The Jewish Publication Society did a disservice to this book and to its potential readership by releasing it under the title given above. The book is not about Jews exiled to the Amazon, but about a mestizo population living in the city of Iquitos, well integrated into local society and culture, who are the accidental descendants of Jewish traders and tappers who arrived in the region during the rubber boom of the 1880s. As the offspring of non-Jewish mothers and grandmothers, they are not Jews under Jewish law. Israel does not automatically grant them immigration rights under the Law of Return, and Limeño Jews keep them at an emotional distance, possibly because of their “alien” phenotype. (Who are the exiles here?) The author, quite appropriately, surrounds his use of the term “Jew” with quotation marks throughout the text, or refers to them as Jewish mestizos or descendants of Jews.What Segal explores is a more interesting topic than chronicling the existence of yet another quaint Jewish community. His focus is the “Jewish obsession” that so possesses this group. Despite their isolation from Jewish institutions, individuals, or sacred texts, they struggle—not to maintain—for they started from ground zero—but to gain a Jewish identity that they consider their birthright. Amazonian notions of the supernatural combine with trace elements of Jewish monotheism. Like other Iquiteños, they inhabit a world of jungle spirits and souls “retracing their steps.” They question the Christian Trinity, yet embrace Jesus as the Messiah. They observe the public Christian holidays but fast on Yom Kippur, explaining their traditions by quoting from the Apostles. These passionate confusions, contrasted with the secular lifestyle of the acknowledged Jews of Lima, provoke in Segal the ongoing riddle of Jewish life, “Who is a Jew?”Segal, identifying himself as a Jew and a neophyte historian, describes his struggle to separate these two personas during the period of his research in Iquitos. In the end, the Jew wins out, resulting in his total immersion in the life of the community as a quondam religious teacher and later, as an advocate. Starting from a determination to maintain scholarly objectivity, he finds himself engaged emotionally with the struggle of these “Jews” to enter fully into Judaism while possessing the barest knowledge of what Judaism might be. He is overwhelmed by their longing for Israel. He relates their efforts to be accepted by people they assume to be at the core of Jewish life—such as himself or the Jews of Lima. He suggests that they are modern Marranos: Jews whose conventional Catholicism masks a Jewish soul. Their stubborn retention of the shred of Jewish tradition—which is all their fathers bequeathed them—amounts, says the author, to a “Jewish obsession.” Where it comes from, and why is it so recognizable to us are questions he cannot answer rationally, only by empathizing with the obsessed.Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller runs like a theme through the book, and Segal has in fact turned himself into the storyteller for the “mestizo Jews” of Iqui-tos. Like all storytellers, he tells a convoluted tale that repeats itself incessantly. He is unable to analyze the phenomena he describes, disclaiming knowledge of sociological and anthropological tools. This book is not comparable to Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman, whose author also entered into the life of her subject, while maintaining use of her intellectual armamentarium. Instead we have what Segal himself calls “lyrical sentimentalism.” Yet as Vargas Llosa asserts through one of his characters, “storytelling may be something that the very existence of a people may depend on.”
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Dec 15, 2008
Claudio Mazzatenta 
Open Access
