The commitment builds as a response to the increasing food demand from cities, which by now host over half the global population, and is shaped in recognition of global challenges including climate change, human health problems, disconnections in the food value chains and lack of access to healthy food: “… to… work to develop sustainable food systems that are inclusive, resilient, safe, and diverse, that provide healthy and affordable food to all people in a human rights-based framework, that minimize waste and conserve biodiversity while adapting to and mitigating impacts of climate change.” Furthermore, this Pact gives attention to the significance of landscape level planning entailing ecosystems and farming systems within and around the cities and it identifies participatory strategies to realize their holistic goals: “…apply an ecosystem approach to guide holistic and integrated land use planning and management in collaboration with both urban and rural authorities and other natural resource managers by combining landscape features, for example with risk-minimizing strategies to enhance opportunities for agroecological production, conservation of biodiversity and farmland, climate change adaptation, tourism, leisure and other ecosystem services.” The collaboration behind the Milan Pact represented a wide cross section of city leaders,stacking pots anticipating food system pressures likely to accompany the trend of rapid urbanization in many areas around the world, while also providing a relevant framework for utilizing and shaping sustainable living environments and food systems in the hundreds of shrinking cities world wide. 

The vision, strategies, and practical applications of work to incorporate agroecological food systems provide ample entry for potential solutions in many types of situations all dealing with states of transformation in rural, urban, and rural–urban areas.Iquitos is the largest Amazonian city in Perú, in Perú’s northernmost and easternmost province of Loreto, nestled between the Amazon, Nanay, and Itaya Rivers. Alongside its past as a grand center for commerce, its present as a center for indigenous1 and environmental activism, and the everyday lives of urban, Catholic Peruvians that make up the majority of the city, a small community of Jews lives quietly. They attend one synagogue in the back of a mattress shop, use the Amazon River as a mikveh, maintain close relationships with Masorti congregations in New York and Buenos Aires, hold grudges against Limeño Jews, invent workarounds to help yeasted challah rise in the jungle, make difficult decisions about the schooling of their children, convert, marry, care for a historical Jewish cemetery, and every year, send several families to Israel as olim, Jewish migrants. Every few years, an article is published in the Jewish or mainstream press marveling that there could be Jews so different from the ones whose ancestors lived in the Pale, so far from Tel Aviv or New York. Usually, the migration history of this community is sketched out in broad strokes, jumping in a few sentences from 19th century Morocco to the present day, when migration to Israel is fast depleting their numbers. In these articles, White Jews and White gentiles hold up Iquiteño Jews — Latin American Jews — Jews of color — non-Ashkenazi Jews — as a curious spectacle. These are Other Jews, the articles seem to say. How strange they are; let us feel curious about them, sad that their community is dying, pleased or outraged that they have a relationship with Israel, intrigued by their exoticism. There is an us, these articles say, and there is a them, and in doing so, they ignore the humanity and the Jewishness and the special ordinariness of Iquiteño Jews.

They flatten and whitewash Jewish history. These narratives use race as a lazy shorthand for what they deem authentic Jewishness, using tropes of migration, skin color, and otherness to flatten real ethnic differences and diverse cultural practices into simply “not Ashkenazi.” In doing so, they fail to recognize that they, as reporters, and they, as readers, and they, as Jews, are missing vital questions about what it means to be Jewish, about how narratives of Jewish sameness and otherness can be politically useful, and how Jewishness reveals the cracks in common thinking about diaspora, transnationalism, religious identity and change, and convergences of practicality and spirituality. When I came to Iquitos, the people of the community taught me to ask these questions. I began by asking a political question: Why, given the substantial costs in time and money, the invalidation of their own self-identification as Jews, the devaluation of their traditions in favor of Ashkenazi ones, a relative lack of institutional support, and, in general, a self-contortion necessary to fit a normative ideal of Israeli Jewishness, do Iquiteño Jews continue to migrate to Israel in such large numbers? As I spent time learning, I began to see to the larger questions behind that one. Why is the movement of Jewish people so centered on Israel even when it is not beneficial to migrants, and why does Israel seem to both require and drive away potential immigrants? Why do the dynamics of Iquiteño-Jewish movement contradict models of migration which emphasize interest-based decision-making and circular motion? If this people-movement is unique to this Jewish group, then how can the impact of Jewishness, and therefore religion, explain migration dynamics writ large? These questions are answered at the fringes. The Jews of Iquitos fall across the margins of many presumed definitions of Jewishness: racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural. Because of their marginality, their case reveals much about how Jews define themselves and others, and how different parts of the diaspora relate to one another in the contemporary age of nation-states.

These relations go from the personal or community level alongside the institutions that serve them, to the state level, all the way to the grand level of interlocking transnational dynamics. Although small in number, Iquiteño Jews as a group reveal that the shifting,sawtooth greenhouse global relationships between symbolic diaspora and practical transnational activity drive Jews to actively adapt their own identities to fit new narratives of authentic Jewishness. At the level of states, the muddiness of Iquiteño Jewishness illustrates how Israel’s relationship to the diaspora is based on a delicate balance of domestic racism and the problems that arise when citizenship is based on an identity as surprisingly fluid as that of Jewishness. And broader yet, they reveal two major flaws in the scholarship of religion and immigration. First, the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’ are commonly understood to be interchangeable, when in fact they have different dynamics and can each be used to influence the other. Second, scholars often disregard or explain away religious and spiritual belief or motivations as “really” practical and self-interested in nature. Truthfully, the lives of people of faith often see these two aspects converge into a dynamic that is vital to interrogate in order to respectfully seek to understand dilemmas that touch on the divine as well as the mundane without foolishly disregarding either. These many arguments are all covered in depth, but most important is their convergence to the main argument of this thesis. In short, transnational communities are subtly but importantly different from diasporic peoples, and the two should not be understood as interchangeable, because the rhetoric of diaspora serves the transnational goals of interested actors, including states, in driving migration, racial formation, and other cross-border activity that affects outcomes and identities within and beyond the people diasporas encompass.This thesis begins in Iquitos, by unpacking and examining that combination of spirituality and practicality which is essential to understanding why and how this community specifically migrates and converts, and why those two things are so interlinked. In interrogating the migration-conversion connection, it introduces the racial pressures that affect Iquiteño Jews and which are more fully explored in the third chapter. The first chapter also introduces the history of the community, with special attention paid to the years between 1990 and 2003, when the foundation for many of the community-level dynamics that guide contemporary Jewish life and migration in Iquitos was laid. This information serves to establish how the transnationalism/ diaspora dynamic operates on the personal/community level. To massively oversimplify the history of Iquiteño Jews for the sake of this introduction, they can be described as Moroccan-descended Jews who, after decades of intermarriage with local indigenous Amazonian populations, have developed a unique religious practice, culture, and self-identification that blends Jewish, indigenous, and national-Peruvian ways of being. After a lapse in Jewish practice during the latter half of the 20th century, the Iquitos community experienced a massive revival at the turn of the millennium and has since oriented itself firmly towards a Jewish identity quite unlike its earlier practices.

Specifically, influxes of foreign educational materials, teachers, and money have influenced the Iquitos community towards a more Ashkenazi form of practice, one that is strongly oriented towards Israel. 80 percent of the circa-2000 Iquiteño Jewish population2 has emigrated to Israel, and the majority of those who remain plan to or wish to go. Almost all are settled by the state in Ramla, home to the largest Latinx community community in Israel and one of the country’s last mixed Jewish-Arab cities, although some earlier migrants were settled in Beersheba. Although they self-identify as Jews, most Iquiteño Jews cannot enter the State of Israel under the Law of Return, because intermarriage has long rendered their Jewish status illegitimate in the eyes of Ashkenazi-Orthodox Israeli authorities. As such, most would-be emigrants must “convert.” Although Israel’s restrictions on conversions in the Diaspora are less strict than those mandated within the state , there simply are no rabbis versed in the specific Iquiteño tradition to conduct these conversions. So, the process requires Iquiteño Jews to change their religious and cultural practices to resemble Ashkenazi-normative Israeli conceptions of valid Judaism. Notwithstanding this acculturation, the insistence on conversion despite intensive Jewish practice and elective Jewish identification automatically invalidates Iquiteños’ own conceptions of themselves as Jews. The question this chapter seeks to answer is: Considering the time-consuming, invalidating, perhaps insulting hoops Iquiteño Jews must jump through to achieve Israeli validation of their Jewishness, why do they continue to “convert” and migrate? To answer, I argue that Jewishness is adaptable. As local and diaspora-wide terrains shift, Jews adapt their practices and identities to survive, and the notion of “authentic” Jewishness adapts with them. While the first question is answerable in the Iquiteños’ specific case only through interviews—asking Iquiteño Jews why and how they have made their own choices— other common migration drivers appear, like the potential to access education, work, and quality of living, that push and pull all migrants across the globe. In the case of Jews generally, I apply transnational frameworks to help understand how historical, potentially symbolic diasporas and modern transnational behavior like migration influence one another, and why Jews value different national identities and expressions of Judaism differently across time and place. In Iquitos, transnational behaviors that use the idea of diaspora-homeland as a symbol and self justification lead Jews to center the modern state of Israel in their Jewish self-understanding and their understanding of Jewish authenticity. Beyond these basic assumptions it is best to ask the people themselves for their stories. Given this set of theoretical and practical circumstances, what purposes does conversion specifically serve for Iquiteño Jews? Considering individuals’ differing affairs, Iquiteños may see conversion as a formality, a great insult, a common-sense realignment, a necessary step towards self-acceptance as a Jew, a motion towards “authenticity,” a stepping stone towards better economic prospects beyond Peru, or any combination of the above. Although conversions for purposes of migrating to Israel must be observed to some extent by a rabbi, a purpose that may take years of practice to that rabbi’s satisfaction, it is an open question whether Iquiteño Jews continue to live and practice in accordance with these precepts. In my experience observing and participating in weekly services and life events like Bnei mitzvot in Iquitos, it seems that Iquiteño Jews do continue using at least Ashkenazi-style liturgy, calendars, and orders in public religious practice. Private practices may vary significantly, and I do not know what those Iquiteños who currently live in Israel do. This question of “why do you convert?” is of course one of my central questions, but its answer allows me to suggest further avenues of study regarding the structural processes that shape Israeli citizenship.