Also in 1971, the same year her ethnographic study The Bene Israel of Bombay appeared through Schocken Books, the anthropologist Schifra Strizower published a second book, The Children of Israel, through the British publisher B. Blackwell. Where the Schocken volume focused narrowly on Bombay’s Bene Israel community, examining kinship, marriage, and social structure through fieldwork, this second, near-simultaneous book took up a related but distinct question that had, by the early 1970s, become urgent and unresolved for the Bene Israel specifically: whether they were, in the eyes of Jewish religious law and the Israeli state, fully and unambiguously Jewish.
A Title That States a Claim
The book’s title itself makes an argument. “The Children of Israel” is a phrase drawn directly from the Hebrew Bible’s own language for the people of Israel collectively, and using it as a title for a study of the Bene Israel implicitly asserts the very claim to full, unqualified Jewish belonging that had been publicly and painfully contested in Israel only a few years before the book’s publication. This was not an abstract theological dispute: it had directly affected the ability of Bene Israel immigrants in Israel to marry, to have their children recognized without question as Jewish, and to participate fully in Israeli religious and civil life on the same terms as other Jewish citizens.
The 1962 Rabbinate Controversy
The controversy Strizower’s book responded to had begun in 1962, when the Council of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel ruled that before registering a marriage between a Bene Israel applicant and a Jew from outside the community, the officiating rabbi should investigate the applicant’s lineage for evidence of non-Jewish descent, and require conversion or ritual immersion in cases of doubt. The ruling reflected a belief among some religious authorities that centuries of separation from the wider Jewish world, and the possibility of intermarriage during that long isolation, meant the Bene Israel’s Jewish status could not simply be assumed in the way it would be for a Jew from a more continuously connected community.
The Bene Israel community’s response was immediate and sustained. Between 1962 and 1964, Bene Israel Israelis organized protests against the ruling, framing it publicly as an act of racial and ethnic discrimination against a Jewish community whose religious devotion and communal cohesion, maintained across centuries of geographic isolation from other Jews, should if anything have counted in their favor rather than against them. This period of protest culminated in 1964, when the Israeli Rabbinate reversed its earlier position and ruled definitively that the Bene Israel were “full Jews in every respect” – a ruling that formally resolved the immediate legal controversy, even though the underlying questions of belonging, discrimination, and full social integration it had raised continued to shape Bene Israel life in Israel for decades afterward.
Writing in the Immediate Aftermath
Strizower’s Children of Israel, appearing just seven years after the Rabbinate’s 1964 reversal, was therefore written and published at a moment when the question of Bene Israel Jewish status had only just been formally settled but remained fresh in communal memory, both in Israel and among Bene Israel families still living in Bombay and the Konkan villages. This timing gives the book a different tone and purpose than the more purely descriptive ethnography of her companion volume: where The Bene Israel of Bombay set out primarily to document social structure and daily life, The Children of Israel engaged more directly with a live controversy over the community’s fundamental religious standing, one that had only recently moved from open dispute to official, if not universally accepted, resolution.
A Community Still Defining Its Place
Even after the 1964 ruling formally recognized the Bene Israel as full Jews, the community’s actual social integration within Israel remained a more gradual and uneven process. Later research, including the 2012 Report of the High Level Commission on the Indian Diaspora, found that Bene Israel immigrants concentrated substantially in cities such as Beersheba and Ramla, generally achieved only modest economic means, retained limited political influence within Israel, and became religiously integrated primarily within Israel’s Sephardic Jewish community rather than forming a fully separate institutional structure of their own. Some scholars, including the anthropologist Jon Abbink, have argued that despite this religious integration, the Bene Israel nonetheless remain a distinct ethnic minority within Israeli society even after multiple generations of residence – a more complicated legacy of belonging than either the community’s own “Children of Israel” self-designation or the Rabbinate’s 1964 ruling fully anticipated.
Read together, Strizower’s two 1971 books capture the Bene Israel at a genuinely pivotal historical moment: one volume documenting the social world the community had built over generations in Bombay and the Konkan villages, the other engaging directly with the community’s fight, only recently and incompletely won, for unambiguous recognition as full members of the Jewish people in their newly adopted homeland.
The 1952-1954 Repatriation Episode
The 1962 Rabbinate controversy was not the first instance of tension between Bene Israel immigrants and Israeli institutions. Between 1952 and 1954, following a wave of sit-down protests and hunger strikes, several hundred Bene Israel who had already immigrated to Israel were repatriated back to India at their own request by the Jewish Agency, reflecting difficulties in absorption, cultural adjustment, and possibly early forms of the same social friction that would erupt more visibly a decade later over the marriage-registration ruling. Notably, most of those repatriated in this earlier episode eventually chose to return to Israel in subsequent years, suggesting that their initial departure reflected specific, resolvable grievances about their treatment and circumstances rather than a fundamental rejection of emigration to Israel itself.
This earlier repatriation episode provides useful context for understanding why the 1962 Rabbinate ruling proved so explosive within the Bene Israel community specifically. A community that had already experienced one difficult chapter of immigration, adjustment, and partial reversal was, by the early 1960s, primed to interpret a new institutional challenge to its members’ basic religious status not as an isolated bureaucratic dispute but as confirmation of a broader pattern of marginalization within Israeli society – which is precisely why the protests that followed proved so sustained and ultimately successful in reversing the ruling.
Two Books, One Community, One Pivotal Year
That Strizower chose to address both the community’s internal social structure and its external struggle for religious recognition through two separate books published in the very same year suggests she recognized these as related but genuinely distinct projects, each requiring its own sustained treatment rather than being compressed into a single volume attempting to cover both simultaneously. The Bene Israel of Bombay could draw on direct ethnographic fieldwork – observation of kinship patterns, marriage practices, and social stratification – conducted over an extended period; The Children of Israel, by contrast, engaged more directly with a recent and still-unfolding political and religious controversy, requiring a different kind of research and argumentation focused on documenting and interpreting a specific chapter of communal history rather than describing an ongoing social structure through fieldwork observation.
Why the Distinction Between the Two Books Matters
For researchers and general readers encountering Strizower’s work today, recognizing that she authored two distinct 1971 books on the Bene Israel – rather than a single work under two different titles – matters for accurately citing and using her scholarship. The Bene Israel of Bombay remains the more frequently cited source for questions of social structure, kinship, and daily communal life in the pre-emigration Bombay and Konkan setting. The Children of Israel, by contrast, is the more relevant source for understanding the specific religious-status controversy of the early 1960s and the Bene Israel community’s own response to it, a chapter of Indo-Israeli Jewish history that receives comparatively less attention in general surveys of Indian Jewry than the community’s earlier, India-based history does.
That distinction also underscores a broader point about Bene Israel history worth keeping in view: the community’s story does not end with emigration to Israel, and the challenges of religious recognition, social integration, and identity that Strizower’s second book documents continued to shape Bene Israel life in Israel for decades after 1964, in ways that a purely India-focused history of the community, however thorough, could not fully capture on its own.
Nearly six decades after its publication, The Children of Israel remains a useful primary window into how the Bene Israel themselves, and the anthropologist documenting them, understood a moment of genuine crisis and eventual, if incomplete, resolution in the community’s long effort to have its Jewish identity recognized without qualification by the state and religious institutions of the country its ancestors’ faith had always pointed toward as a homeland.