In 2008, KTAV Publishing House released Spiritual Journey Home: Eastern Mysticism and the Search for Jewish Identity, a memoir by Nathan Katz, the American scholar whose academic career made him one of the most prolific chroniclers of India’s Jewish communities. Unlike his earlier academic monographs, which examined Indian Jewry from the outside as a subject of scholarly inquiry, this book turned the lens on Katz’s own decades-long path from a young student of Buddhism and Asian religion toward a career defined by the study and documentation of Jewish identity in India.
From Camden, New Jersey, to the Study of Buddhism
Katz was raised in Camden, New Jersey, and earned his undergraduate degree from Temple University in 1970. Rather than proceeding directly into Jewish studies, his early career took a route through Buddhist studies and South Asian religion: he worked for two years with the U.S. Information Agency in Afghanistan, spent a year in India studying classical languages, and returned to Temple for graduate work in religion before serving as a Fulbright dissertation fellow in Sri Lanka and India between 1976 and 1978. He earned his doctorate in 1979 and joined the faculty in Buddhist Studies at Naropa University in Colorado, before moving to Williams College in Massachusetts as an assistant professor of religion.
This trajectory – years of immersion in Buddhist philosophy and South and Southeast Asian religious traditions before any sustained engagement with Jewish studies specifically – is the personal history that Spiritual Journey Home set out to explain. The book’s subtitle, invoking both “Eastern mysticism” and the search for Jewish identity, frames Katz’s career shift not as an abandonment of his early scholarly interests but as a gradual convergence: a scholar trained to take Asian religious traditions seriously on their own terms eventually turning that same rigor toward his own inherited but largely unexamined Jewish identity.
The Dalai Lama and the Jewish-Buddhist Dialogue
One of the more publicly visible episodes in Katz’s path toward Indo-Judaic studies was his selection as a delegate to the 1990 Tibetan-Jewish dialogue hosted by the Dalai Lama, an encounter later chronicled in the bestselling book The Jew in the Lotus. Katz reciprocated that hospitality in 1999, when the Dalai Lama made his first visit to Florida International University to receive an honorary doctorate, a relationship he continued through further visits in 2004 and 2010. This sustained personal connection to the Dalai Lama and to Buddhist-Jewish dialogue more broadly gives Spiritual Journey Home its most distinctive material: a firsthand account, from inside the dialogue itself, of how a scholar moved between two of the traditions he had studied throughout his career, using each to illuminate questions about identity, exile, and continuity that both Tibetan Buddhists and diaspora Jews have had to confront.
Arriving at India’s Jewish Communities
Katz’s scholarly path eventually led him to the subject for which he remains best known: the Jewish communities of India. His 1993 book The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India, co-written with Ellen S. Goldberg, was selected as a Nota Bene title by the Chronicle of Higher Education and remains one of the most frequently cited academic studies of the Cochin Jewish community. He followed this with Who Are the Jews of India? (University of California Press, 2000), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and went on to edit or author further volumes including Studies of Indian-Jewish Identity (1995), Indian Jews: An Annotated Bibliography, 1665-2005 (2013), and Jews: India – Selected Essays by Nathan Katz (2022).
In 2002, Katz convened an international seminar on Indo-Judaic studies at Oxford University, bringing together scholars from North America, India, Europe, and Israel, a gathering that produced the volume Indo-Judaic Studies in the 21st Century and was later the subject of an academic panel at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Across a long academic career at Florida International University – where he served as Distinguished Professor Emeritus, founding chair of the Department of Religious Studies, director of Jewish studies, and holder of the Bhagawan Mahavir Professorship in Jain Studies – Katz built one of the most interdisciplinary academic profiles of any scholar working on Indian Jewry, moving fluidly among Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain studies throughout his career.
A Career Recognized Across Traditions
Katz’s honors reflect the breadth of that interdisciplinary career: he received Florida International University’s President’s Award for Achievement and Excellence in 2001, FIU Faculty Senate awards for both research and service, recognition as “Scholar of the Year” from the University of South Florida in 1990, and India’s Vak Devi Saraswati Samman award in 2004. He was named a “Master Teacher” by the Florida Center for Teachers of the Florida Humanities Council an unprecedented thirteen times, and later served as an adjunct professor of Hinduism at the Hindu University of America, as academic dean of an Orthodox rabbinical college in Surfside, Florida, and at a yoga ashram in the Bahamas – a combination of appointments that would be unusual for almost any other scholar of Jewish studies, but which reflects precisely the multi-tradition path that Spiritual Journey Home set out to narrate.
Why the Memoir Matters Alongside the Scholarship
Katz’s academic monographs on Cochin and Indian Jewry established the factual and historical record that much subsequent scholarship on the subject has built upon. Spiritual Journey Home serves a different function: it explains why a scholar with Katz’s particular background in Buddhist and South Asian religious studies was drawn to Indian Jewry in the first place, and what it meant personally to spend a career studying a small, geographically remote Jewish community through the lens of comparative religion rather than conventional Jewish historiography. For readers who have encountered Katz’s academic work on the Bene Israel, Cochin, or Baghdadi Jewish communities, the memoir offers a rare view into the scholarly formation behind that body of work – one shaped as much by a young American’s years studying Buddhism in Sri Lanka and India as by any prior grounding in Jewish studies as conventionally defined.
Comparative Religion as Method
What distinguishes Katz’s approach to Indian Jewry from many other scholars in the field is that he arrived at the subject already trained as a comparative religionist rather than as a historian or anthropologist specializing in Jewish communities from the outset. His years of Buddhist studies at Naropa University, his Fulbright research in Sri Lanka and India, and his later appointments teaching Hinduism and Jain studies alongside Jewish studies meant that by the time he turned his full attention to the Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi communities, he brought analytical tools developed for understanding Buddhist and Hindu religious minorities under conditions of diaspora, syncretism, and shifting political status – tools not always present in more conventionally trained Jewish studies scholarship. Spiritual Journey Home makes the case, implicitly, that this unusual academic formation was not a detour from his eventual specialization in Indian Jewry but rather the necessary preparation for it, since understanding how a small religious community maintains identity while deeply embedded within a much larger, religiously different host society was precisely the methodological problem his Buddhist and Hindu studies training had already equipped him to address.
The Question of Insider and Outsider Perspective
Memoirs by academic scholars of religion often grapple with a tension between the outsider’s analytical distance and the insider’s lived experience of a tradition, and Katz’s book engages this tension directly with respect to his own Jewish identity. Having spent the first phase of his career studying Buddhism and Hinduism as, by his own account, largely an outsider looking in in the scholarly sense, Katz’s subsequent turn toward Jewish studies raised the reverse question: could a scholar whose formation had been so thoroughly shaped by Buddhist and Hindu studies still claim insider standing when it came to studying his own inherited religious tradition, particularly one as historically and geographically specific as the small, endangered Jewish communities of India? Spiritual Journey Home treats this question as central rather than incidental, using Katz’s own biography to explore how a scholar’s personal religious identity and professional academic specialization can develop along parallel but not always synchronized tracks across an entire career.
That tension is also reflected in the range of institutions Katz has served across his career – an Orthodox rabbinical college in Florida, a Hindu university, a Buddhist-oriented yoga ashram – suggesting a scholar who resisted being confined to a single religious or institutional identity even as his most influential published scholarship increasingly centered on one particular subject: the history and identity of India’s Jews. Read as a companion to that scholarship, Spiritual Journey Home offers something the academic monographs cannot: an explicit account, in the author’s own voice, of why that particular subject became the center of a career that could easily have developed in several other directions entirely.
For that reason, readers encountering Katz’s work for the first time may benefit from starting with this memoir before turning to the denser academic argument of The Last Jews of Cochin or Who Are the Jews of India?, since it supplies the personal context that makes clear why those later, more conventionally scholarly books took the particular shape and emphasis that they did.