The Jewish community in India dates back thousands of years. Here are five lesser-known facts concerning the role of Jews in India throughout history. Marco Polo’s Visit When Marco Polo visited India in 1293, he wrote of an unexpected encounter with Jews who had established a thriving settlement on the country’s southwestern coast in his…
Emigration has reduced the Jewish population in Kerala, India, to a measly 50 people since Israel’s formation in 1948, as it has in many other far-flung Jewish communities. Fernandes (Holy Warriors), a British-Indian journalist, describes today’s Keralite Jews while recounting her efforts to study their past. Keralite Jews are divided into two groups: “Black,” or…
While it is true that a large number of Indian Jews have left the subcontinent for Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom since 1947, the causes for this population loss are debatable. The writing produced by the Indian Jewish community, which includes fiction, theatre, poetry, and literature for young adults, tells…
This study examines novelist Esther David’s restorative fictional creations, The Book of Esther (2000) and The Book of Rachel (2001), through partial historical recovery (2006). David, a renowned writer from India’s Bene Israel Jewish community, utilizes fiction to redefine Indian Jews’ link to a past that is Jewish, Indian, and global, as well as ancient,…
Over the centuries, Indian Jews have lived in various parts of the Indian subcontinent without encountering the anti-Semitism that has been prevalent in many other parts of the world, particularly Christian Europe, which eventually exported its anti-Jewish sensibilities to the Muslim world, particularly in the context of European colonialism and post-colonialism in the Middle East,…
As American Jewish organizations try to figure out how to maintain Jewish “continuity,” it’s a good idea to go outside the box to see how other Jewish communities have done so successfully. Two models may be found in India: the scholarly Jewish community of Kochi (Cochin) and the pious Bene Israel. Both of these little…
MUMBAI — On my first morning in India, I found myself staring at an egg. That and a cup of coffee was all my hotel’s “free continental breakfast” amounted to, but I didn’t feel cheated. I felt vindicated. After all, I’d come to India because of an egg. I cracked the hard-boiled shell and peeled…
If, as I argued in Chapter 2, diasporic South Asian writers tend to associate Jewishness with the past and to transform Jewish characters into a haunting presence, their representations are inextricably linked with the narration and understanding of Indian Jews in other disciplines like journalism and history. In Edna Fernandes’s The Last Jews of Kerala…
The volume is meant to be a rebuttal to the 1950s dismissal of India’s newly independent country as incapable of producing original and important works of art that could stand with Western ones. It also demonstrates that India was and had been made up of people from other areas, particularly Jews, who coexisted with the…
The Jews of India are one of the least well-known and fascinating Diaspora populations. The religious lives of the Jewish community in Cochin, the Bene Israel from the remote Konkan coast near Bombay, and the Baghdadi Jews, who migrated to Indian port cities and flourished under the British Raj, are examined in depth in this…