The Absence of Jewish Studies in India: Creating a New Awareness

Presidency College building in Kolkata, now Presidency University, the only Indian university offering a course in Global Jewish History

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The absence of Jewish studies in India is a gap that one scholar has spent much of his career trying to close. In a widely cited 2010 essay published in Asian Jewish Life, historian Navras Jaat Aafreedi laid out, in personal and unflinching terms, just how little formal academic attention India’s universities pay to Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the Holocaust, despite India being home to Jewish communities that trace their roots back nearly two thousand years.

A Scholar’s Personal Reckoning

Aafreedi, then a young researcher working on Indian Jewish history, opens his essay with a small but telling anecdote from Colaba in Mumbai. Sent to browse the street book stalls for titles on Jews, he was met with blank looks, and on his return visit was handed a book about juice instead, a mix-up rooted in simple mishearing but symptomatic of something larger: most Indians, he found, knew almost nothing about the Jewish communities living among them. The irony was sharper because Mumbai is home to the largest population of India’s Jews, a community whose presence around the city stretches back for centuries, and a city with eight functioning synagogues that many locals still cannot identify as places of worship.

He recounts further encounters that underline the same point, including a university sociology department head who was unsure whether Jews were a Christian sect, and his own experience of having doctoral research on Indian Jews filed under West Asian Studies by confused hiring committees, since no one was quite sure which academic “box” the subject belonged in. He also describes a recurring suspicion faced by scholars who work on Jewish subjects in India, where interest in Jewish history has sometimes been misread in parts of the Urdu press as evidence of a hidden pro-Israel or intelligence agenda rather than as ordinary historical research.

Mapping the Academic Gap

The heart of Aafreedi’s argument is structural. Out of India’s vast network of universities, he found only a small number of institutions willing to engage with Jewish history as a subject of serious study, with Kolkata’s Presidency University standing out for offering a course touching on global Jewish history. Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, meanwhile, had established a chair for Hebrew studies that sat vacant for long stretches, a symbol, in Aafreedi’s telling, of good intentions without institutional follow-through. By contrast, he notes that Islamic studies programs are common across major Indian universities, making the near-total absence of equivalent Jewish studies programs harder to explain away as simple resource scarcity.

This is not a story about hostility. Indian Jewish communities, including the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the Jews of Cochin, and the Baghdadi Jewish communities of Mumbai and Kolkata, have historically lived without the antisemitism that shaped Jewish life elsewhere. Aafreedi’s concern is not persecution but erasure through neglect, a slow forgetting that leaves most Indians without the vocabulary or context to understand a community that has been part of the subcontinent’s story for two millennia. He is careful to note that this apathy toward Jewish topics coexisted with a genuinely warm, low-conflict relationship between ordinary Indian Jews and their neighbors, which made the academic silence all the more puzzling to him.

The Missing Chapter: Holocaust Education in India

Nowhere is this neglect more visible, Aafreedi argues, than in how Indian schools and universities handle the Holocaust. He points to the University of Lucknow, which taught European history without ever setting an examination question on the Holocaust, an omission that matters in an educational culture where students focus overwhelmingly on likely exam topics. He also recalls the Israeli government’s formal protest in 2002 over how thinly a standard Indian history textbook treated the Holocaust, folding the murder of six million Jews into a vague aside about wartime casualties rather than naming the event directly.

Part of the problem, as Aafreedi describes it, is linguistic as well as institutional: Hindi, India’s national language, has no established word for the Holocaust, forcing broadcasters and educators to reach for English terminology or leave the subject undiscussed altogether. He notes that even professionals producing Hindi-language documentaries about Jewish history were sometimes unfamiliar with the correct Hindi term for “Jews,” defaulting instead to the English word.

Ignorance, Denial, and a Troubling Popularity

The essay does not shy away from harder territory. Aafreedi describes being asked by one of his own students whether the Holocaust had actually happened, and points to a documented rise in the popularity of Adolf Hitler and Nazi imagery among some segments of Indian youth during the 2000s, including strong sales figures reported at the time for Indian editions of Hitler’s writings, with one major Indian publisher and distributor reporting tens of thousands of copies sold over the preceding decade. He cites press coverage of an unsuccessful attempt to open a Nazi-themed restaurant near Mumbai in 2006, and notes that a film dramatizing Hitler’s final days was in production in India around the time he was writing.

He is careful to frame this popularity as a product of ignorance rather than antisemitism as it is understood in a European context, tying it instead to the broader failure of Indian education to teach the Holocaust with any seriousness, and to political currents that discussed Nazi Germany’s treatment of minorities largely through the lens of India’s own domestic religious politics rather than as history in its own right. Scholars he cites in the essay, including historian Tilak Raj Sareen and anthropologist Yulia Egorova, make related arguments that India’s reaction to the Holocaust, both at the time and in later memory, was shaped more by domestic communal politics than by direct engagement with Jewish history itself.

Building Bridges: The Lucknow Holocaust Film Retrospective

Rather than stopping at diagnosis, Aafreedi used his essay to describe his own response. In the autumn of 2009, working through a youth outreach program based in Pune, he organized what he describes as South Asia’s first Holocaust film retrospective, a two-week series held at two universities in his hometown of Lucknow, a city with a long tradition of Muslim scholarship. Screenings were free and reportedly drew thousands of attendees over the course of the festival, with discussions afterward featuring Muslim academics and religious scholars speaking openly against Holocaust denial and antisemitism, alongside Jewish speakers from India, Israel, and the United States, including a human rights activist and a filmmaker who had documented Bene Israel life.

The choice of Lucknow was deliberate. Aafreedi describes the city as a place where anti-Israel sentiment was common and visible, making it precisely the kind of setting where Jewish-Muslim dialogue, in his view, was most needed and most likely to matter.

Reaching the Next Generation

Beyond the classroom and the lecture hall, Aafreedi describes turning to literature, music, and early social media to build interest in Jewish history among young Indians. He organized public readings of the work of Indian Jewish writers such as the poet Nissim Ezekiel and novelist Esther David, alongside Israeli, European, and American Jewish authors, coordinated a retrospective of an Israeli filmmaker’s documentaries, and hosted a concert of Jewish music in Lucknow in memory of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl. He also built early online communities on Facebook dedicated to Jewish studies and Holocaust education in South Asia, describing them, even with modest membership numbers at the time, as meaningful steps toward the awareness he believed India’s universities were failing to provide.

India’s Jewish population today numbers only in the low thousands, spread across three historically distinct communities: the Bene Israel of the Konkan coast and Mumbai, the Cochin Jews of Kerala, and the Baghdadi Jews who settled in port cities like Mumbai and Kolkata from the eighteenth century onward. Aafreedi’s essay treats this small, dwindling population as reason for more academic attention, not less, arguing that a community’s demographic decline makes documentation and formal study more urgent, not more dispensable.

Why the Essay Still Matters

More than a decade on, Aafreedi’s essay remains one of the most direct scholarly statements on why India, despite having hosted Jewish communities for centuries without the antisemitism that scarred Europe and much of the Middle East, has produced so little institutional scholarship on Jewish history. It is frequently cited in later academic work on Jewish life in India, including in the bibliography of Wikipedia’s overview of the history of the Jews in India, and it continues to frame conversations about how the stories of the Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi communities are taught, or too often, not taught, within India itself.

For readers of this site, the essay is a useful companion to more personal accounts of Indian Jewish identity, such as the story of Iraqi-Indian Jewish heritage explored in Elana Benjamin’s essay and cookbook on her family’s journey from Baghdad to Bombay to Bondi. Where Benjamin’s work reconstructs one family’s memory from the inside, Aafreedi’s essay asks why so few Indian institutions have done the work of preserving that memory at all, and what it would take for a formal field of Jewish studies to take root in Indian higher education.

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