In the case of Iquitos, why do people simply not respond to Mormon or Evangelical Christian overtures? The community, its actions, and the relationships converts build with each other are key not only to why individuals convert, but can explain how new converts are brought into the fold. In the field of pastoral psychology, Ines Jindra combines two important concepts in the service of studying conversion: critical realism and the toolkit approach8. Critical realism allows for multiple levels of truth, which Jindra characterizes as what really happened and what actually happened. This allows personal conversion narratives to be important and truthful while also acknowledging other forces that may push someone towards conversion. It goes some way to healing the problem Gauri Viswanathan sees in the sociological study of conversion, where personal narrative and the power of belief are disregarded. The toolkit approach, meanwhile, draws on cultural studies to recast religion as a tool with many uses, both spiritual and practical. In this way, granting religion validity as a tool means that transformation, where there is a change in a person’s values, outlook, and sense of self, among other key characteristics, and conversion, a change from one religion to another, do not march in lockstep. Yang and Abel, while they intend to characterize the sub-field of sociology that focuses on conversion, also lay out a three-tiered model from which they say sociologists pick and choose influences. I intend to use this model more intentionally, where the tiers are like baskets from which certain influences are more salient, and which the convert responds to with their religion, as in toolkit theory. The three levels, or baskets, are the macro,aeroponic tower garden system the meso, and the micro level. The macro has to do with very broad-scale forces, such as globalization or transnationalism, that change a person’s societal surroundings.
This could connect to Lofland and Stark’s predisposing conditions. The meso could also be called the institutional level; it is where congregations, community and activist organizations, and even large international NGOs are found. This level is critical to the supply side Phillips and Snow identify; these are the institutions that shape what affective bonds and intensive interaction can look like for a particular community. Finally, the micro level is where individual narratives of spiritual seeking, feelings of belonging, or personal troubles can shape decisions to convert. I have chosen not to copy these levels exactly but to adapt them, combining the individual and the immediate religious community, seeing the international arena of individual states as the middle level, and taking in the grand networks of transnational activity as the largest scale. In understanding conversion in Iquitos, then, I draw from each of these models. In particular, the focus on community, the recognition that religious communities are affected by strong political forces, and the connection between the individual and the world are key. Drawing from Yang and Abel’s leveling technique, the various factors can be described as follows. At the global level, individuals a macroeconomic and political situation that makes migration from Peru to Israel more attractive in general, and a transnational social field made possible by global advances in transport and communications technology. The Iquitos case is interesting on itsmerits, and it also helps us understand that the usual sociological division between practical and religious motivations for conversion is flawed, and that any focus on conversion as purely instrumentalist or purely a subject for the spirit is necessarily incomplete. It is obvious that religion and worldly concerns influence each other, but when it comes to conversion, sometimes worldly concerns are religious and vice-versa.
Furthermore, Iquitos helps us understand how narratives and myths of diaspora can actively drive practical transnational movement in the modern age by creating new forms of religious authenticity linked to politics, place, and movement. At the state level, major Jewish institutions like the Jewish Agency operating in Latin America are interested in potentially supporting an isolated community with a complex history are primarily Ashkenazi, usually quite large, and often connected with the State of Israel. In Israel, the Law of Return’s current iteration requires certain bonafides from potential immigrants. Together, these forces have helped shaped what conversion, and therefore Jewishness, looks like in Iquitos. Finally, at the individual/community level, individual Iquiteños interpret and respond to the institutions and options available to them using all the tools in their kit, including religious ones, which are in turn influenced by the two broader levels. By the end of this chapter, I wish to demonstrate that the Latin American-Jewish institutional resources available to the Iquitos community early on shaped an orientation towards Israel. That early orientation combined with the economic situation of Iquitos led to an early wave of migration. Those first migrants established what would become a transnational social field between Israel and Iquitos. The template for Jewish education and conversion continued combined with contact between Iquiteños in Israel and Peru led to a blending of Jewishness and Israeliness in the Iquiteño imagination and also provided more standard pull factors for further migration, resulting in state appropriation of diasporic identity to drive today’s migration patterns.Traces of Iquitos’ historical Jewish presence jump out from between the saints’-name streets, the churches and monasteries, and Jesus-bedecked public buses with surprising ease. The large supermarket in the historic city center does business in the old Casa Cohen, its sign still hanging above the portales that give the current store its name. On the same street is the current synagogue,dutch bucket for sale hidden behind a mattress and fabric shop.
One of the ubiquitous mototaxis coughs by with a phone number and an elaborately calligraphed surname that immediately surprises me with its almost humorous Jewishness — I later hear from an interview subject who shares the same apellido that the owner-driver is a distant cousin from the branch of the family that did not hold onto or return to their Jewish ancestry. Iquitos’ most famous living artist is the ironically named Christian Bendayán, descendant of second-generation patriarch León Bendayán. In the municipal cemetery, a small fenced-in meadow marks the Jewish section, where flowers give way to river pebbles and red-and-black huayruro seeds placed on the headstones. Someone was buried there just two months before I arrived. Online, things look pretty good too. The Kehilá runs not one but two Facebook pages which post at least a few times a week, and the first Google search result for “Iquitos synagogue” is a helpful webpage on TurismoJudaico.com. At the time of writing, the English-language Wikipedia page returns nine results for the word “Jew,” the Spanish page five, while on Hebrew Wikipedia, the section simply called “Yehudim” is more than twice as long as the general history section. Several articles in online newspapers also come up in a Google search, from long features in The New York Times and The Guardian to Sefardi special-interest websites to Zionist RSS feeds to local Spanish-language dailies. Most of them have been written since 2010, when The Fire Within, a 2008 documentary directed by Lorry Salcedo Mitrani about the community’s renaissance, made the film festival circuit. All this despite the fact that the most common response to my research wherever I go is an incredulous, “There are Jews in Peru?” Sitting in the courtyard of the synagogue, conducting my scheduled interviews and also swooping down on unsuspecting visitors who drop by for coffee, help with Israeli immigration documents, and sometimes mattresses, I get a different picture. A little girl of six who I remember as a toddler from my last visit tells me in passing that she always comes to Monday “Judaism classes” because it is a chance to see her same-age friends, who, she sighs, will all be leaving soon except for her. Of all my interview subjects in 2019, only that girl’s father and two others tell me they intend to stay in Iquitos with their families to keep the Abramowitzes company. Over coffee on day one of my 2019 visit, Jorge Abramovitz, the de facto leader of the community and owner of the synagogue building, tells me something Ryan Schuessler quoted him on in The Guardian in 20169: “La comunidad puede morir.” The community may die. The sentiment is independently repeated to me by Señor Abramowitz’s wife, several of my interview subjects, and the little girl, who appoints herself my unofficial guide after I spend at least an hour with her lying on our fronts trying to make nice with the mattress shop’s resident ice queen cat. The presidents expect that no more than five to seven families of the twenty or so presently there will remain — some will have to stay whether they want to or not due to family matters or money troubles.
What can explain the gap between the international perspective on Iquitos and the reality that the community once more appears to be going dormant, if not dying?Migration is an intrinsic part of broader processes of development, social transformation, inequality, and globalization. The relation between migration and inequality is complex and fundamentally non-linear, but there is a strong relationship between economic development and migration. It is generally assumed that when moderately high inequality and an international arena that encourages some movement exist in conjunction, an integrated migration system exists. As of 2018, Peru’s GNI per capita was 6,530 USD, while Israel’s was 40,850 USD, a clear difference, although as of 2016, both countries’ GINI index score was only 4.6 measures apart. Generally, middle-income countries like Peru have the highest emigration rates because of a combination of relative deprivation and tighter links to developed countries — in Iquitos, this link is the somewhat nonstandard link between Israel and the global Jewish diaspora.Israel, despite a sometimes difficult relationship with its diaspora , has for decades engaged in aggressive outreach to Jewish populations across the world. This includes legal provisions such as the Law of Return, which guarantees access to Israeli citizenship for migrants who meet state-determined baseline criteria of Jewish practice and/or ancestry. Accessing the benefits of this law often requires that potential migrants be able to provide documents such as parents’ Jewish marriage certificate , burial records, and/or documentation proving conversion. Since the 1970s, the Israeli state has in general encouraged both migration and conversion in order to boost the absolute numbers of Jews in the country, although this has deepened struggles between secular Zionists and ultra Orthodox religious Jews in the state apparatus, and led to ambiguous or difficult situations when groups cannot provide such documentation, claim Jewish identity, and do not convert. NGOs like the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish National Fund conduct outreach between Israel and other countries, while organizations at the national level, like the Federación Sionista del Perú, engage in Israel-positive activities for a local or regional audience. Conceiving of Israel as the natural center of Jewish life, practical or religious, is a relatively recent phenomenon: indeed, for most of Rabbinic Jewish history, the land that was to become Israel was a backwater that maintained a symbolic, ritual importance rather than being a practical goal for most Jews. As will be discussed in the next chapter, that the modern state of Israel today seems a natural point of interest for Jewish migrants across the globe is evidence of a successful parlaying of a symbolic diaspora, which was in reality only loosely connected between its individual nodes, into practical transnational activity, including migration, money flow, and idea exchange. Altogether, it seems evident that migration was a response to circumstances that any Iquiteño person might have chosen. This simple model does not explain, however, why Israel? Why not Lima, the center of Jewish life within Peru? Beyond internal migration, why not the U.S., Spain, or Argentina, the first, second, and third most-common host countries for migrant Peruvians ? Why go through the long and involved process of conversion , followed by the long and involved process of making aliyah? It is the history of the state and institutional history one level down from the interconnected world that helped fuse Jewish and Israeli identities in Iquitos that explains why Israel specifically became the goal.