In December 1990, the novelist Anita Desai reviewed two new books on Indian Jewish history for The New York Review of Books under the title “Jews, Indians, and Imperialists.” One of those books, the historian Joan G. Roland’s Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era (Brandeis University Press / University Press of New England, 1989, 355 pp.), remains one of the most detailed academic accounts of how India’s Jewish communities defined themselves under British rule, and of how that colonial framework shaped divisions that outlasted the empire itself.
A Historian’s Question: What Made Someone a Jew in Bombay?
Roland’s book does not treat “Indian Jews” as a single group with a shared story. Instead, it asks how two very different communities living in the same city, the Bene Israel and the Baghdadi Jews, arrived at competing answers to the same question: what counted as authentic Jewish identity, and who got to decide? Both communities used the vocabulary and institutions of British colonial society, from census categories to social clubs to synagogue governance, to stake out their claims, which meant that the colonial state ended up shaping Jewish communal politics in Bombay almost as much as religious tradition did.
The Bene Israel: Sanskritization and the Search for Recognition
The Bene Israel, the older of the two communities, had lived in the villages of the Konkan coast for centuries before moving into Bombay in growing numbers from the eighteenth century onward, working as oil pressers, clerks, and soldiers in the British Indian Army. Roland traces how, once they encountered Baghdadi and other more recently arrived Jewish communities who questioned their religious legitimacy, many Bene Israel responded by adopting stricter normative Jewish practice and distancing themselves from customs perceived as too “Indian,” a process she and later scholars describe using the sociological term Sanskritization, borrowed from studies of caste mobility in Hindu society. At the same time, prominent Bene Israel also pushed for English education and government employment, seeking acceptance on Western colonial terms even as they defended their Jewish authenticity on religious ones.
The Baghdadi Jews: Trade, the Sassoons, and Alignment with the Raj
The Baghdadi Jews arrived later, mostly beginning in the eighteenth century, as merchants from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East. Families such as the Sassoons built vast trading and industrial fortunes in opium, textiles, and shipping, and used that wealth to fund synagogues, schools, and hospitals across Bombay and Calcutta. Roland shows how the Baghdadi community, despite Middle Eastern origins that might have aligned them culturally with India’s other minorities, instead worked hard to be classified as European for legal and social purposes under British rule, a status that came with real privileges in colonial Bombay. That choice put them at odds with the Bene Israel, whom many Baghdadi Jews refused to recognize as fully Jewish and treated with a social distance that Roland compares to caste segregation, even barring Bene Israel members from some Baghdadi-run synagogues and burial grounds for a period.
Two Communities, Divided by Caste-Like Lines
One of the more striking arguments in Jews in British India is that the friction between the Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jews was not a leftover import from the Middle East or Europe, but something that took its particular shape from India’s own social structures. Roland draws a direct comparison to caste hierarchy: light-skinned, more recently arrived Baghdadi Jews positioned themselves above the darker-skinned, longer-settled Bene Israel in a hierarchy that mirrored, without being identical to, the gora-kala (fair-dark) distinctions found elsewhere in Indian society. This was, in Roland’s account, a colonial-era invention rather than an ancient one: earlier Jewish travelers and the Bene Israel’s own oral tradition show no such rigid boundary before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Zionism and the End of the Colonial Bargain
The last sections of the book turn to the twentieth century, when the rise of Zionism and the approach of Indian independence forced both communities to reconsider identities they had built around British rule. Roland describes how the Bene Israel largely embraced both Indian nationalism and, later, emigration to Israel, seeing no contradiction between the two, while many Baghdadi Jews, whose social position had depended heavily on British patronage and a self-identification as European, found the end of empire far more disorienting and left India in much larger proportions after 1947 and 1948. By the time Roland was writing in the late 1980s, both communities had shrunk to a small fraction of their peak populations, a decline she frames as the final outcome of identity strategies that had made sense under colonial rule but did not survive its end.
A Second Edition and Lasting Influence
Roland revisited and expanded the book nearly a decade later as The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era (Transaction Publishers, 1998), updating the research with material on the postcolonial period and the communities’ experience of emigration to Israel. The original 1989 edition remains widely cited in later scholarship on Indian Jewish history, including more recent academic work on Baghdadi Jewish politics under empire, and Anita Desai’s 1990 review helped introduce the book, alongside Shirley Berry Isenberg’s Bene Israel sourcebook, to a broader literary readership beyond specialists in Jewish or South Asian studies.
Sources: Archives, Census Records, and Oral History
Part of what made Jews in British India a standard reference rather than just one book among many is Roland’s use of sources that had not previously been brought together in one place: British colonial census and government records, synagogue minute books and communal registers in Bombay and Calcutta, contemporary Jewish and Anglo-Indian newspapers, and interviews she conducted with elderly Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jewish community members in India and, after their emigration, in Israel. That combination let her track how each community’s own self-description changed across generations, rather than relying only on how outsiders classified them, which is part of why the book has held up as a primary reference for later historians rather than being superseded by newer surveys.
Influence on Later Scholarship
Roland’s arguments about Baghdadi Jewish self-identification as European, and about the caste-like distance the community kept from the Bene Israel, continue to shape more recent academic work. Historian Elizabeth E. Imber’s 2018 article in Jewish Social Studies, “Baghdadi Jews in British India and the Political Horizons of Empire and Nation,” builds directly on the groundwork Roland laid, extending the analysis into Baghdadi Jewish political engagement with both British imperial institutions and early Zionist organizations. That kind of ongoing citation, nearly three decades after the book’s first edition, is one of the clearer signs of how central Roland’s research became to the small but active field of Indian Jewish studies.
The Sassoons as a Case Study in Colonial Identity
Roland uses the Sassoon family, perhaps the most famous Baghdadi Jewish name in Indian history, as a running example of the strategy she describes. Having left Baghdad for Bombay, the family built one of the largest trading fortunes in colonial India, with interests spanning textiles, shipping, and other commodities, and channeled a significant share of that wealth into civic institutions bearing the family name, including docks, a library, and a hospital in Bombay, along with synagogues such as the Magen David and Kenesseth Eliyahoo. Roland reads this pattern of large-scale, highly visible philanthropy as more than generosity: it was also a way of publicly asserting the family’s, and by extension the Baghdadi community’s, standing as loyal, assimilated subjects of the British Empire, at the same time as they kept their Jewish religious and social institutions distinct from those of the Bene Israel.
Why This Book Still Matters
Nearly all subsequent writing on how the Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jewish communities related to one another in colonial Bombay engages with Roland’s research in some way, whether to build on her Sanskritization framework or to challenge it. For readers of this site interested in how identity, caste, and colonial politics intersected in Jewish Bombay, and in how those same dynamics echoed in the Baghdadi Jewish community of Kolkata, Jews in British India remains the starting point.
Book details: Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era by Joan G. Roland, Brandeis University Press / University Press of New England, 1989, 355 pages, ISBN 978-0-87451-457-5. Reviewed alongside Shirley Berry Isenberg’s India’s Bene Israel by Anita Desai in “Jews, Indians, and Imperialists,” The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990.