with its own traditions: the Kurdish-speaking Jews of Kamishli, the Jews of Aleppo with Spanish roots, and the original Eastern Jews of Damascus, called Must'arab.

This internal stratification is essential. In Aleppo as in Damascus coexisted indigenous Jews, known as musta'rabim (arabized), and descendants of the exiles from the Iberian Peninsula. Initially, the Jews of Syria were predominantly Mizrahi; but after the expulsion of the Sephardi Jews from Spain, many integrated into the established communities of Aleppo and Damascus. Aleppo, in particular, enjoyed considerable spiritual prestige in the Jewish world, home to the famous Aleppo Codex (Keter Aram Tzova). Aleppo became a major center for trade, Jewish life, and spirituality.

The decline of this ancient order began in the nineteenth century. It slowly started to unravel in the nineteenth century: antisemitism increased, accusations of ritual murder against Syrian Jews spread, which drove many to flee the country. The Damascus affair of 1840 — an accusation of ritual murder targeting the Damascene community — constitutes one of the defining episodes of this mounting pressure. To these factors were added the economic transformations of the waning Ottoman Empire, the opening of the Suez Canal which shifted trade routes, then conscription and the upheavals of the First World War, all of which precipitated emigration to the Americas, including Mexico.

The first Syrian Jews arrived in Mexico in the very first years of the twentieth century. Jews from Damascus and Aleppo have been present in Mexico City since the early years of the twentieth century. These pioneers, often young men who had set out to seek their fortune, first settled in the historic center of the capital, where they engaged in peddling and small-scale textile trade.

The first signs of an organized religious life were modest. Originally, they prayed in a private house converted into a synagogue — the Sinagoga Ketana (Bet Haknesset HaKatan) — located on the Calles de Jesús María. This downtown place of worship, one of the oldest vestiges of Jewish life in Mexico City, remains a symbol of the community's humble origins.

The founding moment of institutionalization came in 1912. The first formally established community in Mexico was the Monte Sinaí community, founded in 1912 with the aim of helping Jewish immigrants; in 1914, the land for the first Jewish cemetery was purchased, signaling the new community's desire to settle in this country. It should be noted, however, that this initial organization brought together Jews of diverse origins. The founding document attests to the first Jewish organization, established in 1912, when a group of Jews from the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Libya, and Syria decided to join forces in order to buy a plot of land for use as a cemetery. The acquisition of a cemetery, the first gesture of any Jewish community in exile, marks here the will for lasting roots.

The institutional history of Mexican Jewry is marked by successive separations, which reflect not so much conflicts as each group's desire to preserve its own rites. The first of these divisions set the Ashkenazim against the Sephardic and Eastern founders of Monte Sinaí. In 1912 the inaugural Jewish community was founded, the Sociedad de Beneficencia Alianza Monte Sinai, but ten years later the first schism broke out when the Ashkenazi Jews separated from Monte Sinaí to form their own community; two years later, Jewish immigrants from Mediterranean countries formed the Sephardic community, and in 1938 the Syrian Jews from Aleppo decided to separate from the Syrian Jews of Damascus to form the Maguen David community.

This pattern of separation by origin was confirmed by the communal institutions themselves. In 1938, the Maguen David community, made up of the Jews of Aleppo, in Syria, was created; shortly afterward, in 1941, the Sephardic community, formed by the Jews of Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans, was formally organized. From then on, Monte Sinaí became the reference institution for the Damascenes, also incorporating the Jews who had come from Lebanon. Today, this community includes the Jews who came from the city of Damascus in Syria and from Lebanon.

It must be emphasized that this division was not the fruit of animosity, but the rendering on Mexican soil of a distinction already vivid in the Levant. According to the communal sources consulted, it was precisely the fidelity to the liturgical and cultural customs proper to each city of origin — minhag halabi and minhag shami — that justified the creation of distinct institutions. This separation of 1938 remains the structuring event of the entire subsequent history of the Halabis and the Shamis of Mexico City.

The distinction between Halabi and Shami, inherited from the Levant, took on new layers of meaning in the Mexican context. Scholars in linguistic anthropology have shown that these labels are not mere markers of origin, but complex operators of identity. The Shami community represents those originally from Damascus (Syria), and the Halebi community those from Aleppo (Syria). To these two Syrian subgroups are added, in the Mexican Jewish landscape, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. The Jewish subgroups were defined by the geographical origins of their founders: the Shamis from Damascus, in Syria, as well as from Lebanon; the Halebis from Aleppo, in Syria; the Idish or Ashkenazim from Eastern and Central Europe; and the Turcos, the Sephardim.

Community memory preserves the recollection of the tensions of the early decades, particularly with regard to the Ashkenazim. During a visit to the old Jewish quarters, the guide Monica Unikel evoked the tensions that frequently arose between Judeo-Arabic-speaking Shami and Halabi Jews and their Ashkenazi counterparts, who organized community events exclusively in Yiddish; today, only the original Syrian immigrants speak Arabic.

The Judeo-Arabic language was indeed the most visible marker of Syrian identity, and its decline one of the major phenomena of acculturation. Today, no one but the original Syrian immigrants speaks Arabic; most did not consider the language worthy of being passed on. As for the labels themselves, contemporary research stresses that their meaning has evolved. Various labels circulate to designate the members of these groups, including halebi (Aleppine), shami (Damascene), idish (Ashkenazi) and turco (Sephardi); the question arises as to the contemporary role and relevance of these ethnic distinctions, particularly under the influence of ultra-Orthodox movements. This chapter thus stands at an intersection: the memory passed down through families meets scholarly analysis, which nuances it without contradicting it.

The vitality of Mexico City's Syro-Lebanese community is measured today by the density of its institutions. Far from having withered, the dual structure inherited from the 1930s has given rise to two considerable communal entities. Monte Sinaí and Maguen David are today the largest Jewish communities in Mexico, counting more than 30 synagogues, a community center, and a school each, with Maguen David having at least 5 schools and projects for more.

The school network forms the backbone of this transmission. On the Aleppan side, the educational effort took shape late but with ambition. It was only from the 1970s that the Aleppan community of Mexico City had its first true day school, the Colegio Hebreo Maguen David, with a better academic program; in the 1990s, Atid opened its doors, becoming the day school of choice for the Aleppan community. The Colegio Hebreo Maguen David has since modernized. The Colegio Hebreo Maguen David, located in Lomas de Vista Hermosa, Cuajimalpa, has offered the International Baccalaureate program since 2000 and provides instruction in Spanish, English, and Hebrew. On the Damascene side, the leading institution is older. The Colegio Hebreo Monte Sinaí, located in Colonia Vista Hermosa, Cuajimalpa, was established in 1943 and was originally located in Colonia Roma.

Rabbinic authority too remains divided according to origin. Today, the chief rabbi of the Aleppan community is Shlomo Tawil; the chief rabbi of the Damascus community is Abraham Teubal, from Argentina. This persistence of two distinct rabbinates illustrates the robustness of communal boundaries, even as the two groups share the metropolis, Spanish as a vernacular language, and a common Mexican destiny.

The community's inscription into Mexican space follows an upward trajectory characteristic of merchant diasporas. The first immigrants settled in the historic center, around Jesús María and La Merced, before migrating to more residential neighborhoods. During the interwar period, the Colonia Roma was a major hub of Syrian Jewish life. Both communities prospered in Roma, according to Monica Unikel, a specialist in the Jewish neighborhoods of Mexico City.

Over the decades, social mobility led families westward across the capital — Polanco, Tecamachalco, Lomas de Vista Hermosa, Cuajimalpa — where the principal institutions are concentrated today. The majority of Syrian immigrants settled in the capital, but other centers formed in the provinces. Most Syrian immigrants settled in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara.

The community has, moreover, given Mexico many eminent figures. Several prominent Mexican intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen are of Syrian origin. With regard to collective memory, the effort of heritage preservation has intensified recently, with the creation of a documentation center whose centerpiece comes from the Damascenes. One of the most important documents in the new center was donated by the Monte Sinaí community, which represents the Jews who immigrated from Damascus. The "probable" status assumed for the present chapter stems from the fact that the social geography, well documented in its broad outlines, also rests on testimonies and reconstructions whose details remain partly dependent on oral tradition.

The history of the Syro-Lebanese Jews of Mexico City presents itself as a textbook case of identity resilience in diaspora. Having departed from Aleppo and Damascus at the turn of the twentieth century, fleeing economic decline and the persecutions of the late Ottoman Empire, these immigrants first joined forces in a common organization — Monte Sinaí in 1912 — before dividing along lines that the Levant had already drawn. In 1938, the Syrian Jews of Aleppo decided to separate from the Syrian Jews of Damascus to form the Maguen David community.

This singularity — two distinct Jewish communities, each endowed with synagogues, schools, and a rabbinate of its own, founded on the sole distinction between two Syrian cities — constitutes the most remarkable trait of this diaspora. Far from signaling a fragility, this dual structure produced, on the contrary, two of the largest Jewish communities of contemporary Mexico. The price of this rootedness was nonetheless the gradual effacement of Judeo-Arabic, the language of the founders, now understood only by the survivors of the immigrant generation. The halabi/shami distinction, for its part, persists — no longer as a geographic boundary but as a repertoire of religious styles, cuisines, and transmitted names. Between the archive and Memory, the history of this community remains a living dialogue, whose established contours are extended by family narratives that it falls to future generations to continue gathering.