In 1996, the State University of New York Press published Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture, a comparative study by the religious studies scholar Barbara A. Holdrege. Rather than examining the lived history of India’s own Jewish communities, Holdrege’s book takes on a more abstract and ambitious comparative project: analyzing how two of the world’s oldest religious traditions, Brahmanical Hinduism and Rabbinic Judaism, have each understood the nature and status of their central scriptures – the Vedas and the Torah – as something considerably more than written text.
Scripture as Cosmic Reality, Not Just Text
Holdrege’s central argument is that both the Vedic and Rabbinic traditions conceive of their scriptures as multileveled cosmic realities that encompass historical and transmundane dimensions simultaneously, rather than treating them merely as written records to be read and interpreted. In the Brahmanical tradition, the Veda is understood not simply as a body of texts but as an eternal, uncreated sound-reality underlying the cosmos itself, of which the written or recited texts are only one manifestation. Holdrege traces a comparable, though theologically distinct, conception within Rabbinic Judaism, where the Torah is likewise understood in some strands of tradition as pre-existing creation itself, serving as the blueprint or instrument through which God created the world, so that the physical scroll and its text represent only the accessible portion of a much larger cosmic and metaphysical reality.
This comparative approach allows Holdrege to argue that the specific sacred status, authority, and function assigned to scripture within each tradition are shaped by these underlying cosmological conceptions, and that understanding the Veda and the Torah as what she calls the “paradigmatic signs” of their respective traditions requires taking seriously the full cosmic and transmundane dimensions each tradition attributes to its central scripture, not simply analyzing scriptural content or interpretive history in isolation.
Part of a Longer History of Hindu-Jewish Comparison
Holdrege’s book belongs to a much longer, occasionally surprising history of scholarly comparison between Hinduism and Judaism. Such comparisons were already common during the Age of Enlightenment, when European scholars debated deistic worldviews partly through the lens of comparative religion, and Hinduism and Judaism both featured prominently in European discussions of idolatry, spirituality, race theory, and comparative mythology and language. In a different vein, Jewish scholars in subsequent centuries drew direct comparisons between Kabbalah and Indian philosophical traditions – the rabbi and editor Asriel Günzig, for instance, published a Hebrew essay in 1900 often translated as “Kabbalah and Indian Philosophy,” comparing Kabbalistic thought with ideas drawn from translations of the Upanishads.
This tradition of scholarly comparison continued into the late twentieth century with the 1994 publication of Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism, edited by Hananya Goodman, a collection that, like Holdrege’s slightly later monograph, treated Hindu-Jewish comparison as a legitimate and productive field of religious studies scholarship in its own right, distinct from the study of India’s actual resident Jewish communities.
A Different Kind of Indo-Judaic Scholarship
Holdrege’s work occupies a distinct place within the broader field of Indo-Judaic studies compared to the historical and ethnographic scholarship on India’s Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi Jewish communities covered elsewhere in this collection. Where Nathan Katz’s historical studies or Schifra Strizower’s ethnographic fieldwork examine documented Jewish communities that actually lived and worshipped in India, Holdrege’s comparative theology addresses a different question entirely: what happens when two ancient religious traditions – one indigenous to India, one historically centered in the Middle East and its diaspora – are analyzed side by side for what they reveal about how religious communities conceive of sacred text itself. The book’s subject matter connects to India geographically and thematically without being a study of Indian Jewry as a historical or social phenomenon.
This distinction matters for readers navigating the wider literature on “Jews and India” as a subject, since it spans at least three genuinely different kinds of scholarship: documented history of actual resident Jewish communities, literary-critical studies of how Jewishness functions as metaphor in South Asian literature, and comparative theological scholarship examining structural parallels between Hindu and Jewish religious thought, of which Holdrege’s book is a leading example. Each of these approaches asks different questions and draws on different kinds of evidence, and conflating them risks treating claims from one register – literary metaphor, say, or comparative scriptural theology – as though they were historical claims about India’s actual Jewish population.
Why Comparative Scriptural Theology Matters
For readers interested specifically in comparative religion rather than in the history of Indian Jewry as such, Holdrege’s work remains one of the most rigorous scholarly treatments of how the Veda and the Torah function analogously – and differently – as cosmic, not merely textual, realities within their respective traditions. Its influence extends well beyond Indo-Judaic studies narrowly defined, into the broader academic field of comparative scripture studies, which examines how different world religious traditions conceptualize the nature and authority of their central sacred texts. Read as part of the wider shelf of scholarship connecting India and Jewish thought, Veda and Torah demonstrates that “Indo-Judaic studies” as a field encompasses far more than the documented history of India’s resident Jewish communities alone – extending to comparative theology that asks what Judaism and Hinduism can illuminate about each other as living religious traditions, independent of whether Jews and Hindus ever shared the same physical geography.
Monotheism, Polytheism, and the Limits of Comparison
One of the persistent complications facing any comparative study of Hinduism and Judaism is the question of monotheism. Judaism’s strict monotheism is often assumed to sit uneasily alongside Hinduism’s vast pantheon of deities, yet scholars of comparative religion, including those working in the tradition Holdrege’s book belongs to, have long noted that certain strands of Hindu philosophical and scriptural tradition – particularly within Vedantic interpretations of the Vedas – articulate a monistic or even monotheistic conception of ultimate reality that bears meaningful comparison to Jewish monotheism, even as the two traditions’ devotional and ritual practices differ enormously. Holdrege’s comparative method navigates this complexity by focusing specifically on the structural role scripture plays within each tradition’s cosmology, rather than attempting a broader and more contestable comparison between Hindu and Jewish conceptions of divinity as such – a narrower, more carefully bounded comparative question that has made her specific argument about scripture-as-cosmic-reality more durable within the scholarly literature than more sweeping comparisons between the two religions’ theologies overall.
Reception Within Religious Studies
Veda and Torah has been widely cited within the academic study of comparative scripture and remains a standard reference for scholars examining how different religious traditions conceptualize sacred text beyond its literal, readable content. Its influence reflects a broader trend within late-twentieth-century religious studies toward taking seriously each tradition’s own internal categories and self-understanding, rather than imposing an external, often implicitly Christian or Western, framework onto the analysis of what scripture is and how it functions religiously. By insisting that both the Veda and the Torah be understood on their own culturally specific terms as cosmic realities rather than assimilated to a generic, cross-cultural definition of “scripture” borrowed from biblical studies, Holdrege’s work has been credited with helping shift comparative religious studies away from earlier, more Eurocentric models of scriptural analysis.
A Field Built on Multiple Kinds of Comparison
Holdrege’s book, together with Goodman’s edited volume and the longer history of Hindu-Jewish comparative scholarship stretching back to the Enlightenment, illustrates that comparative work between Hinduism and Judaism has taken multiple, only loosely connected forms across the centuries: eighteenth-century deist arguments about idolatry and primitive religion, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century comparisons between Kabbalah and Vedantic philosophy, and late-twentieth-century academic scholarship examining scripture, cosmology, and religious epistemology in a more systematic and methodologically self-conscious way. Holdrege’s contribution belongs clearly to this last, most rigorous phase of the tradition, distinguished from its predecessors by its careful attention to each tradition’s own technical vocabulary and internal theological categories rather than by broad, impressionistic comparison.
For readers of this collection whose primary interest lies in the documented history of India’s Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi Jewish communities, Holdrege’s book is best understood as adjacent scholarship rather than as part of that documentary record directly – a reminder that “Jews and India” as a subject encompasses not only a specific regional Jewish population’s history but also a much older and more abstract tradition of comparing Jewish and Hindu religious thought, one that has proceeded largely independently of, and occasionally in complete ignorance of, the actual Jewish communities that lived in India across the centuries these comparisons were being drawn.
That reminder is a useful one for this collection as a whole: not everything written about “Jews and India” concerns the Bene Israel, Cochin, or Baghdadi communities directly, and distinguishing between the documented history of those communities and the much broader comparative and literary traditions that also invoke Jewishness and India together helps prevent the two from being mistaken for one another.