Jews of the Amazon: Self-Exile in Earthly Paradise (review)

Ariel Segal’s Jews of the Amazon: Self-Exile in Earthly Paradise tells the story of a small group in Iquitos (Amazonian Peru) who define themselves as Jews (some have migrated to Israel). All claim ancestry from a group of North African Jewish men who migrated to the Amazon as part of the nineteenth-century rubber boom and married local women. While the story itself is compellingly told and may appeal to some because of its novelty, Segal’s mixture of history, participant anthropology, and self-referential commentary places this book more in the journalistic category (Segal is the Latin American correspondent in Israel for the BBC) than the scholarly one. To Segal’s credit, he makes it clear to readers that the book is not the traditional “researcher-researched relationship between a historian and his or her living sources of information” (p. xi). By dispensing with many historical conventions (extensive footnotes, chronology, full use of archives) Jews of the Amazon provides readers with a story that is as much about Segal’s relationship with the Iquiteños as it is about the group itself. As Segal notes, he is the classic example of “the researcher who woke up transformed into a protagonist” (p. 214).

Much of Jews of the Amazon outlines the two years that Segal spent living in Iquitos. This is done by moving between traditional narrative and excerpts from oral histories. In addition, Segal kept a journal during his stay, and direct selections from it form much of the basis for the book. This constant shifting, and the interspersion of self-reflection on research methods (“. . . I had decided to record [the] personal recollec tions in a separate diary that I would keep far away from my sources at the moment or writing. But those moments of weakness in my attempt to remain distant from my subjects repeated themselves again and again until I realized a greater truth: some historical experiences are impossible to understand on an objective level if we do not allow ourselves to be subjective” [p. 3]) may be of particular interest to non-scholars who wonder what life in the field is like. Indeed, this appears to be Segal’s target audience, since he tends to gloss over the historical antecedents of what he describes as “Jewish mestizos,” focusing instead on a discussion of contemporary culture with its related beliefs and practices. For those wishing to use the book in courses, this is quite problematic: while Segal wants to argue that a sense of a remote Jewish past has remained constant among the group, he gives very little evidence of what that past was and how it is reconstructed in the present.

Ultimately, Jews of the Amazon is a fascinating popular exploration of the transfig uration of Jewish, Catholic, and Amazonian indigenous cosmologies among a small group of strongly identified, albeit rather theologically incoherent, Jews in Iquitos. By comparing the Jewish Iquitetant o a more traditionally self-defined Jewish community in Lima, Segal does an important service by reminding readers that ethnicity is often as local as it is global.