The inherent messiness and incompleteness of this project is highlighted by the many edge-cases that still exist: Conservative/Masorti, Reform, or Reconstructionist conversions; patrilineal Jews, deconversions, adoptees, those with no access to documents of “proof” such as ketubahs, photographs of tombstones, etc. The Jews of Iquitos match many of these descriptions, most importantly, those of being patrilineal, of having difficulty finding proof of Jewish ancestry, and of having non-Orthodox conversions. Resolving this situation via conversion to the level which allows Iquiteños the status of olim, though not of fully enfranchised Israeli citizens, is an arduous and expensive process for members of the community, but it is also arduous and expensive for Israel, and in the end only produces unideal Jews. Why bother? In order to meet the demands of demographic warfare for Jewish bodies while taking a conciliatory stance towards ultra-Orthodox opponents, Israel has essentially developed different stances towards incorporation to try to make use of those who fall into these edge cases. Drawing on the work of Netanel Fisher , I argue that these stances more or less fall into the following camps.
Ethnonationalist inclusion, which is ironically accepting of different modes of Jewishness in the pursuit of Jewish ethnicity,stacking flower pot tower seeks to meet the racist demands of demographic warfare by welcoming the diaspora into Israel, albeit often as second-class citizens. Ultra-Orthodox incorporation regimes are in fact exclusion regimes, as very few potential immigrants can muster the evidence necessary to prove their Jewishness or pass through a stringent Orthodox conversion process. In the middle are the centrist religious Zionists, who do their best to be a bridge between these two camps, in particular by creating special conversion schools , funding the Jewish Agency for Israel and similar bodies, deciding which aspects of life in Israel should be determined by the secular face or the religious face of the state. Instead of solving the basic issue , these religious Zionists create an “Israeli halakha” that ultimately pushes an increasingly ethnicity-dependent definition of Jewishness under a cloak of halakhic observance. Encouraging and regulating conversion, then, is one of the state’s main tools to resolve these competing camps and strengthen the Israeli definition of Jewishness. And so, Iquiteño Jews represent a marginal case that touches on an unusual number of these edge cases, inadequacies, and shaky bridges — they are reliant upon the secular-nationalist programming that provides them with support without which migration to Israel would be impossible, but are beholden to ultra-Orthodox strictures that guide their practices and lives before and after immigration.
This reveals not only the tension and the strange inefficiencies of Israel’s immigration regime, but the larger compromises that must occur between secular-nationalist and religious forces within the state, and the almost separate racial categorizations that exist side-by-side. As such, Jews who are difficult to incorporate into the idealized nation of Israel unsettle the state—but the apparent effectiveness and even existence of programs to encourage homogenization through conversion demonstrate how conversion can also strengthen it.Because conversion involves change, critique, and examination of religious hierarchies on the part of the convert and all those who are aware of the convert, it both reveals and hides the slippery, blurry edges of religious self-identification and the power of society and the state to control that identification. Taking as given that religion is a mode of social identification akin to race, gender, or class, Viswanathan unpicks the idea that religion can ever be successfully relegated to the private, personal realm by a secular state, and that it can be easily pigeonholed by scholars as simply another kind of ideology like party affiliation. Instead, belief and faith intertwine with legislation, culture, politics, and public life in ways that cannot be neatly separated. Furthermore, a religion can be a site of knowledge construction, a site of oppression, and a site of resistance — functions that bely an easy classification.
Conversion, therefore, is both intensely personal and entirely public and political, as it begs questions about society, individual responsibilities, and state/societal power. Viswanathan focuses on clear-cut conversions from one religion to another, mainly conversions from minority to majority religions or vice-versa. Furthermore, in her focus on England, Viswanathan is interested in how conversion fits narratives of tolerant, secular31, multicultural states. This is not quite the situation of the Jews of Iquitos—how to define a conversion from one religion to more or less the same religion, so that one can move from a place where one is a minority religion to a place where one would be the majority religion in a state that makes no pretense at secularity? Nonetheless, the critique she makes of the state’s role in defining religious identity and conversion is highly applicable. Because converts in general can make claims on the state, and because the claim olim make on Israel is so strong and foundational, the state engages in constant legislation and bureaucratization of what is a valid conversion, and therefore, who is a valid convert and what that validity looks like. As discussed in this chapter, this might include protecting or assigning rights, adjudicating relevant court cases,ebb and flow or navigating the space between religious and secular law. This is essentially the legalization of religious authenticity, the center around which my study of Iquitos turns. Even in Judaism, where converts are meant to be above question, fully absorbed into the fabric of Jewish life, and the history of conversion more or less personal, when Judaism becomes theocratic, spirituality is “usurped by the state” , which must regulate converts’ authenticity. This creates an interesting double-bind for the state itself: even though this turning to the state to confirm identity or authenticity strengthens the perception of the state as the place to turn to for help, it exposes the untruth of a truly secular, disinterested, multicultural state as it exposes the state’s interest in religious intervention. By attempting to exert power over this process, the state highlights its own weaknesses—which may be the same as weakening itself. However, because even marginal Jews are privileged above Palestinians, this is not all conversion does in Israel. When marginal Jews convert in Israel, they are in fact actively strengthening the state in its aims of demographic warfare. When diasporic Jews convert in order to enter Israel, they do the same. Also, Fisher points out that as much as the ultra Orthodox protest the entry of Jews into Israel, and sometimes even the existence of Israel, they use state power—the aforementioned Israeli halakha—to enforce their preferred standards in ways that would be simply impossible if their purported Orthodox readings of sacred texts were truly being upheld. As such, even the problem of these unideal converting Jews helps bring a powerful group into the fold. In particular, marginal Jews can present a major racial destabilization to the state. Former Soviet Union Jewish migrants, who can usually more easily pass for Ashkenazi than Iquiteños can and so cause much racial consternation when they are denied the rights they are supposedly owed according to their acculturation into Ashkenazi Israeli culture, incontrovertibly “settle” the state when they convert.
When Iquiteño olim convert in an Ashkenazi method before even leaving their home country, they too help the avoid these scenes of racial tension. Even though their dark skin and accents in Hebrew are punished in Israel’s racist society, their assimilation into an Ashkenazi ethnic identity through conversion is settling. Furthermore, even their very undesirability emphasizes the fundamental difference in the Israeli racial project between Jews and Palestinians. As at the individual level, where religious concerns and practical concerns converge, this is an instance in which two things are true at once. Transnational state influence over conversion is both settling and unsettling of definitions of Jewish and of Israel’s overall racial project, papering over the most obvious cracks and serving Israel’s immediate demographic need, but at the same time reinforcing an unstable racist system that cannot hold the full complexity of the diaspora. Plants rely on environmental cues for survival. Light is one such cue and plants perceive its quality, intensity, and direction. Phototropins and cryptochromes are well known blue light and UV A photoreceptors and phytochromes are red and far red light receptors . PHOT, which bind the blue light–absorbing chromophore FMN, harbor two FMN binding domains, LOV1 and LOV2 at the N terminus, and a serine/threonine kinase domain at the C terminus . LOV domains belong to the PerARNT Sim family . PHOT control phototropism in seedlings, induce stomatal opening, and regulate chloroplast movement . CRY have two recognizable domains, a DNA photolyase like domain at the N terminus and C terminal DQXVP acidic STAES domains that are distinguished mainly by their C terminal extensions . CRY participate in the circadian clock, anthocyanin biosynthesis, anthogenesis, and plant growth . It is well known that light, which is perceived by photoreceptors, affects plant phenotypes by influencing phytohormones. For example, blue light perceived by PHOT induces phototropism via auxin translocation , whereas light induced germination by PHY and CRY perception of light is induced by gibberellic acid . Leguminous plants and rhizobia establish a symbiosis in which root nodules develop on a host root. Within the nodules, rhizobia fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, which eventually results in the synthesis of amino acids that are utilized by the host. In return, the plants provide photosynthetic products to the rhizobia as an energy source that drives the nitrogenfixation process . Light perceived by the above ground parts of the plant is essential for the establishment of this symbiosis. Previously, we reported that not only light quantity but, also, light quality affects nodulation and, moreover, that this photomorphogenetic event is controlled by phytochrome through jasmonic acid signaling in Lotus japonicus . Recently, Weller et al. reported that ethylene signaling influences phytochrome regulation in pea, and ethyleneinsensitive mutants are known to have increased nodule numbers . Light triggers the suppression of nodulation in many legume roots. For example, previous studies reported that nodulation in Pisum sativum was decreased by root exposure to daylight and that nodulation of isolated roots of Phaseolus vulgaris was suppressed by white light . To study the effect of root exposure to light on nodulation in L. japonicus Miyakojima MG20, we employed three different strategies . Ten day old plants growing on agar plates were inoculated with M. loti MAFF303099 and the roots of some plants were shaded. Under unshaded conditions, both the shoot and root were exposed to continuous white light whereas, when the root was shaded, only the shoot was exposed. Under these conditions, shaded roots received approximately 10 µmol m_2 s _1 of light. Although root lengths were not significantly different between unshaded and shaded plants 21 days after inoculation , the shoots from the unshaded plants were significantly shorter than those of the shaded plants . Also, unshaded roots had significantly fewer root nodules per plant than shaded roots , confirming earlier investigations that showed that nodulation is inhibited by white light. However, uninoculated plants did not differ in shoot length whether they were shaded or not , suggesting that the difference in shoot length of the inoculated plants grown under unshaded conditions is related to the presence of rhizobia. In a split root system in which the two root systems were inoculated with M. loti but one side of the root system was either totally shaded or both shaded and unshaded, we found that, although root lengths were not significantly different between the two different shaded and shaded/unshaded root systems , the overall number of nodules per root system was significantly reduced in the roots grown under completely unshaded conditions compared with those in shaded conditions . We used the data from Figure 1E and, as shown in Supplementary Figure S3A, prepared a graph combining the total number of nodules per split root systems . We next analyzed the expression of nin, a nodulation gene marker, and found that its expression was significantly reduced on the unshaded root whereas nin was highly expressed in the shaded root in S/U plants, which were better nodulated. The reduction in nin expression was, thus, directly correlated with the reduced nodule number. Finally, we investigated the effects of light on nodulation in a single root.