Certainly the only reason any Iquiteño Jewish migrant goes to Israel is because of Israel’s recruiting of Jews from the diaspora, rhetoric backed up with citizenship and financial assistance. On the other hand, Israel does so because it is important for it to be seen as a homeland for all Jews, and Iquiteño Jews across borders of time, gender, and age strongly identify as Jews who want a homeland. Furthermore, gaining their citizenship in Israel is, like citizenship anywhere else, a long, arduous, confusing, and sometimes humiliating process. As a reminder, an Iquiteño who wishes to move to Israel must register with the Iquitos synagogue as someone who has Jewish ancestry or someone who does not , take multiple years of classes in conversational Hebrew, Jewish liturgy and ritual, Israeli culture, and successfully perform their learning over a period of more years to a series of community leaders, rabbis, and semi-official migration bureaucrats before “converting,” a process which may feel hurtful to those who already identified as Jewish, all before even considering taking the first practical steps towards movement. The main difference seems to be that for Iquiteño Jews, this process occurs largely before the actual movement takes place. Furthermore, once Iquiteño Jewish migrants are in Perú, their citizenship is revealed to be partial. Because conversions in Iquitos are performed according to Conservative/Masorti standards, not Orthodox ones,round plastic pots Iquiteño Jewish migrants are still barred from institutions such as marriage as a result of their ambiguous halakhic status.
They will also face less ambiguous racism and xenophobia. They are in arguably within the privileged tier in the Israeli Jewish/Palestinian binary, and their citizenship is hard-won and partial compared to other European-Jewish migrants and native Israeli Jews. These difficulties often appear in the ways in which the familial patterns of Iquiteño Jewish migrants differ from those of non-Jewish Peruvian migrants. The gender pattern is different: while in previous major 21st century waves of Peruvian migration, women have overwhelmingly formed the vanguard and later brought their male relatives with them , in Iquitos the pattern is that whole families migrate at once, leaving behind only scattered adult or near-adult children and siblings. Is this a factor only of guaranteed citizenship and Israel’s financial assistance, which removes barriers that separate other families? The household strategy approach to migration suggests that sending individual members of a family helps diversify that family’s options and adding to their overall economic security. The “absorption basket” governmental aid to new citizens from the ends after twelve months from arrival, meaning new migrants cannot rely on the Israeli state for long.Similarly, Iquiteño Jewish migrants to Israel buck another common demographic trend in Peruvian migration: they take their children with them rather than leaving them to finish their educations in Peru, as can be assumed to be usual by the low proportion of Peruvian migrants under age 20. The children of Iquitos’ Jews go to good schools and expect to go to university, whether in Iquitos or, more prestigiously, in Lima. Those good schools, however, are private Catholic schools, a situation that perturbs parents who want their children to be educated in environments that value and promote Jewishness, not simply educated.
This concern for children’s Jewish education was, as discussed in the previous chapter, by far the most commonly listed reason for migration. For many parents, a Jewish education that they feel will help make their children more Jewish is worth disrupting education in an absolute sense. Education is not a neutral driver in this case, or even a blunt-force promise of opportunity; questions of identity visibly trump questions of practicality and pedagogy. From a neoclassical economics standpoint that privileges economic self-interest as the main driver of human motion, one might expect that the differences in standard of living and wages between Israel and Perú would encourage migrants to stay in Israel, rather than Iquitos. Peruvian migration in general does indeed lend some support to this thinking: return migration is relatively uncommon for Peruvians specifically and non-Jewish Latin American migration to Israel conforms to this pattern. However, Iquiteño Jews do not necessarily expect a better life in Israel in economic terms, although the shift seems clear on the surface. The majority of Iquitos’ Jewish community is lower-middle to middle class —shopkeepers, professionals, clerical and medical workers—and usually moves down the economic ladder when they move to Israel. In my 2019 interview group, nineteen of my adult subjects expressed anxiety about their work prospects in Israel, and were particularly nervous about the difficulties of learning Hebrew as adults to the level necessary to do their present jobs. One young woman, a math teacher, told me about her older sister, a family medicine doctor who, after seven years in Israel, had been able to recertify herself as a nurse. As for herself, she thought, perhaps there would be some posts for tutoring the children of other Spanish-speaking migrants until she could learn enough to earn an Israeli teaching credential.
On the Ramla Tinos Facebook page, which circulates death notices, flyers for secondhand refrigerators,hydroponic bucket and the periodic Jewish meme in Spanish to the approximately 1,800 Latin American olim who make up its followers, a typical job ad is for domestic labor in private homes or factory jobs. This is not the kind of work the majority of Iquiteño Jews do in Iquitos, and combined with the testimony of my interview subjects, suggests that life will in many ways be economically harder in Israel than in Perú, and many Iquiteños know it. It seems implausible, therefore, that neoclassical-style economic thinking, easy citizenship, or the promise of a wealthier life could explain why Iquiteño-Jewish migration follows a riskier and more permanent pattern than is usual among 21st century migrants generally and even Latin American migrants to Israel specifically. Life for recent olim from Latin America, who face racial, religious, linguistic, and legal barriers to full citizenship and economic success, is arguably more difficult in Israel than it was at home, something of which prospective migrants are aware, at least in part. I do not wish to ignore the fact that migration dynamics often become self-sustaining as time goes by. Ethnic enclaves like those that my subjects and their Israel-dwelling relatives tell me have sprung up around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, in Ramla, and in Beersheba represent social capital that softens arrivals for new migrants and provides information and formal and informal labor opportunities. Transnational social fields develop institutional frameworks and pulls of their own, and become self-sustaining. All this is true and demonstrably affects the ways in which Iquiteño Jews migrate: as discussed in the previous chapter, by the time of writing, almost everyone left in the Iquitos community has friends and family living in Israel with whom they desire to reconnect. Even so, transnational social fields can become self-sustainingly circular , so it still matters why this social field has become self sustainingly unidirectional. Moreover, it is not simply coincidental that these Jews ended up in and stayed in Israel, and treating this group as if it were not engaged in behavior that conforms to a certain set of expectations about the reciprocal roles of diaspora and homeland in favor of simplistic economic arguments is shortsighted. Discussions with Iquiteño Jews laid out in the previous chapter made clear that the majority of these potential migrants feel an intense affinity for Israel that out times outweighs their expressed love for Perú. I also described how the revitalization of Jewish life in Iquitos has from the start been shaped by individuals and organizations with a desire to see the Jewish diaspora support Israel in multiple ways up to and including permanent migration as religiously inflected olim, not simply any other migrant. The educational materials and conversion processes made available to the Jews of Iquitos suggest the similarity of the Biblical Holy Land and the modern State of Israel and reinforce the primacy of Israel for diaspora Jewish identity. They seem to have successfully created a now self-sustaining model of Jewish identity in which migration to Israel to live a “more Jewish” or “better Jewish” life is key to proving belonging and status in the community and in a perceived global community of Jews. Although this might seem a natural equivalency, it is in no way a given that the modern state of Israel should be the locus of current Jewish transnational activity.
Over the course of thousands of years of Jewish diaspora, Jewish self-rule developed in countries far from the Holy Land, belying the assumption that owning the territory of the erstwhile Kingdom of Israel was necessary. In the modern era, diaspora nationalism, which for Jews indicates not the support of the home country in the diaspora but the assertion of real, valid, solid identities as Jews in the diaspora had an enormous influence on Jewish arts and letters and political activity, including proposals for alternate Jewish homelands in places as diverse as eastern Russia and the Niagara River, New York. As Lesser and Rein argue so forcefully, hyphenated Jewish identities can and often do focus as strongly on the host national segment as on the Jewish one. As Roniger argues, the usefulness of acknowledging and acting upon transnational ties is perpetually in flux. It is not natural and obvious that the Jews of Iquitos, simply for being Jews, should have decided to engage in transnational activity with Israel specifically. If a purely economic analysis suggests that transnational activity was inevitable in a globalized world, precluding a durable community in Iquitos, it was not inevitable that Iquitos’ Jewish community should decide to focus its transnational activities to such an extent on Israel. It is possible to imagine stronger links with Argentina’s Jewish population that did not lead back to Israel, just as it is possible to imagine connections with communities in the United States that were not tied solely to migration. It is even possible to imagine a resurgence of interest in Morocco, from whence the ancestors of most of Iquitos’ Jewish population hail, far more recently than any connection to the land of Israel. It has only been made to seem as though Israel was the choice so obvious it could not be passed up through precisely the utilization of diaspora discussed at the beginning of this chapter. When respected religious officials like Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, long-term guests like Ariel Segal, and philanthropic organizations like the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Federación Sionista del Perú all push a specific narrative of the inadequacy of diaspora and the illegitimacy of diasporic identities in which dedication to Jewish life and possession of a valid Jewish identity is shown through attachment to the state of Israel, the rhetoric combines with the economic. Iquitos’ Jewish community is a clear example of transnational practices, from commerce to migration, being guided by rhetoric that takes strict Safran-style interpretations of diaspora for its guide. Apart from simply steering migrants towards a particular destination, this blending of diaspora with transnational practice also produces different outcomes from groups in similar situations who are engaged in transnational activity without belonging to a diasporic people. Transnational social fields occur thanks to economic and practical principles; this transnational social field occurred thanks to economics and the conscious deployment by activists, states, and organizations of diaspora as more than a myth. If this situation is true for the Jews of Iquitos, it can be true for other diasporic peoples, whether they more closely resemble a Safranesque diaspora or a Berns-McGown-like one. If, as Roniger states, Jews in the diaspora can choose when and where to direct their transnational efforts after absorbing changing messages about their own and their ties’ legitimacy, so can other diaspora groups, whether or not that identity is conventionally considered strong. Homelands can shape a narrative in which being part of the diaspora makes an individual less than both a person living in the homeland and a person native to the host country, where recall and return are not only necessary performances of identity but can be acted upon in practical ways, whether through voting abroad, sending back money, or moving back home.