Jews of the Amazon: Self-Exile in Paradise - Hardcover

Segal, Ariel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0827606699 ISBN 13: 9780827606692

Publisher: JEWISH PUBLICATON SOCIETY, 1999

Synopsis

A fascinating study of a Jewish community in one of the world’s most isolated places: the heart of the Peruvian Amazon.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

In this absorbing work, historian Segal narrows his focus to the tiny Jewish community of Iquitos, an isolated Peruvian town in the Amazon jungle. Segal weaves the town's microhistory with the larger history of Peru. Jewish men first came to Iquitos during the rubber boom in the late 19th century, married Amazonian women and created their own syncretic Jewish tradition, including elements of nominal Catholicism and indigenous religions. Segal categorizes the Iquitos Jews with the Marranos of Spain who secretly maintained their Jewish faith after ostensibly becoming Catholics. Recognizing their mixed ancestry, he calls them "Jewish Mestizos." Others have dubbed them "Jewish Incas." For comparative purposes, Segal provides background information about such other "exotic" Jewish communities as the B'nai Israel of India, Samaritans, Karaites and Beta Israel of Ethiopia. These and other lesser known Jewish communities have been lost as a result of war, exile and forced conversions. Born in Venezuela but educated in America, Segal began this project in 1995, as part of his doctoral program. He candidly documents his clouded role as a "sentimental scholar" who abandoned objectivity and adopted the cause of the people he studied. Segal became enamored with the 100 Jewish Mestizos of Iquitos, teaching them Jewish religion and prayer services, and intervening on their behalf to secure their eligibility for immigration to Israel. Describing these activities, he acknowledges that he "trespassed the boundaries" of traditional scholarship. The result is an unusual, refreshing and vividly researched cultural study. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Segal, who grew up in Venezuela and earned his doctorate in Latin American history at the University of Miami (and now works as a lecturer and as a radio analyst in Israel) brings us an unusual tale. Making use of the various strands of his background, he investigates a strange and little-known episode in Jewish history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during a rubber boom in the Peruvian Amazon, Jewish men from Europe and Morocco came to make their fortune and ended up settling in a remote and seemingly inhospitable town named Iquitos. Over the years, they married native Amazonian women. Now a later generation exists of people who are culturally part Jewish, part Christian, and part native AmazonianAand who participate in such a strange amalgam of cultures and rituals that Segal finds them hard to classify. Meticulous research (Segal lived in the Amazon for months) and his engrossing writing (at times, his account reads like a novel) combine with an ethnographic richness to make this a fascinating scholarly book. Recommended for libraries with larger holdings in Jewish or Latin American studies.APaul M. Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: JEWISH PUBLICATON SOCIETY
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0827606699
• ISBN 13: 9780827606692
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 342