The Canadian National Newspaper - The progressive voice of Canada: Who Are the Jews of India?

Not many know that the Jewish diaspora reached India two thousand years ago. Although the size of the three Jewish diasporas in India was always small, they merit study because their history of sustained harmony sharply contrasts the Jewish diasporas in Europe, a history of periodic horrors.

Nathan Katz, professor and chair of Religious Studies at Florida International University, has written the first comprehensive scholarly study of all three of the Jewish communities in India. It's fitting that the University of California Press is the publisher, for it was a UC Berkeley professor of history, Walter J. Fischel, who pioneered the study of the Jews in India in his 1962 article, "Cochin in Jewish History: Prolegomena to a History of the Jews in India," published in The Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Inspired by his article, several monographs soon appeared on each of the three Indian Jewish communities. And more recently, Indian Jews have appeared as principal characters in fiction such as Sally Solomon's Hooghly Tales: Stories of Growing Up in Calcutta under the Raj, Gay Courter's Flowers in the Blood, Esther David's The Walled City, and Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay

In the introduction to this truly engrossing book, Katz writes: "Indian Jews lived as all Jews should have been allowed to live: free, proud, observant, creative and prosperous, self-realized, full contributors to the host community." However, running alongside this theme of acceptance and toleration is another one, of discrimination within the Jewish communities themselves.

The three Indian Jewish communities have a distinct history: the Cochin Jews arrived as early as the first century; the Bene Israel Jews of greater Bombay arrived, they claim, 1600 years ago; and the Baghdadi Jews of the port cities of Bombay and Calcutta arrived in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The largest section of the book is on the Cochin Jews. The connection between the port of Cochin and the Jews goes back to the time of King Solomon (992952 B. C.) when teak, ivory, spice, and peacocks were exported to Palestine. The Cochin Jews claim their ancestors arrived in Shingly, near Cochin, on the southwest coast of India in 72 A. D., fleeing the destruction of the second temple by the Romans. They were allowed to settle in Cochin by the local maharaja, where many of them prospered as merchants, government officials and soldiers. Katz quotes from Mandelbaum's article in the Jewish Journal of Sociology: As late as 1550 "the Raja of Cochin refused to fight a battle on Saturday because on that day his Jewish soldiers would not fight; and they were the best warriors he had raised." Katz comments: "Probably India is the only country on earth so civilized that in war, out of deference to its esteemed Jewish soldiers, no battles were fought on the Sabbath."

Katz also notes that the Cochin Jews soon came to establish separate synagogues for white and brown Jews: "Fair-skinned European converts were sometimes accepted as white Jews despite the obvious fact that they could not have Jewish lineage. Similarly, some dark-skinned Yemeni Jews who had proper lineage were considered blacks and were not accepted into the white synagogue."

The Bene Israeli community, which numbered 50,000 before emigration to Israel, claims it originated some sixteen or eighteen hundred years ago. They claim that their ancestors were fleeing persecution and happened to get shipwrecked on Indian shores.

Like the Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel were very conscious of skin colour. They divided themselves into sub-castes: Gora, or White, and Kala, or Black. "The Goras were believed to be descendants of the seven original shipwrecked couples, while the Kalas were stigmatized as descendants of concubinage between a Gora Bene Israel and a gentile woman, usually low caste. They could attend the same synagogue, but as an example of discrimination, Kala could not be offered wine for kiddush until all Gora had drunk theirs."

The Baghdadi Jews arrived in India around 1750 A. D. from the Middle Eastern countries and spoke Arabic and Persian as their first language. They did not treat the Bene Israel community as their equals. After establishing themselves in India, they attempted to win acceptance as Europeans by the British in India, attempts the British contemptuously rebuffed. As a result, they found themselves sharing Calcutta's "greytown" with Armenians, Anglo-Indians, Greeks, Portuguese, and others whose skin color did not allow them entry into the European "whitetown" area. In Bombay, the Baghdadi Jews went further. Not only did they identify with British culture, they completely rejected Indian culture, particularly those aspects that had been embraced by the Bene Israel.

Katz ascribes the acculturation of the Hindu caste system by the Jews in India to the low esteem with which the white Cochin Jews and the Baghdadi Jews held the Bene Israel. While it cannot be denied that the invidious caste-system might have also influenced the Jews in India, I would argue that this discriminatory behaviour reflects pervasive ethnocentric prejudice among many communities in the world. A relevant example is the historic prejudice of the German Jews toward Polish and Russian Jews.

On the harmonious history of the Jewish diaspora in India, Katz notes that the Indian Jews were able to acculturate without any pressure to assimilate. A distinctive feature of Indian civilization is its ready acceptance of differences among its constituent cultural groups. "Such is the experience not only of India's Jews, but also of local Christians, Zoroastrians, and recently, Tibetan Buddhists. This striking feature of Indian civilization is reflected by each of these immigrant groups."

Although Katz is right in ascribing Hinduism's acceptance, even encouragement, of differences, I would point out that the Hindus extend hospitality to the outside groups to the extent that the outsiders refrain from proselytizing Hindus. For example, the Islamic injunction to proselytize all infidels and to slay those who refuse (Koran, 9.5) is the major cause of conflict between the Muslims and the Hindus for more than a thousand years. The Christian missionaries are vigorously opposed by most Hindus, including M. K. Gandhi, who said, "If I had the power and could legislate, I should stop all proselytising . . . . It is the deadliest poison that ever sapped the fountain of truth." Unlike the Muslims and the Christians, the Jews in India never engaged in proselytizing activities. In my opinion, the greatest of the Jewish strategies of adapting to India lay in what the Jews did not do!

The tolerant attitude of Hindus to Jews, and vice versa, is brought out in several of the interviews that Katz conducted in India and in Israel. In Calcutta, Norman Nahoum, one of the small number of Baghdadi Jews who remain in India, tells him: "We are taught to abhor idolatry to prevent its assimilation into Abraham's family of religions, but if you look closely you will see that Judaism and Hinduism have so much in common. In India, we are accepted totally, at the same time we are treated with kid gloves, like special guests." Referring to Hindus, Nahoum says, "These people are civilized; the others are barbarians, bent on proselytization. If you ask any Jew who has lived in India, from Cochin to Calcutta , you will find that although the Hindus are called idolaters, they are more accepting of Jews than those so-called new religions that grew out of Judaism." In Cochin, interviewees tell Katz a similar story: "Anti-Semitism doesn't exist in our Indian dictionary."

Since the creation of the state of Israel, India's Jewish communities declined dramatically. Kata points out that "when conditions permitted they returned en masse to Israel, which they had always proclaimed to be their true home despite India's hospitality." The exodus happened not only for spiritual reasons but also because the Indian Jews sought better economic opportunities. Ironically some of the returning Jews met with more discrimination in Israel than they had known in India. The dark-skinned Bene Israel, for example, encountered considerable racial prejudice. Katz writes, "As recently as 1997, an Ashkenazic (European) rabbi in Petah Tiqveh refused to register a marriage between a Bene Israel sabra (native Israeli) and her Ashkenazic groom. The matter caused a brief controversy, but worldwide rabbinic opinion was virtually universal in support of the young woman. The hard-line rabbi was suitably castigated and the marriage was celebrated . . . . For generations, the Bene Israel were Jews in India. Now they are Indians in Israel."

Katz has written a heart-warming, scholarly book on the Jewish diaspora in India. It is a fascinating historical episode that is fast drawing to a close because of the emigration of Indian Jews to Israel. Today, the synagogues in India have stopped holding regular services because they often fail to gather a quorum of ten male Jews. Perhaps a more appropriate title of the book would be: Who Were the Jews of India?