This is the community’s story angle on Growing Up Jewish in India – among the five essays and chapters commissioned for Growing Up Jewish in India, the 2021 anthology edited by art historian Ori Z. Soltes and published by Niyogi Books, one theme runs deeper than any other: the long, often precarious journey Indian Jewish communities took simply to remain Indian Jewish communities. This article looks at the book through that lens – not as a nostalgic family memoir collection, but as a record of migration, displacement, and quiet endurance stretching back more than a thousand years.
A Community Built on Repeated Displacement
The story most often told about India’s Jews is one of unusual welcome: a subcontinent where, unlike almost anywhere else in the Jewish diaspora, no state-sponsored pogrom or expulsion of Jews as Jews ever took place. That reputation is accurate, but it obscures a harder truth that Growing Up Jewish in India does not shy away from – India’s Jewish communities were repeatedly uprooted by other forces: rival traders, colonial powers, and, in the twentieth century, the pull of a new Jewish state that emptied synagogue after synagogue.
The Cochin Jews of Kerala, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, trace their presence in India to the ancient port of Muziris (Cranganore), where a Jewish settlement is believed to have existed since at least the early centuries CE, reinforced by later migrations following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. For over a thousand years the Cranganore Jews prospered under royal protection and grants such as the famous copper plates said to have been issued to the Jewish leader Joseph Rabban.
The Fall of Cranganore and the Flight South
That prosperity ended abruptly. In 1524, Muslim traders backed by the ruler of Calicut attacked the wealthy Jewish merchants of Cranganore, who dominated the lucrative pepper trade along the Malabar coast. The Jews fled south to the Kingdom of Cochin, where the Hindu Raja granted them asylum, exempted them from taxation, and extended to them the same privileges enjoyed by other tax-paying subjects. Within four years of arriving as refugees, the community had rebuilt itself enough to construct its first synagogue in its new home. It is this act – rebuilding, again and again, after being pushed off the map – that several contributors to Soltes’s anthology describe as the true inheritance passed down through generations of Cochin Jewish families.
The Portuguese, who established a trading post at Cochin in 1500 and dominated the region until 1663, brought a different kind of pressure. While the Portuguese Empire conducted business with the Jewish community, colonial administrators openly discriminated against Jews in Cochin in ways that echoed the Iberian persecutions many Paradesi Jewish families had fled a generation earlier following the 1492 Alhambra Decree that expelled Jews from Spain. Sephardi refugee families who reached Cochin by the sixteenth century became known as the Paradesi, or “foreign,” Jews, forming a second community alongside the long-established Malabar Jews, each maintaining distinct synagogues, customs, and even the Judeo-Malayalam and Ladino languages within a shared, tightly-knit Jewish quarter.
Synagogues as Anchors Against Erasure
One of the quieter arguments running through Growing Up Jewish in India is that the synagogue itself became the community’s primary tool for survival – a portable institution that could be rebuilt wherever a Jewish community landed next. The Kadavumbagam Synagogue in Ernakulam, believed to have been founded around 1200 and rebuilt in the 1790s, is one such anchor. Its congregation, whose members believed they were the rightful custodians of the historic copper plates granted to Joseph Rabban, numbered as many as 2,000 people in the 1930s and 1940s. Within a generation, nearly all of them had emigrated to the newly founded State of Israel, leaving the synagogue building behind as one of the last physical markers of a community that had otherwise dispersed entirely.
A similar pattern played out at the Thekkumbhagam Synagogue in Ernakulam, rebuilt in 1939, and at the Parur Synagogue, built in 1615 on a site tradition holds had housed a synagogue since 1165. By 1998, only five families connected to the Ernakulam congregation still lived in Kerala or Madras. The book’s contributors, several of them descendants of these congregations now living in Israel, the United States, or the United Kingdom, describe returning to Kerala to find synagogue buildings standing largely empty – maintained more as heritage sites than as functioning houses of worship, yet still carrying enormous emotional weight for the families who once filled them.
The Twentieth-Century Exodus
If earlier centuries saw Indian Jewish communities pushed and displaced by outside forces, the mid-twentieth century saw something different: a voluntary, near-total emigration driven by the pull of a Jewish homeland after 1948, combined with economic uncertainty following India’s independence and partition in 1947. The Bene Israel community of Maharashtra, the Baghdadi Jewish communities of Mumbai and Kolkata, and the Cochin Jews of Kerala all experienced the same demographic reality: communities that had numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands shrank, within two or three decades, to a few dozen families or fewer.
Contributors to Growing Up Jewish in India who grew up during this period describe childhoods spent watching relatives, neighbors, and eventually entire congregations depart for Israel, even as their own families chose, for a time, to stay. That tension – between a homeland that had never persecuted them and a new Jewish state actively calling them home – is one of the most emotionally complex threads in the book, and it is precisely the kind of lived, first-person testimony that distinguishes this anthology from a conventional academic history.
Why the Persecution Theme Matters
It would be a mistake to read Growing Up Jewish in India as a catalogue of suffering; the book is, on balance, a celebration of an unusually tolerant relationship between India’s Jewish communities and their neighbors of other faiths. But the essays collected by Soltes make clear that tolerance in the broad sense did not mean an absence of hardship. Cranganore’s Jews were driven from their homes by armed attackers. Cochin’s Jews lived for over a century under a colonial power that discriminated against them even while trading with them. And in the twentieth century, nearly every synagogue described in the book emptied out as congregants sought a more secure Jewish future elsewhere.
Reading these chapters alongside the standard histories of Cochin Jews, Bene Israel, and Baghdadi Jewish life in India adds a dimension often missing from shorter popular accounts: a sense of how much active work – rebuilding synagogues, securing royal charters, preserving Judeo-Malayalam liturgy – it took to keep these communities intact across a millennium of upheaval, long before the final wave of emigration to Israel began.
Two More Origin Stories of Flight
Growing Up Jewish in India is not only about the Cochin Jews. Soltes structured the anthology around India’s three main Jewish communities – the Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel, and the Baghdadi Jews – and each community’s founding story, as told by its own descendants in the book, begins with an escape from danger rather than a peaceful settlement.
The Bene Israel, the largest of India’s historic Jewish communities and concentrated for generations along the Konkan coast south of Mumbai, trace their own origin to a shipwreck. Community tradition holds that their ancestors fled Judea during the persecution carried out under the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century BCE, and that only fourteen survivors – seven men and seven women – washed ashore near the village of Navagaon after their vessel was wrecked. Cut off from the wider Jewish world for centuries, the Bene Israel preserved core practices such as Sabbath observance and dietary law, which is how they came to be known locally as the “Shanivar Teli,” or Saturday oil-pressers, a name describing the trade many of them worked while refusing to labor on the Sabbath. It was not until the eighteenth century that Sephardi Jewish teachers reintroduced the community to normative rabbinic Judaism, prompting a gradual migration from Konkan villages into Mumbai, Pune, and Ahmedabad.
The Baghdadi Jews, by contrast, arrived far more recently and for more directly documented reasons. Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jewish merchant families from Baghdad, Basra, and other parts of the Ottoman Empire left the Middle East to escape political instability, heavy taxation, and periodic persecution of religious minorities under local rulers. Families such as the Sassoons and Kadoories rebuilt their fortunes in Bombay and Calcutta, eventually founding some of India’s most recognizable synagogues, schools, and charitable institutions. Like the Cochin Jews and Bene Israel before them, the Baghdadi Jewish community would itself empty out within a few generations, as descendants emigrated to Israel, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere following Indian independence.
Read together, the three founding stories that anchor Growing Up Jewish in India – a massacre survived at Cranganore, a shipwreck following persecution in Judea, and a merchant exodus from Ottoman Iraq – make the case that displacement is not a footnote to Indian Jewish history but its recurring starting point, in every single community the book covers.
Further Reading
Readers interested in this angle of Growing Up Jewish in India may also want to read our companion pieces covering the book’s general overview and its critical reception, as well as our profile of the Cochin Paradesi Jewish community. For further background on the historical events referenced here, see the Wikipedia entry on Cochin Jews.