Amazonian Jews

Amazonian Jews (Hebrew: יהודי אמזונאס, "Yehudei Amazonas"; Spanish: judíos amazónicos; Portuguese: judeus amazônicos) is the name for the mixed-race people of Jewish Moroccan and indigenous descent who live in the Amazon basin cities and river villages of Brazil and Peru, including Belém, Santarém, Alenquer, Óbidos, and Manaus, Brazil; and Iquitos in Peru. They married indigenous women and their descendants are of mixed race (mestizo). In the 21st century, Belém has about 1000 Jewish families and Manaus about 140 such families, most descended from these 19th-century Moroccans.
A small Jewish community was established in Iquitos by immigrants from Morocco during the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Other than Lima, with a larger, mostly Ashkenazi Jewish community, Iquitos has the only organized Jewish community in Peru. Since the late 20th century, some of these Sephardic descendants have studied Judaism and formally converted in order to be accepted by Israel as Jews. Hundreds from Iquitos have emigrated to Israel since then, including about 150 from 2013 to 2014.
== Origins ==
This ethnic group is descended from Moroccan Jewish traders who worked in the Brazilian, and later Peruvian, Amazon basin. They spoke Ladino, Hebrew, and Haketia. The earliest Moroccan Jews came in 1810 from Fez, Tanger, Tetuan, Casablanca, Salé, Rabat, and Marrakesh. In 1824 they organized the first synagogue, Eshel Avraham, in Belém, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon River. With the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early 20th century, thousands more Moroccan Jews entered the Amazon towns. Those who stayed married indigenous Native American women, and their children have grown up in a culture of Jewish and Christian, and Moroccan and Amazonian influences.
The peak of the rubber boom between 1880 and 1910 attracted so many merchants and other workers that it was the height of Jewish immigration to the Amazonian Basin; they established new communities along the interior of the Amazon River, in Santarém and Manaus, Brazil, and ventured as far as Iquitos, Peru, on the east side of the Andes. This was a major center on the Amazon for rubber export and related businesses. It was the headquarters of the Peruvian-owned Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC). The rubber boom also attracted Jewish adventurers from England, Alsace-Lorraine and France, and other Europeans, who helped found new Jewish and European institutions in Iquitos, including an opera house.
Some of the Jewish immigrants settled in Iquitos, marrying native women and establishing a Jewish cemetery and synagogue. Even after the rubber boom, some Moroccan Jews remained in Iquitos and other cities of the Amazon. Many of their mestizo descendants were reared Catholic in their mothers' faith, also absorbing Amazonian culture, and the remnants of the Jewish community gradually gave up much of their practice. Other Moroccan Jews lived in isolated ribeirinho settlements in Brazil.
Category:Jewish Brazilian history