ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several of the major demographic features of Latin American Jewry. It focuses on aspects of internal sociodemographic stratification and change that are not directly related to Jewish population size. From the establishment of the modern Jewish settlement in Argentina to the present, changes in the size of the Jewish population have been documented through a moderate amount of statistical data, some of doubtful reliability. Immigration had been a leading factor of Jewish population growth until the late 1930s, among other things because of the stringent quotas that limited migration to other countries. The Jewish population in 1960, broken down by sex and five-year age groups and corrected for underreporting in each age—sex subgroup, served as a basis for the computation of projections up to 1975. Data on age composition also provide an indirect quality check of the 1960 Argentine census concerning the Jewish population.
