The title once attached to this post — “Growing Up an Iraqi-Indian Jew in Australia” — is, in fact, the exact title of a real personal essay by writer Elana Benjamin, published in SBS Voices in July 2020. Benjamin’s family history traces directly back to India’s Baghdadi Jewish community, and her essay led to a full book documenting that community’s food and family history: first as a self-researched project and later as the published cookbook Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi.
A Family From Bombay, By Way of Baghdad
In her SBS essay, Benjamin explains that both of her parents were born and raised in Bombay (now Mumbai), and that their families had come to India from Iraq generations earlier, part of the Baghdadi Jewish migration that settled in Indian port cities from the eighteenth century onward. Her parents immigrated to Australia in the 1960s and found their place within Sydney’s small Sephardi Jewish community, alongside other families originally from India, Iraq, and Egypt.
Growing Up Between Two Jewish Worlds
Benjamin’s essay describes attending Jewish schools that taught the customs, prayer melodies, and history of the Ashkenazi Jewish majority, while her own family kept different practices at home, including Iraqi-style Rosh Hashanah foods such as cardamom-infused apple jam in place of the more familiar apple-and-honey custom. She writes candidly about spending years quietly moving between these two worlds without drawing attention to her family’s distinct Sephardi, Iraqi-Indian background, only later realizing in university how little she actually knew about her own community’s specific history, including events such as the 1941 Farhud attacks on Baghdad’s Jewish community.
Ten Years of Research Become a Book
That gap in her own knowledge led Benjamin to spend roughly a decade researching her family’s history and the broader story of Iraqi Jews who settled in India before eventually emigrating again to Australia. That research first took shape as a manuscript titled My Mother’s Spice Cupboard: A Journey from Baghdad to Bombay to Bondi, and later became the published cookbook Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi, released by the Sydney Jewish Museum in 2024.
What the Book Documents
Indian-Jewish Food captures the same Calcutta-and-Bombay Baghdadi Jewish culinary tradition documented by earlier writers such as Mavis Hyman, but told specifically through Benjamin’s own family recipes and stories after their move to Sydney’s Bondi area. The book includes home-style dishes such as chittarnee, a tomato-based chicken curry, chatpatay, a tamarind-spiced chickpea and potato dish, and cheese samoosas, presenting them alongside family history and photographs. The book has been covered by The Guardian and The Indian Sun, and was named a finalist in the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Why This Story Matters Beyond Australia
Benjamin’s essay and book are part of a broader pattern in which the descendants of India’s Baghdadi Jewish community, now scattered across Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere, have taken up the work of documenting a culture that no longer has a large living population in India itself. Her account is also a useful reminder that “Indian Jewish” identity does not end at India’s borders; it continues, and is actively being recorded, within diaspora communities such as Sydney’s Sephardi Jewish community decades after the original emigration took place.
Book Details
- Title: Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi
- Author: Elana Benjamin
- Publisher: Sydney Jewish Museum
- Year: 2024
- ISBN: 978-0-6459770-1-1
Further Reading
Read Elana Benjamin’s original essay on SBS Voices. For another book documenting this same culinary tradition, see our coverage of Mavis Hyman’s Indian-Jewish Cooking.
The Sassoon Family Legacy Behind Her Community
The Baghdadi Jewish community that Benjamin’s grandparents and parents belonged to in Bombay was shaped in large part by prominent merchant families such as the Sassoons, who built synagogues, schools, libraries, and docks across the city from the nineteenth century onward. Institutions such as the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room in Mumbai’s Fort district stand today as physical reminders of that community’s civic presence in the city, even though the Baghdadi Jewish population itself has almost entirely emigrated in the decades since Indian independence.
An Academic Record of a Personal Story
Benjamin’s essay has itself become a citable historical source: a 2024 academic paper on Australian Jewish communities by researchers including Suzanne Rutland cites “Growing Up an Iraqi-Indian Jew in Australia” directly, reflecting how personal essays about diaspora identity are increasingly used by scholars alongside more traditional archival sources when studying smaller, less-documented Jewish communities such as Australia’s Iraqi-Indian Sephardi population.
Two Generations, Two Kinds of Documentation
Read alongside Mavis Hyman’s 1992 cookbook documenting the same Calcutta Baghdadi Jewish food tradition, Benjamin’s more recent essay and book show how documentation of this cuisine and community has continued across generations and continents. Where Hyman wrote from within a Calcutta community still directly connected to India, Benjamin writes as a second-generation Australian immigrant piecing her family’s story back together decades after her parents left Bombay, making her book as much a record of diaspora memory and identity as it is a cookbook.
A Wider Pattern of Rediscovery
Benjamin’s account of not learning her own community’s history until university reflects a pattern described by other writers with Indian Jewish backgrounds living in Western countries, including Sadia Shepard’s memoir about her Bene Israel grandmother and Nathan Katz’s academic work on Indian Jewish identity more broadly. In each case, a period of research, sometimes taking years, was required to recover family and community history that had not been passed down in complete form, suggesting how much of Indian Jewish history outside India itself depends on individual descendants choosing to document it before that knowledge is lost.