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Who Are the Jews of India?
Of all the Diaspora communities, the Jews of India are among the least known and most interesting. This readable study, full of vivid details of everyday life, looks in depth at the religious life of the Jewish community in Cochin, the Bene Israel from the remote Konkan coast near Bombay, and the Baghdadi Jews, who migrated to Indian port cities and flourished under the British Raj. Who Are the Jews of India? is the first integrated, comprehensive work available on all three of India's Jewish communities.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Nathan Katz brings together methods and insights from religious studies, ritual studies, anthropology, history, linguistics, and folklore, as he discusses the strategies each community developed to maintain its Jewish identity. Based on extensive fieldwork throughout India, as well as close reading of historical documents, this study provides a striking new understanding of the Jewish Diaspora and of Hindu civilization as a whole.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Nathan Katz brings together methods and insights from religious studies, ritual studies, anthropology, history, linguistics, and folklore, as he discusses the strategies each community developed to maintain its Jewish identity. Based on extensive fieldwork throughout India, as well as close reading of historical documents, this study provides a striking new understanding of the Jewish Diaspora and of Hindu civilization as a whole.
- GenresIndia
228 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2000
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October 4, 2022
This book gave me everything I wanted and more. I visited Cochin in November 2019 and one of my favorite city in my 3 week trip through India, and loved the people and landscape of Kerala. One of the best parts of Cochin was the Jewish history, which all the locals seemed to be very proud of even though there were only two Jews left in Cochin. There had recently been 5 left, but Sarah Cohen died at age 96 and two younger Jewish women decided to go to Israel after that. In Jew Town I visited Sarah Cohen’s embroidery and Judaica shop, read a little about her life, and bought a beautiful, delicate challah cover. I was pleased to read her name on the first page of the first chapter of this book.
One of the things that this book underlines as unique about the Jews in India is that they existed in a country that had no anti-Semitism. Indian tradition encouraged the foreigner to preserve their own tradition which may elevate their ranking or esteem, quite unlike elsewhere in the diaspora. The rich Jewish history in India also counters the popular and lazy notion that Jews were Western (European). Here they were Asian. In Kerala they affirmed and participated in the social hierarchy, and they judiciously borrowed from local custom within the framework of Halachic law. There was reportedly a trading relationship between Jews and Kerala dating from the time of King Solomon in the 10th Century BCE. There were also supposedly boatloads of Jews who arrived in 72 CE after the destruction of the Second Temple. There is nothing in any other peoples’ history that contradicts this, but there is scant evidence to support it. The Jewish people of the Malabar coast relied on the local kings for protection while bolstering the economy through trade. Kerala, like Calcutta, became a major port for European trade. It was colonized by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and ultimately the British. Prior to European incursions, the Jewish, Muslim and Christian peoples who settled in Kerala lived mostly without conflict, with early Christians often having very Jewish traditions and none of the Muslim-Hindu conflict of the north. Jewish life under the Portuguese was not great (religious texts and Torah scrolls were burned, and exorbitant taxes), as they brought the Inquisition with them, but under the Dutch there was a great exchange of communication between the Jews of western Europe and the Jews of Kerala who had been mostly isolated for centuries. The Dutch Jews wrote about these Indian Jews and the Indian Jews commissioned new prayer books that reflected their particular traditions.
Once the British took over Kerala, they neglected it. Bombay and Calcutta were to be their primary ports. However, the Jews still enjoyed the protection of the maharaja. However, the Jewish community began to slowly unravel. There was first the immigration of western Jews from Europe and the Middle East (Paradesi Jews) who felt superior to the traditionally local Jews (Malabar Jews) because they were more multi-culturally adept in the ever expanding global trade, and because they felt they had a stronger knowledge of their Jewish heritage. Outsiders frequently commented on the segregation between these two groups. This pattern was repeated again with the Bene Israel Jews and the Baghdadi Jews on Bombay. The Bene Israel were first noted outside of India in the last 1700s. They had considered themselves one of the lost tribes of Israel but the history was and still is unclear. By the time they were discovered by the western world they were oil pressers who observed some unequivocally Judaic customs while many others had fallen away. Christian missionaries taught them English and Hebrew which, rather than converting them to Christianity, confirmed for them their Jewish heritage, enabled them to translate Hebrew prayers into Marathi, and connected them to all that they had lost. Learning the English language also enabled them to move to Bombay and establish a mostly prosperous community. In India they were considered Jews but in Israel they were considered Indians and they often had to fight for acknowledgement that they were Jews. This was further complicated by the fact that India was ruled by Britain, and because of the Bene Israel’s acculturation they often had a much harder time gaining British privilege than the Baghdadi Jews who immigrated to Bombay and identified themselves as British subjects with all the education and culture that entailed, while the Bene Israel were eventually compelled to shake off the Indian caste system and become more Hebrew. The Bene Israel were often treated as the poor relations and their education and worship was usually separate and unequal. I feel this is all unfortunate because the Bene Israel should have been celebrated for being able to maintain the broad strokes of their Judaism despite being cut off from world Jewry for many centuries. They still had Passover and the High Holy Days even if they were called something else, and even if Tashlich was observed by a higher percentage of people than in the rest of the world. It shows how the emphasis on home ritual can sustain the faith when lacking places to congregate, for whatever the reason. The Bene Israel left in India are now less than a tenth of the number now found inn Israel.
The Baghdadi Jews had an easier time in India, and although they left their mark on some major cities, particularly Bombay, their time was transitory. In the days of early British empire they were regarded as from the Middle East. After the Mutiny of 1857 they hewed closer to the British. After WWI they identified as European, and while absorbing Ashkenazi refugees before WWII they became more closely identified with Zionism. After Britain left India in 1947 and conferred national status to Israel in 1948, most Baghdadis left India, and most went to London or Israel, though many also landed in Singapore, South Africa, Australia, Canada and the U.S. There was heavy Baghdadi involvement in the opium trade but they eventually moved to textiles, real estate and manufacturing. They adopted English as their mother tongue and their schools gained European status which garnered them greater funding but more emphasis on an English education than Judaic. Their charitable trusts often excluded the Bene Israel explicitly in echoes of the Indian caste system and the British class system. This even carried through to the military which at the beginning of WWII categorized the Baghdadi as ‘Anglo-Indian’ Jews and the Bene Israel as ‘Indian Jews’.
In the end, just because few Jews finally decided to stay in India, and even though the different groups’ experiences were usually divergent, it does not mean that the Jewish experience in India was ultimately insignificant. These three stories are a testament to the industriousness of the Jewish people and the durability of the faith. This is also a part of Indian history as well, a land that could welcome outsiders in a way that is fairly unique to Jewish history.
One of the things that this book underlines as unique about the Jews in India is that they existed in a country that had no anti-Semitism. Indian tradition encouraged the foreigner to preserve their own tradition which may elevate their ranking or esteem, quite unlike elsewhere in the diaspora. The rich Jewish history in India also counters the popular and lazy notion that Jews were Western (European). Here they were Asian. In Kerala they affirmed and participated in the social hierarchy, and they judiciously borrowed from local custom within the framework of Halachic law. There was reportedly a trading relationship between Jews and Kerala dating from the time of King Solomon in the 10th Century BCE. There were also supposedly boatloads of Jews who arrived in 72 CE after the destruction of the Second Temple. There is nothing in any other peoples’ history that contradicts this, but there is scant evidence to support it. The Jewish people of the Malabar coast relied on the local kings for protection while bolstering the economy through trade. Kerala, like Calcutta, became a major port for European trade. It was colonized by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and ultimately the British. Prior to European incursions, the Jewish, Muslim and Christian peoples who settled in Kerala lived mostly without conflict, with early Christians often having very Jewish traditions and none of the Muslim-Hindu conflict of the north. Jewish life under the Portuguese was not great (religious texts and Torah scrolls were burned, and exorbitant taxes), as they brought the Inquisition with them, but under the Dutch there was a great exchange of communication between the Jews of western Europe and the Jews of Kerala who had been mostly isolated for centuries. The Dutch Jews wrote about these Indian Jews and the Indian Jews commissioned new prayer books that reflected their particular traditions.
Once the British took over Kerala, they neglected it. Bombay and Calcutta were to be their primary ports. However, the Jews still enjoyed the protection of the maharaja. However, the Jewish community began to slowly unravel. There was first the immigration of western Jews from Europe and the Middle East (Paradesi Jews) who felt superior to the traditionally local Jews (Malabar Jews) because they were more multi-culturally adept in the ever expanding global trade, and because they felt they had a stronger knowledge of their Jewish heritage. Outsiders frequently commented on the segregation between these two groups. This pattern was repeated again with the Bene Israel Jews and the Baghdadi Jews on Bombay. The Bene Israel were first noted outside of India in the last 1700s. They had considered themselves one of the lost tribes of Israel but the history was and still is unclear. By the time they were discovered by the western world they were oil pressers who observed some unequivocally Judaic customs while many others had fallen away. Christian missionaries taught them English and Hebrew which, rather than converting them to Christianity, confirmed for them their Jewish heritage, enabled them to translate Hebrew prayers into Marathi, and connected them to all that they had lost. Learning the English language also enabled them to move to Bombay and establish a mostly prosperous community. In India they were considered Jews but in Israel they were considered Indians and they often had to fight for acknowledgement that they were Jews. This was further complicated by the fact that India was ruled by Britain, and because of the Bene Israel’s acculturation they often had a much harder time gaining British privilege than the Baghdadi Jews who immigrated to Bombay and identified themselves as British subjects with all the education and culture that entailed, while the Bene Israel were eventually compelled to shake off the Indian caste system and become more Hebrew. The Bene Israel were often treated as the poor relations and their education and worship was usually separate and unequal. I feel this is all unfortunate because the Bene Israel should have been celebrated for being able to maintain the broad strokes of their Judaism despite being cut off from world Jewry for many centuries. They still had Passover and the High Holy Days even if they were called something else, and even if Tashlich was observed by a higher percentage of people than in the rest of the world. It shows how the emphasis on home ritual can sustain the faith when lacking places to congregate, for whatever the reason. The Bene Israel left in India are now less than a tenth of the number now found inn Israel.
The Baghdadi Jews had an easier time in India, and although they left their mark on some major cities, particularly Bombay, their time was transitory. In the days of early British empire they were regarded as from the Middle East. After the Mutiny of 1857 they hewed closer to the British. After WWI they identified as European, and while absorbing Ashkenazi refugees before WWII they became more closely identified with Zionism. After Britain left India in 1947 and conferred national status to Israel in 1948, most Baghdadis left India, and most went to London or Israel, though many also landed in Singapore, South Africa, Australia, Canada and the U.S. There was heavy Baghdadi involvement in the opium trade but they eventually moved to textiles, real estate and manufacturing. They adopted English as their mother tongue and their schools gained European status which garnered them greater funding but more emphasis on an English education than Judaic. Their charitable trusts often excluded the Bene Israel explicitly in echoes of the Indian caste system and the British class system. This even carried through to the military which at the beginning of WWII categorized the Baghdadi as ‘Anglo-Indian’ Jews and the Bene Israel as ‘Indian Jews’.
In the end, just because few Jews finally decided to stay in India, and even though the different groups’ experiences were usually divergent, it does not mean that the Jewish experience in India was ultimately insignificant. These three stories are a testament to the industriousness of the Jewish people and the durability of the faith. This is also a part of Indian history as well, a land that could welcome outsiders in a way that is fairly unique to Jewish history.
April 28, 2015
There is certainly a good amount of material here, but much of it is just a synthesis of previous works on Indian Jews rather than original research. But because most of those books are hard to get or out of print, it is useful to have this text. That said, there are a number of problems I had with this book:
1. He has a huge problem with Indian context and his bibliography and footnotes reveal that he has explored very little of Indian history in general. Therefore, Katz says a number of things that are problematic such as:
a) He talks about the Baghdadi Jews' involvement in the opium trade, but treats it as a banal, harmless trade. He never mentions the colonial causes of this trade--that it was forced upon Indians and they were not allowed to grow crops for food, but were trapped in a devastating system that kept the majority of Indians destitute and hungry;
b) Katz, although he at one point does recognise the problem of saying the 1857 "Mutiny", never uses the term that Indians use, namely The First War of Independence.
I will say that these types of problems are consistent--in general Katz seems to either see colonialism as benign or nonexistent, including, of course, when Jews are colonising Palestinian land.
c) He thinks Bengali is a "vernacular" form of language and not a full-fledged language rooted in history, culture, and markedly different from other languages from Telugu to Malyalam to Gujarati.
d) Katz alludes to extraordinary figures like Subhas Chandra Bose and refers to this anti-colonial movement as if it were an anti-Semitic movement because Bose, like most trying to remove the shackles of European colonialism, appealed to his enemies' enemy, namely Japan and Germany during World War II. None of that context is revealed.
2. He also never address how and why Indian Jews became Zionists. He just talks about it as if it were a foregone conclusion, despite the fact that there has never been any anti-Semitism in India.
3. Makes errors about the Arab world, for example, he thinks that Syria did not exist before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
4. He uses the paintings in the Pardesi synagogue in Mattancherry as a historical narrative, which he follows and does not question. Thus, the Swadesi narrative is suppressed and he upholds the false notion that the Pardesi Jews were the original Jews in India.
5. He glosses over the racist context into which Indian Jews find themselves when they choose to migrate there.
Finally, his footnotes are rather disappointing for a scholarly monograph. It was a rather disappointing read.
1. He has a huge problem with Indian context and his bibliography and footnotes reveal that he has explored very little of Indian history in general. Therefore, Katz says a number of things that are problematic such as:
a) He talks about the Baghdadi Jews' involvement in the opium trade, but treats it as a banal, harmless trade. He never mentions the colonial causes of this trade--that it was forced upon Indians and they were not allowed to grow crops for food, but were trapped in a devastating system that kept the majority of Indians destitute and hungry;
b) Katz, although he at one point does recognise the problem of saying the 1857 "Mutiny", never uses the term that Indians use, namely The First War of Independence.
I will say that these types of problems are consistent--in general Katz seems to either see colonialism as benign or nonexistent, including, of course, when Jews are colonising Palestinian land.
c) He thinks Bengali is a "vernacular" form of language and not a full-fledged language rooted in history, culture, and markedly different from other languages from Telugu to Malyalam to Gujarati.
d) Katz alludes to extraordinary figures like Subhas Chandra Bose and refers to this anti-colonial movement as if it were an anti-Semitic movement because Bose, like most trying to remove the shackles of European colonialism, appealed to his enemies' enemy, namely Japan and Germany during World War II. None of that context is revealed.
2. He also never address how and why Indian Jews became Zionists. He just talks about it as if it were a foregone conclusion, despite the fact that there has never been any anti-Semitism in India.
3. Makes errors about the Arab world, for example, he thinks that Syria did not exist before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
4. He uses the paintings in the Pardesi synagogue in Mattancherry as a historical narrative, which he follows and does not question. Thus, the Swadesi narrative is suppressed and he upholds the false notion that the Pardesi Jews were the original Jews in India.
5. He glosses over the racist context into which Indian Jews find themselves when they choose to migrate there.
Finally, his footnotes are rather disappointing for a scholarly monograph. It was a rather disappointing read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews