Is Israel engaged in constructing a machine in which “problematic,” marginal, questionable Jews are found, processed, and shaped into ideal settlers? Although this process is unwieldy, multipart, historical, inefficient, and only partially successful, in this chapter I argue that this immigration process does succeed in its primary goal of convincing diasporic Jews to identify with Israel, migrate, and solidify Israeli racial hierarchies. Regardless of the personal meaning of conversions to Iquiteños, they are a powerful tool for the education and selection of potential Israelis. Since some Mizrahi and Sephardi communities wield significant power within Israel, and Israel’s secular courts have loosened restrictions on the kinds of conversions that turn potential olim into viable proto-Israelis, why do Iquiteños nonetheless convert in Orthodox Ashkenazi modes3? The obvious answer is that affiliating themselves with relatively disadvantaged groups is unwise. Forward-thinking action towards assuming a more privileged position in Israel seems like a rational step to take, but how is that position of privilege communicated to Iquiteños, and what parts of the social position are received as most attractive? How is the sincere potential religiosity of conversion tied to expectations of more material gains in a way that Iquiteños understand and respond to? The overlap of personal choice and state-level manipulation may reveal much about how the diaspora relates to a modern state claiming centrality and authenticity, and vice-versa.

The second chapter takes a closer look at the transnational frameworks introduced in the first,strawberry gutter system expanding its scope to Latin American Jewry writ large, and then to the global Jewish diaspora. It argues that Jewish discourse continually constructs the meaning of diaspora internal to its community, even as sociological discourse constructs a different meaning that is more closely related to the concept of transnationalism. Each definition ignores the ways in which the modern international arena of nation states can actively use these definitions to influence behavior: using the rhetoric of diaspora to encourage transnational activities and using transnational activities to curate and control who belongs to the diaspora. This expansion to the global, theoretical level comes before the exploration of the state level because it is vital to contextualize transnationalism and diasporic rhetoric before jumping into case-by-case examples. Latin American Jews are immensely diverse and their communities and relationships within the region and within the global Diaspora are complex and long-standing. The literature that uses transnationalism to better understand the identities of Jews in Latin America tends to position them on a spectrum with a national identity and a Jewish identity at opposite ends. At one end are scholars like Judit Bokser-Liwerant , who see Jews in Latin America as Jews foremost. From this point of view, a sense of pan-Jewish ethno-religious identity unites Jews across national borders, often to the exclusion of meaningful national identities. In this understanding, Jewishness is the most important tile in Jewish individuals’ mosaics of identity,and lends itself naturally to transnational behavior. This presumed behavior and presumed identification with other Jews across and irrespective of national borders is also assumed to have something to do with the fact of being a diasporic people. On the other end of the spectrum are Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein , who have both rejected what they deem the “essentializing” pan-Jewishness of a stance like Bokser Liwerant’s in favor of seeing Jews in Latin America as national citizens first. Jews are expected to look to the host nation first when assessing their own identities, rather than emphasizing their Jewishness to the exclusion of their national identity.

This results in a range of hyphenations, such as Jewish-Argentinian, Jewish-Peruvian, etc. While transnational behavior may occur, the Jewish identity is usually considered to be one of the less prominent identities that an individual counts towards their identity mosaics. Lesser and Rein’s concern with the differences in Jewish life, treatment, and identification between countries is important to remember, particularly when examining shifts in local conditions that may lead Jews to consider migration. Nevertheless, it can be essentializing as well in its focus on discrete and identifiable national identities and can minimize important regional similarities or historical ties between communities. By being able to see this distinction, it also becomes possible to see how a sense of belonging to a diaspora can influence transnational behaviors. In fact, diasporic history and transnational behavior are often actively conflated to achieve political and/or economic aims, especially pan-Jewish and Zionist activism, religious philanthropy, and Jewish education. Jewish philanthropy that calls on a diasporic identity to solicit transnational donations has a long history, which includes transnational emissaries in the early modern period when nations were first developing. Iquitos experiences its own version of this border-crossing Jewish philanthropy, and has done since the turn of the century. Frequent intra diaspora migration for professional purposes has a similarly long history: traders, clergy, and activists maintain personal, business, and religious connections across national borders, alternately using the diaspora and transnationalism to justify each other..4 Often, the existence of a diaspora sets the stage for many kinds of transnational activities, which may or may not symbolically call upon the diaspora to achieve their goals. At the same time, transnational activity may make a sense of diasporic pan-Jewishness stronger and a more active part of individuals’ self-identification. Participating or not in transnational activity between nodes of the diaspora also comes into play when gauging Jewish authenticity.

The third and final chapter returns to a single country-level case study, this time in Israel through a structural examination of the great contradiction of Israeli immigration policy. Israel’s view of immigrants and potential immigrants is torn between religious and secular interests,hydroponic fodder system which prioritize Jewish purity and Jewish numbers, respectively. On the one hand, secular Zionist immigration policy requires more and more Jewish bodies in Israel to make the state more secure and overwhelm Palestinians still living there through sheer numbers and new settlements. In light of this need for numerical superiority, politicians on this side of the ideological divide are willing to expand ideas of authentic Jewishness. On the other hand, ultra-Orthodox religious factions wish to keep the answer to the question of “who is a Jew?” very narrow, because a narrow definition allows them to maintain certain special privileges above and beyond those granted to all Israeli citizens. Furthermore, the current citizenship regime and their status as European-descended Ashkenazim grants these groups the structural privilege to effectively lobby for such restrictive definitions. Both sides need each other to form an effective governing coalition, and as such, the immigration of “problematic” Jews is not halted completely. Rather, the two sides compromise such that the secular bureaus in charge of immigration and Diaspora relations will attempt to create a machine of policy and outreach that produces more desirable Jews from an Ashkenazi-normative religious perspective, that is, to make “inauthentic” Jews “authentic.” Furthermore, the fact that most Iquiteño migrants are settled in the mixed city of Ramla indicates that they serve the Israeli state in constructing a racial hierarchy. Demographic warfare is not general, but is in fact quite tactical and specific. In this case, the absorption of Iquiteño Jews into an Ashkenazi mold is not only an indicator of intra-Jewish hierarchy, it is a way of reinforcing, even creating, an Israeli racial project in which even the most “undesirable” Jews can be wielded against Palestinians. In this way, Iquiteño Jews are literally and metaphorically placed definitively apart from pale-skinned Ashkenazi, but above Palestinians. The way in which Iquiteños are asked to shape themselves also includes shaping themselves as an ethnic group against a racialized Arab Other. Driven by many transnational forces, including powerful movements within global Jewries, the Jews of Iquitos have dramatically changed their religious practices, self identifications, and migration plans, mostly with the goal of migrating to Israel for reasons that combine the practical and the spiritual. Although the Jewish community of Iquitos is very small, and grows smaller yearly due to emigration, its marginal position within Jewish hierarchies of ethnicity, religion, and nation helps reveal the messy, contested borders of contemporary Jewishness and how Jews actively change what it means to be authentically Jewish. Human identities are always a mosaic of multiple facets of greater or lesser saliency, and Jewish identities that cross or complicate those boundaries are possible and common. Iquiteño Jews fall across many of those borders.

As they do so, they bring into focus the intersections of symbolic diaspora and practical transnationalism, the historical mutability of Jewish authenticity, and the active use of these intersections and the Diaspora at large by the Israeli state as it seeks to solidify and stabilize its contemporary centrality to modern Judaism. By seeing and seeking to understand these often-ignored or hidden points of difference and conversion, scholars and activists can examine the ways in which they define their own religious and ethnic identities, make their discussions of religion and migration more respectful and nuanced, and take control of the narratives that predicate rights and safety on authenticity. And, finally, understanding the differences between transnational communities and diasporic peoples will reveal the usefulness of diasporic rhetoric to actors seeking to influence groups’ transnational activities, and therefore the changes in migration patterns, racial and ethnic formations, and self-identifications of diasporic peoples. For the Jews of Iquitos, migration to Israel is seen as a step in the pathway to becoming an authentic Jew that is as necessary as a conversion process. This blending of Israeli and Jewish identity stems from institutional influence in the early days of Iquitos’ community renaissance, but has since become self-sustaining thanks to global-level economics and individual-level transnational affective bonds. Iquiteño Jews do not see their conversions as solely an instrumentalist tool to gain a more economically privileged life in Israel, nor do they see their conversions as completely individual pursuits of spiritual fulfillment. Rather, they are motivated by both practical and spiritual concerns, which are made to converge at key points thanks to diasporic influence on transnational actions. This phenomenon challenges common narratives in the sociology of conversion that require total separation of the practical and the spiritual. It is often useful, even necessary, to make such a separation, but insisting on its essentialness makes it difficult to study cases where the two converge. These points of convergence are often important in understanding the justifications, motivations, and identifications of individuals as well as the influence of organizations and states with religious aims. Choosing to interpret these convergences as only blinkered fantasies hiding self-interested, rational motivations, quite aside from being condescending, also hides the very real power of religious belief to motivate action. In this case, the decisions made by Iquiteños occur at the crux of individual belief and global political dynamics, so recognizing both dynamics as important is key to understanding their joint influence. In the case of global Jewry and other diasporic peoples with strong religious identities, this convergence helps make the rhetoricization of diaspora an effective tool to encourage and guide transnational activity.It is a value-added process model, recognizing that while conversion is often portrayed within Christian or Christian-secular contexts like the Western university as a blinding flash of inspiration that transforms its individual subject in an instant, as in the Confessions of Saint Augustine or Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death , in most cases, conversion is a long and social process. Their model has also been heavily critiqued. Critics find that it leaves little room for converts’ own perceptions of their experience, while at the same time relying on individuals’ reportage of their “turning points” and their “seeking” behaviors. Furthermore, it is flawed in its insistence on the presence of each and every one of its purported prerequisites for conversion, in particular because each of these prerequisites are characterized purely as the answer to some inner, individual spiritual lack, leaving aside the many other tools converts have at their disposal, and which they may use alongside or indistinguishable from religious responses. That said, I feel this model accurately emphasizes the importance of affective bonding and community ritual to conversion. Phillips and Snow emphasize the importance of that affective bonding and intensive interaction, and add the important note that it is those two activities that help potential converts choose between many possible options when they convert.