In 1994, the State University of New York Press published Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism, an edited collection assembled by the scholar Hananya Goodman. The book’s title deliberately juxtaposes two sacred cities – Jerusalem, the holiest city in Judaism, and Benares (Varanasi), one of Hinduism’s most sacred sites on the banks of the Ganges – to frame its central project: bringing together scholars working on structural, historical, and theological comparisons between two of the world’s oldest continuously practiced religious traditions.
A Long and Sometimes Surprising History of Comparison
Goodman’s collection did not emerge from nowhere; it consolidated and extended a tradition of Hindu-Jewish comparative scholarship stretching back centuries. As Goodman himself has noted, Hinduism and Judaism played an important role in European intellectual debates from the Age of Enlightenment onward, feeding into discussions of idolatry, spirituality, theories of race, comparative language, and comparative mythology among Enlightenment-era scholars grappling with a newly deistic worldview. This early comparative tradition was not always sympathetic or well-informed, but it established Hinduism and Judaism as a recurring pairing within European comparative religion long before the more careful, historically grounded scholarship Goodman’s volume represents.
A separate and more specifically Jewish strand of comparison emerged in the following century, when Jewish scholars began directly comparing Kabbalah with Indian religious and philosophical traditions. The rabbi and editor Asriel Günzig published a Hebrew essay in 1900, often translated as “Kabbalah and Indian Philosophy,” in the journal Ha-Eshkol, drawing on translations of the Upanishads and on Arthur Schopenhauer’s well-known admiration for Vedic thought to argue for what he called a “wonderful resemblance” between Indian and Israelite religion – an early and striking example of a Jewish scholar taking Hindu philosophical comparison seriously on its own terms rather than merely as a curiosity.
Structural Parallels Between the Two Traditions
Goodman’s collection brought together contributors examining a range of structural and theological parallels between Judaism and Hinduism. Both religions, unlike traditions oriented toward active conversion and universal outreach, have generally been understood as ethnic or communal religions rooted in a specific lineage or people rather than religions seeking to convert outsiders on a mass scale, even though adherents of both are today found scattered across the world through migration and diaspora. Both traditions have also developed unusually elaborate and long-standing systems of ritual law, purity codes, and dietary restriction that function, among other things, to define and maintain communal boundaries – a structural similarity that has drawn comparative attention from scholars examining how religious law shapes communal identity across otherwise very different theological systems.
Other comparative work gathered under this broad heading has drawn more specific, sometimes provocative parallels: the New Religious Movement founder Rajneesh and the ISKCON writer Steve J. Rosen have both compared Brahmins and Jews as communities that understood themselves as divinely chosen, with Rosen noting that Brahmins constituted a “community of priests” in a manner comparable to Judaism’s own concept of a “Kingdom of Priests.” The biblical scholar David Flusser drew a more textually specific comparison, noting substantial parallels between the biblical account of Abraham and the story of the sage Yajnavalkya recounted in the Upanishads, going so far as to argue that “one can easily discover parallels in the Upanishads to the Abraham legend.”
Scripture as a Central Comparative Theme
Among the collection’s most enduring scholarly contributions is its engagement with how each tradition conceives of its central scripture. This theme would be developed further and in more sustained detail two years later in Barbara Holdrege’s 1996 monograph Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture, which built directly on the comparative groundwork Goodman’s edited volume had helped establish, arguing that both the Vedas and the Torah function within their respective traditions as multileveled cosmic realities rather than simply as written texts to be read and interpreted. Reading Goodman’s edited collection and Holdrege’s later monograph together traces how a single comparative insight – that scripture in these two traditions means something considerably more expansive than mere text – developed from an initial edited-volume contribution into a fully elaborated, book-length scholarly argument within just a few years.
Why This Comparative Tradition Matters for Indian Jewish Studies
Goodman’s volume, like Holdrege’s later monograph, occupies a distinct place within the broader literature on “Jews and India” – one focused on comparative theology and structural religious analysis rather than on the documented history of India’s actual resident Jewish communities. Yet the volume’s title, invoking Benares specifically rather than India more generally, is a reminder that this comparative tradition developed in explicit dialogue with the specific geography and religious culture of the Indian subcontinent, even when its primary interest lay in theological comparison rather than in the history of the Bene Israel, Cochin, or Baghdadi Jewish communities that actually lived within that geography.
Read alongside the historical and ethnographic literature on India’s Jewish communities, Goodman’s collection completes a fuller picture of what “Jews and India” has meant as a subject of inquiry across the twentieth century: not only the documented history of specific communities, but also a long and often unexpectedly rich tradition of theological and philosophical comparison between Judaism and the dominant religious tradition of the land those communities called home for so many centuries.
Linguistic and Anthropological Threads
Beyond theology and scripture, comparative Hindu-Jewish scholarship gathered under Goodman’s editorial project has also touched on linguistic and broadly anthropological comparison. The American biologist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, writing as early as the first half of the nineteenth century in his book The American Nations, discussed linguistic and traditional similarities between Hindu and Jewish culture, an idiosyncratic early contribution to what would become, over subsequent generations, a much more methodologically careful comparative literature. That such comparisons attracted attention even from scholars working entirely outside the fields of Jewish studies or Indology – Rafinesque was primarily a naturalist and polymath rather than a religious studies specialist – illustrates how widely the idea of meaningful Hindu-Jewish parallels had already spread through nineteenth-century intellectual culture, well before Goodman’s volume brought together a more focused and academically rigorous treatment of the same underlying comparative impulse.
Editing a Field Into Coherence
Part of what makes an edited collection like Goodman’s significant, beyond the individual quality of its component essays, is the editorial work of drawing together previously scattered strands of comparative scholarship – Enlightenment-era philosophical speculation, nineteenth-century Kabbalah-Vedanta comparison, structural analysis of ritual law and purity codes, textual comparison of specific scriptural narratives – into a single coherent volume organized around a shared comparative project. This kind of field-consolidating editorial work often matters as much for a young or scattered area of scholarship as any single contributor’s individual research does, since it creates a common reference point that later scholars, including Holdrege in her more focused monograph two years later, could build directly upon rather than having to rediscover and re-assemble the same scattered comparative literature from scratch.
The Limits of Comparison
Serious comparative scholarship of the kind Goodman’s volume represents has generally been careful to distinguish structural or thematic parallels from claims of direct historical influence or common origin. That Brahmins and Jews both developed self-conceptions as divinely chosen priestly or covenantal communities, for instance, does not imply that either tradition borrowed this idea from the other, any more than parallels between the Abraham narrative and the Yajnavalkya story in the Upanishads necessarily indicate historical contact or transmission between ancient Israelite and Vedic culture. Rather, such comparisons are valuable precisely because they illuminate how two entirely independent religious traditions, developing in different parts of the ancient world with no significant early contact, nonetheless arrived at structurally similar solutions to comparable religious and social problems – the maintenance of communal boundaries, the definition of a chosen or priestly class, the use of purity codes to organize social and religious life.
This methodological caution distinguishes serious comparative religious scholarship like Goodman’s volume from more impressionistic or speculative comparison, and it is part of why the collection has remained a standard reference point within Indo-Judaic and comparative religious studies in the decades since its publication, cited by later scholars precisely because its contributors generally took care to specify what kind of comparison – structural, historical, textual – each essay was actually making, rather than blurring these distinct forms of comparative claim together.
For readers of this collection whose primary interest is the documented history of India’s own Jewish communities, Goodman’s book is best read as adjacent scholarship exploring a related but distinct question – not what happened to the Bene Israel, Cochin, or Baghdadi Jews, but what centuries of careful comparison between Judaism and Hinduism can reveal about both traditions when set consciously side by side.