Barbara C. Johnson’s “Our Community” in Two Worlds: The Cochin Paradesi Jews in India and Israel, published in 1985 through University Microfilms International as a doctoral dissertation, is one of the earliest sustained academic studies to follow Cochin’s Paradesi Jewish community across both halves of its modern history: its final generations in Kerala and its resettlement in Israel following mass emigration. Johnson, who would go on to a long scholarly engagement with Cochin Jewry, including her later collaboration with Ruby Daniel on the 1995 memoir Ruby of Cochin, produced in this earlier dissertation a detailed anthropological account specifically of the Paradesi community, the so-called “White Jews” of Cochin, rather than the numerically larger Malabari Jewish population with which the Paradesi Jews had coexisted, and at times contested status, for centuries.
A Community Defined by Later Arrival
The Paradesi Jews trace their presence in Kerala to Sephardic Jewish refugees who arrived in the region following the Alhambra Decree of 1492 and Portugal’s own expulsion of its Jewish population in 1496, arriving considerably later than the Malabari Jewish community, whose roots in the region are traditionally dated back many centuries earlier. The term “Paradesi” itself, meaning “foreign” in Malayalam and Tamil, marked this distinction from the outset, and the community came to be referred to, in terminology now generally recognized as pejorative, as the “White Jews” of Cochin, in contrast to the “Black Jews” designation applied to the longer-settled Malabari community. This distinction, rooted in relative lightness of skin tone among many Paradesi families descended from more recent European and Middle Eastern arrivals, structured centuries of separate synagogues, restricted intermarriage, and social hierarchy within Cochin’s small Jewish population.
Following a Community to Israel
What distinguishes Johnson’s dissertation from most earlier scholarship on Cochin Jewry is its explicit “two worlds” framework, tracing the Paradesi community not only through its final generations in Kerala but through its resettlement experience in Israel as well. This approach allowed Johnson to examine how a community’s internal identity and social structure, developed over centuries within a specific Indian social and religious context, persisted, transformed, or dissolved once transplanted into an entirely different Israeli social environment. Unlike the Malabari Jewish community, many of whom resettled in agricultural moshavim such as Nevatim in Israel’s Negev desert, the Paradesi Jews’ emigration followed different and more scattered patterns, with the community’s specific “White Jewish” identity carrying different social implications once removed from the particular Cochin context that had given that distinction its original meaning.
Johnson’s fieldwork, conducted across both India and Israel, gave her dissertation a comparative dimension that purely India-based or purely Israel-based studies of Cochin Jewry could not achieve. By examining the same community’s members across two radically different social contexts, colonial and post-colonial Kerala on one hand, and the Jewish state of Israel on the other, Johnson could trace with unusual precision which elements of Paradesi Jewish identity proved durable across this transition and which depended specifically on the particular social and religious environment of Kerala for their continued meaning and relevance.
A Foundational Work for Later Scholarship
Johnson’s 1985 dissertation preceded, and in various ways informed, her later collaborative work on Ruby Daniel’s 1995 memoir, as well as the broader body of scholarship on Cochin Jewry that developed through the 1990s and 2000s, including work by Nathan Katz and Ellen Goldberg. As one of the earlier sustained academic treatments to take the Paradesi community specifically, rather than Cochin Jewry as an undifferentiated whole, as its primary subject, and to follow that community across its full transition from India to Israel, Johnson’s dissertation occupies a foundational position within the more specialized literature on Cochin Jewish social structure and identity that later scholars have continued to build upon.
Why the Paradesi-Specific Focus Matters
Much of the popular literature on Cochin Jewry, understandably given the numerical predominance of the Malabari community, tends to treat Cochin Jewish history and identity in general terms without always distinguishing carefully between the specific experiences of the Paradesi and Malabari populations. Johnson’s dissertation corrects for this by taking the smaller, historically distinct Paradesi community as its specific subject, examining internal Paradesi communal organization, social hierarchy, and religious practice in a level of ethnographic detail that broader surveys of Cochin Jewry as a whole cannot always provide. For researchers and readers specifically interested in the “White Jewish” community’s particular history and its subsequent experience of emigration and resettlement, Johnson’s work remains one of the most detailed and methodologically serious treatments available, distinguished by its unusual double-sited fieldwork spanning both the Kerala community’s final Indian generations and its ongoing life in Israel.
Anthropological Method and a Small Community
Conducting doctoral fieldwork on a community as small as the Cochin Paradesi Jews, whose numbers even at their historical peak remained modest and had already begun shrinking substantially by the time Johnson undertook her research in the early 1980s, presented distinctive methodological challenges that shaped the dissertation’s approach. Rather than relying on large-scale survey methods appropriate to bigger population groups, Johnson’s work necessarily depended on the kind of close, sustained ethnographic engagement with individual families and community members that anthropological fieldwork traditionally emphasizes, spending extended time within the community in both its Kerala and Israeli settings to develop the detailed, textured understanding of communal identity and social organization that a dissertation of this kind requires.
This methodological approach, common to anthropological dissertations focused on small communities, gave Johnson’s work a level of intimate, detailed knowledge of individual Paradesi families and their specific circumstances that broader historical or demographic studies of Cochin Jewry, working from documentary sources or aggregate statistics, generally cannot replicate. The resulting dissertation functions simultaneously as a scholarly contribution to migration and identity studies and as a detailed ethnographic record of a specific, historically documented Jewish community at a particular and consequential moment in its history, as its Kerala presence continued to diminish and its Israeli resettlement became increasingly the community’s primary locus of ongoing communal life.
Placing Paradesi Identity in Broader Context
Johnson’s specific attention to the internal “White Jewish” versus “Black Jewish” distinction within Cochin Jewry also situates her dissertation within broader anthropological and historical conversations about how skin color and perceived racial distinction can structure social hierarchy even within communities united by shared religious identity and formal legal equality under Jewish law. The Paradesi community’s historic practices of separate synagogues and restricted intermarriage with the Malabari Jewish majority, despite both groups’ shared Jewish religious identity, offer a specific and well-documented case study relevant to broader scholarly interest in how communities construct and maintain internal social hierarchies along lines that have no basis in formal religious doctrine but that nonetheless proved durable across many generations of shared communal life in Kerala.
For contemporary readers and researchers, Johnson’s 1985 dissertation remains valuable precisely because it was completed while direct access to community members who had lived through the transition from India to Israel, and who could speak from firsthand experience about both settings, was still readily available, a documentary window that has narrowed considerably as the generation Johnson interviewed has continued to age and, in many cases, has since passed away, making her original fieldwork an increasingly irreplaceable primary source for understanding this specific and historically significant Cochin Jewish sub-community.
Johnson’s subsequent decades of continued engagement with Cochin Jewish history, culminating in her collaborative work with Ruby Daniel a decade later, suggest that her original dissertation fieldwork established relationships and community trust that she continued to draw upon throughout her scholarly career, making “Our Community” in Two Worlds not just an isolated academic project but the foundational research base for a body of scholarship on Cochin Paradesi Jewry that Johnson would continue to develop for many years afterward.