In 2002, the Delhi-based academic publisher Northern Book Centre issued Indo-Judaic Studies: Some Papers, a scholarly collection by Yohanan Ben-David. The book appeared at a pivotal moment for the young academic field it takes its name from: the same year, Nathan Katz convened an international seminar on Indo-Judaic studies at Oxford University, bringing together scholars from North America, India, Europe, and Israel in an effort to establish Indo-Judaic studies as a recognized field of comparative religious and historical inquiry in its own right, distinct from either Jewish studies or South Asian studies considered separately.
What “Indo-Judaic Studies” Means as a Field
Indo-Judaic studies, as it has developed since the 1990s and 2000s, examines the historical, religious, and cultural connections and parallels between Indian civilization and Jewish civilization, encompassing both the documented history of India’s own Jewish communities – the Bene Israel, Cochin Jews, and Baghdadi Jews – and broader comparative questions about how Hindu, Jain, and Jewish religious thought have influenced or paralleled one another across the centuries of contact between the two civilizations. This dual scope, spanning both a specific regional Jewish community’s history and much broader comparative religious inquiry, is part of what has made Indo-Judaic studies difficult to categorize within existing academic departments, since a single scholar’s work in the field might draw on historical demography, comparative theology, anthropology, and literary criticism within the same research program.
Ben-David’s 2002 collection of papers arrived as part of a wider push, occurring roughly simultaneously in India, Israel, and the United States, to consolidate this scattered scholarly activity into something resembling a coherent academic field. That same push produced the 2002 Oxford seminar organized by Katz, which itself led to the published volume Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First Century, co-authored by Katz along with Ranabir Chakravarti, Braj M. Sinha, and Shalva Weil – a book that, together with Ben-David’s collection, represents one of the clearest documentary markers of when Indo-Judaic studies began to coalesce as a self-consciously named subfield rather than a loose scattering of individual scholarly projects on Indian Jewish history.
A Collection of Papers Rather Than a Single Argument
As its subtitle indicates, Ben-David’s book is structured as a collection of papers rather than a single sustained monograph argument, a format common in the early stages of an emerging academic field, when contributors are often working somewhat independently on related questions before a field’s core questions and methods have been fully standardized. This format allows a volume like Ben-David’s to gather together research on quite different aspects of the Indo-Judaic relationship – potentially spanning the history of specific Indian Jewish communities, comparative religious philosophy, and broader questions about Jewish and Hindu or Jain thought – without requiring the kind of unified thesis that a single-author monograph would need to sustain across its full length.
Because collections of this kind are often published in relatively small print runs by specialist academic presses – Northern Book Centre, Ben-David’s publisher, focuses on precisely this kind of specialist South Asian and religious-studies scholarship – they can be more difficult for general readers to access than the more widely distributed academic monographs published by university presses in the United States or Britain. This distribution pattern is itself worth noting as part of the broader picture of Indo-Judaic studies as a field: much of its foundational scholarship, including Ben-David’s 2002 collection, was published through Indian academic presses aimed primarily at a scholarly readership within India and among specialists, rather than through the larger international university presses that have published better-known works such as Nathan Katz’s Who Are the Jews of India? or Joan Roland’s Jews in British India.
Placing Ben-David’s Work Within the Field’s Development
Read alongside the more widely cited Indo-Judaic studies scholarship – Katz’s monographs and edited volumes, Joan Roland’s colonial-era history, Shalva Weil’s heritage documentation – Ben-David’s collection represents the less internationally visible but still substantive body of scholarship on Indo-Judaic questions that was being produced and published within India itself around the turn of the twenty-first century. The existence of parallel, roughly contemporaneous publishing efforts – an India-based academic press issuing Ben-David’s papers in 2002, and an Oxford-convened international seminar producing a comparable volume around the same time – suggests that the consolidation of Indo-Judaic studies as a recognized field was happening from multiple directions simultaneously, with scholars in India, Israel, and North America each contributing to a body of work that would only later be recognized, in retrospect, as a coherent and connected field of study.
For researchers tracing the intellectual history of Indo-Judaic studies as an academic field, rather than the history of India’s Jewish communities themselves, Ben-David’s 2002 collection is a useful marker of how broadly and simultaneously the field’s foundational scholarship was being produced, even in venues and formats less likely to reach the general readership that later, more widely distributed books on Indian Jewish history would find.
Comparative Religion as a Recurring Theme
A significant strand within Indo-Judaic studies as a field, distinct from but related to the historical study of India’s actual Jewish communities, involves comparative work on Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Jewish religious philosophy – examining, for instance, parallel concepts of exile and homeland, comparative approaches to religious law and ritual purity, or the shared experience of maintaining minority religious identity within much larger civilizational contexts. Nathan Katz’s own academic appointments illustrate how thoroughly intertwined this comparative dimension became with the historical study of Indian Jewry specifically: Katz held the Bhagawan Mahavir Professorship in Jain Studies at Florida International University alongside his role as director of Jewish studies, and taught Hinduism at the Hindu University of America even while remaining the most prolific historian of the Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi Jewish communities. A collection of papers on Indo-Judaic studies published in the same period as Ben-David’s book would very plausibly engage with some version of this comparative religious dimension, alongside or instead of the more narrowly historical questions that dominate community-specific studies of Indian Jewry.
Why Field-Building Scholarship Matters
Books like Ben-David’s collection rarely become the widely read, general-audience introductions to a subject that a work like Katz’s Who Are the Jews of India? or Joan Roland’s Jews in British India eventually became. Their importance lies instead in a different function: establishing, through publication and academic circulation, that a coherent body of scholarly questions and methods exists around a given subject, which later scholars and general-audience writers can then draw on, synthesize, and popularize. Without a first generation of specialist, sometimes narrowly circulated scholarship like Ben-David’s papers, the field of Indo-Judaic studies would have had a much harder time establishing itself as a recognized academic subject with its own conferences, edited volumes, and eventually its own more accessible popular literature – the very body of more widely read books on Indian Jewish history and culture that this collection covers elsewhere.
The Kind of Evidence Indo-Judaic Scholarship Draws On
Much of the documentary evidence that Indo-Judaic scholars, including contributors to collections like Ben-David’s, have had to work with is unusually physical and artifact-based compared to other fields of Jewish historical study. The Cochin Jewish community’s copper-plate grant of privileges to the medieval merchant leader Joseph Rabban, traditionally dated to the early medieval period, remains one of the oldest surviving documentary records of Jewish settlement anywhere in South or Southeast Asia, and scholarship on Indo-Judaic history has repeatedly had to engage with exactly this kind of physical inscription, alongside synagogue architecture, ritual objects, and oral tradition, rather than relying primarily on the textual archives – responsa literature, communal correspondence, government records – more readily available to historians of Jewish communities in Europe or the Middle East. A field-building collection of scholarly papers published in the early 2000s, at a moment when Indo-Judaic studies was still establishing its core methods and evidentiary base, would have had good reason to engage with this same body of physical and artifactual evidence, given how central it has remained to nearly all subsequent scholarship on the subject.
Readers interested primarily in this artifactual and archaeological dimension of Indo-Judaic scholarship may find it useful to read a collection like Ben-David’s alongside more specialized studies of the Cochin copper plates and comparable physical records, since together they illustrate how much of the field’s early evidentiary foundation rested on exactly this kind of material evidence rather than on the documentary paper trail available to historians working in other Jewish diaspora contexts.
Even where individual papers within such a collection remain difficult for a general reader to track down or summarize in detail, their cumulative existence documents an important stage in how Indo-Judaic studies grew from scattered, community-specific historical writing into a field with recognized conferences, edited volumes, and a shared sense among its practitioners of belonging to a single, connected scholarly conversation.