Mavis Hyman’s Jews of the Raj, published in London in 1995 and running to 258 pages, is a general history of Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community during the era of British colonial rule in India, a period during which this originally Arabic-speaking merchant community underwent a distinctive process of cultural anglicization even as it maintained its Jewish religious identity and communal institutions. Where Hyman’s better-known 1992 cookbook, Indian-Jewish Cooking, documented the community’s distinctive culinary tradition, Jews of the Raj takes up the broader social and institutional history of the same community during the specific historical period, roughly the mid-nineteenth century through Indian independence in 1947, when Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews lived under, and increasingly identified with, British colonial administration.
From Baghdad to British Loyalty
Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community traced its origins to merchant families from Baghdad and Aleppo who began settling in the city from the late eighteenth century onward, building trading networks that eventually stretched across Asia to Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. What distinguished this community’s experience under British rule, and what Hyman’s title directly signals, was the degree to which Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews flourished specifically under the British Empire during the nineteenth century, becoming increasingly English-speaking and British-oriented even as they maintained Judeo-Arabic religious and cultural practices at home and in the synagogue. This was a community that, unlike many other immigrant and minority populations under colonial rule, found genuine social and economic advancement through close identification with British institutions, education, and cultural norms, producing a distinctively Anglo-Jewish-Indian identity that set Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews apart from India’s other Jewish communities.
A Community Built on Trade and Kinship
The book traces how this originally Middle Eastern trading network, connecting Baghdadi Jewish merchant families across Asia through bonds of marriage and commerce, adapted itself to the specific opportunities and constraints of life within British India. Leading families such as the Sassoons, Ezras, Eliases, and Judahs built substantial commercial fortunes in Calcutta trading cotton, jute, spices, and opium, fortunes that in turn funded synagogues, schools, and charitable institutions serving the local community while also connecting Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews to sister communities across the Middle East and Asia. Hyman’s history situates this economic success within the broader context of the British colonial system that made such trans-Asian trading networks possible, examining how Baghdadi Jewish merchants navigated their position as a religious and ethnic minority operating within, and substantially benefiting from, British imperial commercial infrastructure.
An Identity Distinct from India’s Other Jewish Communities
By focusing specifically on the community’s relationship to British colonial rule, Jews of the Raj highlights a dimension of Baghdadi Jewish identity that distinguished this community sharply from India’s other historic Jewish populations. Unlike the Bene Israel, whose religious practice developed largely independent of European contact until the eighteenth century, or the Cochin Jews, whose community had been established in India for many centuries before European colonialism arrived, Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews arrived during the colonial period itself and built their communal identity substantially through and alongside British institutions, adopting English as a primary language, sending children to English-medium schools, and participating in the social and civic life of British colonial Calcutta in ways that gave the community a genuinely Anglo-Indian character distinct from India’s older Jewish populations.
Documenting a Community’s Rise and Departure
This close identification with British colonial administration also shaped the community’s trajectory once that administration ended. Indian independence in 1947, following closely on the heels of the Second World War’s disruption of the broader Baghdadi trading network across Asia, prompted the great majority of Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews to emigrate over the following decades, resettling primarily in Britain, Australia, Canada, Israel, and the United States rather than remaining in an independent India where the British colonial institutions and social structures they had built their communal identity around no longer existed in the same form. Hyman’s book, published nearly five decades after independence, captures this full arc: a community’s rise to commercial and social prominence specifically under British rule, and its subsequent, largely complete departure once that rule ended.
A Complementary Companion to Hyman’s Cookbook
Read alongside her earlier cookbook, Jews of the Raj completes a two-part documentary project through which Mavis Hyman, herself descended from Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community, worked to preserve both the social history and the culinary tradition of a community that had, by the time she wrote, substantially dispersed from the city where it had once flourished. Together, the two books offer a fuller picture than either could alone: one documenting the food that sustained communal identity in the kitchen, the other documenting the broader social, economic, and institutional history of a community whose distinctive character was shaped, more than for any other Indian Jewish population, by its specific and close relationship to British colonial rule.
Social Clubs and English Education
Central to the Anglicization process Hyman’s book documents was Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community’s embrace of English-medium education and British-style social institutions. Wealthy Baghdadi Jewish families sent their children to English schools rather than maintaining separate Judeo-Arabic educational institutions exclusively, and community members participated actively in the social clubs, civic organizations, and cultural life of British colonial Calcutta, developing fluency in English social codes and expectations alongside their maintained observance of Jewish religious law and custom. This dual identity, fully English in social and educational orientation while remaining fully Jewish in religious practice, produced a distinctive communal character that differed markedly from the more insular immigrant Jewish communities found elsewhere in the world during the same period, most of which maintained greater social separation from surrounding colonial or national elites.
Hyman’s account of this process situates Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jews within a broader pattern common among certain minority trading communities operating under European colonial rule elsewhere in Asia, wherein close identification with colonial administrative and cultural institutions offered a path to social and economic advancement that group members judged preferable to closer identification with either the colonized majority population or with more insular immigrant communal norms. This strategic and cultural anglicization, whatever its complexities and internal tensions, produced genuine benefits for many Calcutta Baghdadi Jewish families, who rose to considerable prominence in the city’s commercial and social life during the height of British rule.
The End of an Era
The dismantling of British colonial administration after 1947 removed the institutional and social framework within which Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community had built its distinctive identity over nearly a century and a half. Combined with the broader collapse of the trans-Asian Baghdadi trading network during and after the Second World War, as Japanese occupation disrupted sister communities in Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and the parallel establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 offering an alternative destination for Jewish emigration, these combined pressures led to the rapid and largely complete emigration of Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish population within a few decades of Indian independence. Hyman’s history, written from the vantage point of the mid-1990s, captures a community whose distinctive colonial-era identity had by then become almost entirely a matter of historical memory rather than lived experience within India itself.
For readers seeking to understand not just the food or the demographic statistics of Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community but the specific social and institutional history of how this originally Middle Eastern merchant population became, for a century and a half, a genuinely Anglo-Indian Jewish community shaped by close identification with British colonial rule, Hyman’s Jews of the Raj remains one of the more accessible and thorough general histories available, complementing the more focused academic and culinary literature that has continued to document this distinctive chapter of Indian Jewish history.
Hyman’s own family history, tracing back to Baghdadi merchants who settled in Calcutta roughly two centuries ago, gave her a personal stake in preserving both facets of this community’s legacy, ensuring that its distinctive social history under British rule, and not only its cuisine, would survive in documented form for a community now scattered across Britain, Australia, Israel, and beyond.