The title once attached to this post promised an American woman tracing her Jewish roots in India, yet the body of the article never named a single book, author, or documented family history — it was generic template text. There is, however, a real memoir that fits this description precisely: Sadia Shepard’s The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Lost Loves, and Forgotten Histories, published by The Penguin Press in 2008. It is the true story of an American filmmaker who travels to Mumbai to uncover the hidden Bene Israel Jewish ancestry of her own grandmother, and it remains one of the most widely reviewed personal narratives connecting an American life to India’s Jewish communities.
A Family Woven From Three Faiths
Sadia Quraeshi Shepard grew up in Boston in a household that braided together three religious traditions. Her father was a Muslim from Pakistan, her mother a Christian from Colorado, and her maternal grandmother — the woman who lived with the family and helped raise her — was born Rachel Jacobs, a member of the Bene Israel Jewish community of Bombay. Shepard knew her grandmother, whom she called “Nana,” as a woman who prayed facing Mecca and kept a rosary, having converted to Islam after marrying a Muslim civil servant in Pakistan. It was only as a young adult that Shepard learned the fuller story: that her grandmother had been raised Jewish in a tight-knit Bene Israel household in western India before that identity was folded into decades of migration, marriage, and reinvention across three countries.
Rachel Jacobs and the Bene Israel of Bombay
The memoir traces Rachel Jacobs’s early life within the Bene Israel community, a Jewish population that has lived on India’s Konkan coast for many centuries and that concentrated in Bombay from the eighteenth century onward as members moved from agricultural villages into the city for work, education, and trade. Shepard’s grandmother left India for Karachi after her marriage, and in doing so she became, in different times and places, a Jew in Hindu-majority India, an Indian Jew in newly created Muslim Pakistan, and later an immigrant grandmother in Christian America. The book’s title comes from a phrase used to describe her: throughout her life she was seen, in one community after another, as “the girl from foreign,” never quite a full insider anywhere she went. Shepard’s narrative uses this personal history as the frame for a much broader inquiry into what happened to the woman she left behind, and to the community she came from.
A Fulbright Year and a Documentary Companion
Shepard’s research was not conducted from a library alone. In 2001 she received a Fulbright fellowship to travel to India and spend an extended period living among Bene Israel families in Bombay, retracing her grandmother’s childhood neighborhoods, synagogues, and relatives. That fieldwork produced two parallel works: the prose memoir published in 2008, and a documentary film, In Search of the Bene Israel, which follows contemporary members of the community and Shepard’s own search for her grandmother’s history. The documentary premiered at Jewish film festivals in San Francisco and later screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center, giving the same research a visual counterpart to the written memoir.
The Bene Israel Community in the Book’s Background
Much of the memoir’s power comes from the historical material Shepard weaves around her grandmother’s individual story. The Bene Israel trace their own origin to a shipwreck on the Konkan coast near the villages of Navgaon and Alibag, an oral tradition holding that a small number of survivors settled among the local population, retained core Jewish practices such as Sabbath observance and dietary restrictions, but lost fluency in Hebrew and formal religious texts over the centuries that followed. Locally they became known by the occupational name “Shanivar Teli,” or “Saturday oil pressers,” because they abstained from work on Saturdays. Contact with Cochin Jewish and later Baghdadi Jewish communities, along with visiting scholars, gradually reconnected the Bene Israel with wider Jewish religious practice from roughly the eighteenth century onward. By the time Rachel Jacobs was growing up, Bene Israel families were established across Bombay, with synagogues, schools, and social institutions of their own before waves of emigration to Israel and the West sharply reduced the community’s numbers in India during the second half of the twentieth century.
Critical Reception
The memoir received attention from major review outlets on its release. The New York Times covered it in its dining pages in October 2008, focusing on the Bene Israel food traditions Shepard’s grandmother had passed down. The Christian Science Monitor reviewed the book’s account of a woman who lived as a religious and cultural outsider in three different countries. Regional papers, including the Times of India, covered Shepard’s research trip and the family history she uncovered in Mumbai. More recently, the memoir has drawn academic attention as well; a 2023 article in the journal Lwati examined the book as a tribute to a departed grandmother and as a case study in layered, cross-cultural identity.
Why These Jewish Roots in India Matter
Unlike many popular books that mention India and Jewish identity in passing, The Girl from Foreign is substantively about a specific Bene Israel family, a specific set of Bombay neighborhoods and synagogues, and the documented late-twentieth-century emigration that thinned the community Rachel Jacobs was born into. Shepard’s dual project — a memoir paired with a documentary filmed on location among Bene Israel families — makes the book one of the more thoroughly researched personal accounts of the community available to English-language readers, and a useful entry point for readers encountering Bene Israel history for the first time through a family story rather than an academic monograph.
Book Details
- Title: The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Lost Loves, and Forgotten Histories
- Author: Sadia Shepard
- Publisher: The Penguin Press
- Year: 2008
- Length: 384 pages
- ISBN: 978-1-59420-151-6
The Shipwreck Tradition Behind the Bene Israel
Bene Israel oral history holds that the community’s ancestors were shipwrecked off the Konkan coast near the villages of Navgaon and Alibag roughly two thousand years ago, with only seven couples said to have survived and settled among the local Maharashtrian population. For many centuries afterward, the community is described as having preserved a core set of Jewish practices — observing the Sabbath, following dietary restrictions, and reciting the Shema — while losing knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinic literature almost entirely. According to community tradition, it was a Cochin Jewish trader named David Rahabi who, arriving on the Konkan coast generations later, recognized the Bene Israel as fellow Jews through their retained Sabbath observance and began reintroducing formal religious instruction. Shepard’s memoir touches on this founding story as background to her grandmother’s own more recent history, situating one family’s twentieth-century migrations within a much older narrative of isolation and rediscovery that defines Bene Israel identity more broadly.
A Rare First-Person Account
Most English-language books about the Bene Israel are academic studies written by historians or sociologists describing the community from the outside. Shepard’s memoir is unusual in that it is written by a direct descendant, using her grandmother’s own documents, photographs, and recollections gathered from surviving relatives in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Israel, and Pakistan. Because Rachel Jacobs’s story spans three countries and three religious identities, the book has also been used outside of strictly Jewish studies contexts, cited in discussions of Partition-era migration and of blended religious households in South Asia. For readers of this site specifically interested in the Bene Israel, the value of the memoir lies less in new historical data about the community as a whole and more in the granular, documented detail of how one Bene Israel family’s Bombay life was disrupted, relocated, and partially concealed across the second half of the twentieth century.
Where to Find It
The Girl from Foreign was published in hardcover by The Penguin Press in 2008 and in paperback by Penguin Books the following year, and remains available through major booksellers and libraries under both the original subtitle and the later paperback subtitle. Shepard’s companion documentary, In Search of the Bene Israel, has screened at Jewish film festivals in New York and San Francisco and is occasionally available through Jewish film festival archives and university library catalogs for readers who want to see the Bombay locations and community members discussed in the book.
Further Reading
Readers who want a fuller synopsis and additional reviews of the memoir can consult the Jewish Book Council’s entry on The Girl from Foreign, and background on the community itself is available on the Wikipedia page for the Bene Israel. For another book that documents Bene Israel and wider Indian Jewish history in depth, see our review of Jews in India, the 1986 essay collection edited by Thomas A. Timberg.