Photo: Bene Israel ancient costume illustration. Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Food is one of the most powerful markers of cultural identity, and for India’s Jewish communities, the kitchen has been a site of both preservation and transformation for centuries. The question of what makes food “Jewish” in an Indian context, and what makes it “Indian” in a Jewish context, touches on deep questions about how identity works when two cultures live side by side for hundreds or thousands of years without either fully absorbing the other.
The Bene Israel of Maharashtra offer one of the most striking examples of this dual identity in food. Their cooking is immediately recognizable as Maharashtrian to any Indian cook: the masalas, the souring agents, the use of coconut and sesame, the fish curries of the Konkan coast. Yet it is equally recognizable as Jewish to anyone who understands kashrut: meat and dairy are kept strictly separate, certain animals are never eaten, the Shabbat meal follows Jewish ritual structure, and specific dishes are tied to the Jewish calendar rather than the Hindu one. The synchronization is not a compromise; it is a complete integration, something that feels neither half-Indian nor half-Jewish but entirely both.
The Cochin Jews of Kerala demonstrate a similar completeness. Their cooking is Kerala cooking in every identifiable technical sense: the use of coconut oil, fresh coconut milk, curry leaves, black pepper, and tamarind; the centrality of rice; the preference for fresh rather than dried spices. It is also Jewish cooking in every ritual sense: strictly kosher, structured around the Jewish calendar, with dishes specific to each holiday that have no Hindu equivalent. A Cochin Jewish family celebrating Sukkot in their booth of palm fronds in Kerala was doing something simultaneously completely Jewish and completely Kerala.
The question “what does food have to do with it?” when applied to Indian Jewish identity has a clear answer: everything. Food is how the communities transmitted their identity across generations when written records were scarce, when isolation from the broader Jewish world was total, and when the surrounding Hindu society might have absorbed them entirely. The persistence of kashrut among the Bene Israel even during the centuries when they had lost contact with the broader Jewish world and had forgotten much of their religious knowledge speaks to how deeply food observance was embedded in their sense of who they were.
Today, as India’s Jewish communities have largely emigrated to Israel and the diaspora, food continues to be one of the primary ways that people who grew up in or descended from these communities maintain their sense of Indian Jewish identity. Cooking a dish from a grandmother’s recipe, finding the right kokum in an Indian grocery store in Tel Aviv or Toronto, teaching a child how to make the specific coconut sweet associated with a particular holiday: these acts are the food-based equivalent of saying “we are still here, and we remember who we are.”
Source: A Jewish and India Sync: What’s Food Got to Do with It Anyway
Related Reading
- The Bene Israel of Maharashtra
- The Jews of Cochin
- Feature Articles on Indian Jewish History
- Interesting Facts About the Jews of India
- The Four Communities of Indian Jews: An Overview
A Living Culinary Heritage
Food has served as one of the most durable carriers of Indian Jewish identity across centuries of diaspora and migration. As communities moved from India to Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, they carried their recipes with them — adjusting for ingredient availability but preserving the essential character of dishes refined over generations.
In the Jewish communities of India, the act of cooking traditional dishes is understood as a form of cultural continuity. It connects the present generation to grandmothers who stood at similar stoves, worked with similar spices, and fed families who observed the same Shabbat and celebrated the same holidays. The kitchen becomes a space of memory and identity, where the full complexity of Indian Jewish experience can be tasted in a single dish.
Preserving the Recipe, Preserving the Culture
The documentation of Indian Jewish recipes has become an urgent priority as the communities that created them continue to shrink. In 1948, before the establishment of the State of Israel, there were an estimated 30,000 Jews living in India. Today, fewer than 5,000 remain, most of them elderly. The younger generations have largely emigrated to Israel, where they maintain some connection to their Indian heritage while integrating into Israeli society.
Cookbooks, food blogs, and community archives have played a crucial role in preserving these recipes. Works like “Bene Appetit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews” and various community-produced recipe collections represent efforts by Indian Jewish families to document their culinary traditions before they are lost. Food writers and ethnographers have also contributed by interviewing elderly community members and recording not just the recipes but the stories and memories surrounding them.
For the Indian Jewish diaspora, cooking these dishes is an act of cultural maintenance — a way of honoring ancestors and transmitting identity to children who may have grown up in Tel Aviv, New York, or London, far from Mumbai, Cochin, or Kolkata where their grandparents lived. The food becomes a bridge between generations and across geographies, carrying the taste of a world that is gradually disappearing but whose flavors refuse to be forgotten.