Jewish Heritage in India finds one of its richest expressions in India’s Jewish Heritage: Ritual, Art and Life-Cycle, the landmark volume edited by anthropologist Shalva Weil and published by Mumbai’s Marg Publications. First issued in 2002 and reprinted repeatedly through 2004 and again in 2009, the book brought together essays, photographs, and scholarship documenting the ritual life, material culture, and traditions of India’s three principal Jewish communities: the Cochin Jews of Kerala, the Bene Israel of the Konkan coast and Bombay, and the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta and Bombay.
The Scholar Behind the Book
Shalva Weil, born in London and trained in sociology at the London School of Economics before completing a doctorate in social anthropology at Sussex University, has spent more than four decades studying the Bene Israel and the wider landscape of Indian Jewish life. Her doctoral fieldwork, conducted among Bene Israel communities in the Israeli town of Lod, examined the persistence of ethnic and religious identity among Indian Jewish immigrants to Israel – a theme that would define much of her later scholarship. Today she is a senior researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Seymour Fox School of Education and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. In 2017, she spent time in India’s capital as a GIAN Distinguished Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, during which she was also invited as a keynote speaker at a symposium on India’s Jewish communities held at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.
What the Book Covers
India’s Jewish Heritage is structured around exactly what its subtitle promises: ritual, art, and the life-cycle. Rather than presenting a single continuous historical narrative, the volume gathers contributions on subjects ranging from synagogue architecture and Torah scroll ornamentation to marriage customs, Passover observance, and the visual and material culture that distinguished each of India’s Jewish communities from one another despite their shared faith. Because Marg Publications specializes in richly illustrated art books rather than conventional academic monographs, the volume is as valuable for its photographic documentation of synagogues, ritual objects, and community life as for its scholarly essays – a format well suited to recording physical heritage that has, in the decades since, continued to disappear as India’s Jewish population has continued to shrink through emigration.
The Chendamangalam Synagogue Connection
Weil’s engagement with Indian Jewish heritage has extended well beyond the printed page. In 2006, she co-curated an exhibition inside the newly restored synagogue of Chendamangalam, a small village in Kerala that was once home to one of the region’s historic Malabar Jewish congregations. The Chendamangalam synagogue, believed to date to the seventeenth century, had fallen into disrepair after its congregation emigrated to Israel, and its restoration and reopening as a heritage site and small museum represented exactly the kind of physical preservation work that India’s Jewish Heritage was written to support and document. Weil’s involvement in both the book and the synagogue restoration illustrates how the scholarship and the physical preservation of Indian Jewish heritage have developed together, often driven by the same small group of researchers and community advocates.
A Wider Body of Work
Weil has continued to publish on Indian Jewish communities in the decades since India’s Jewish Heritage first appeared. With David Shulman, she co-edited Karmic Passages: Israeli Scholarship on India (Oxford University Press, 2008). She later edited The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity (Routledge, 2019) and The Jews of Goa (Primus, 2021), extending her documentation of Indian Jewish life to communities and regions that had received comparatively little scholarly attention. She is also the founding chairperson of the Israel-India Cultural Association, whose presidency has been held by the conductor Zubin Mehta, reflecting her role not just as a researcher of Indian Jewish heritage but as an active builder of institutional ties between the two countries.
Why This Body of Work Matters
Reference volumes like India’s Jewish Heritage matter precisely because so much of what they document is now difficult or impossible to observe directly. Many of the synagogues photographed for the book have since closed as functioning houses of worship, their congregations having emigrated to Israel, and some of the ritual objects and practices recorded in its pages exist today mainly in archives, museums, and the memories of an aging diaspora. Weil’s decision to publish through Marg, an art-focused press known for lavish illustration, ensured that the visual record of Indian Jewish material culture – the carved wooden arks, hand-painted ketubot, and distinctive synagogue architecture of Cochin, the Konkan coast, and Calcutta – was preserved in a format accessible well beyond the narrow circle of Indo-Judaic studies specialists that Weil herself helped establish as a field starting with an international conference she co-organized at Oxford University in 2002.
Founding a Field: Indo-Judaic Studies
Weil’s work on India’s Jewish Heritage did not happen in isolation. In 2002, the same year the book was first published, she co-organized an international conference at Oxford University on what has since come to be known as Indo-Judaic studies – the comparative, interdisciplinary study of Jewish communities in the Indian subcontinent and their relationship to Indian society more broadly. Weil is widely credited as one of the forerunners of this field, and her subsequent career, spanning museum exhibitions, edited volumes, and university appointments in both Israel and India, has largely been dedicated to building the scholarly infrastructure – conferences, publications, curated collections – that a niche academic subject needs in order to survive and grow. Her earlier curatorial work, including a 1991 exhibition on the Ten Lost Tribes at Beth Hatefutsoth (the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv, today known as ANU), reflected the same instinct for pairing serious scholarship with public-facing exhibition and documentation that would later define India’s Jewish Heritage.
That same instinct carried into her decades of engagement with the Bene Israel community specifically, the subject of her doctoral research. Her fieldwork among Bene Israel immigrants in the Israeli town of Lod during the 1970s produced one of the earliest sustained anthropological accounts of how an Indian Jewish community negotiated its identity after resettlement in Israel – a body of research that fed directly into the essays on Bene Israel ritual and life-cycle practices included in the 2002 volume.
Ritual and Life-Cycle Traditions Documented
The essays gathered in India’s Jewish Heritage pay close attention to the distinct ritual vocabularies of India’s three Jewish communities, rather than treating them as a single undifferentiated group. Among the Bene Israel, the volume documents practices such as the Malida ceremony, a thanksgiving ritual invoking the Prophet Elijah and marked with a plate of fruit, flowers, and fried rice, performed at life-cycle events from births to weddings. The Cochin Jewish material in the book covers the elaborate wedding customs once practiced in Kerala’s Jewish quarters, including the seven-day celebrations and processions that drew on both Jewish law and local Malayali custom, along with the distinctive silver Torah crowns and finials produced by Cochin’s Jewish and non-Jewish silversmiths alike. For the Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta and Bombay, the book records synagogue practices tied to congregations such as Magen David and Beth El in Calcutta, built by Baghdadi merchant families in the nineteenth century, along with the community’s distinctive Judeo-Arabic liturgical traditions carried from Iraq and Syria. Taken together, these chapters make the case that Indian Jewish heritage is best understood not as one story but three overlapping ones, each shaped by different migration histories, regional cultures, and relationships to the wider Indian society around them.
A New Delhi Connection
The original framing of this article around a “book launch in New Delhi” reflects a real and recurring feature of Weil’s career: her repeated engagement with Delhi’s academic institutions on the subject of Indian Jewish heritage. In 2017, Weil held a GIAN (Global Initiative of Academic Networks) Distinguished Professorship at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, a program run by India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development to bring international scholars to Indian universities for concentrated teaching and research visits. During this period she was also associated with a symposium on India’s Jewish communities hosted by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in Delhi, part of the same broader wave of Delhi-based scholarly attention to Indo-Judaic studies that produced events such as the 2017 “Shirei Hodu” conference on Indian Jewish music and heritage. These Delhi engagements, rather than a single discrete book launch event, are the most likely real basis for the New Delhi association carried in this article’s original title, and they underline how much of the institutional infrastructure for studying Indian Jewish communities has, since the early 2000s, run through a small number of repeat collaborations between Weil, Indian universities, and cultural institutions such as IGNCA.
Further Reading
For more on the communities and heritage sites discussed in this article, see our coverage of the Cochin Jewish community and the IGNCA conference on Jewish heritage in India, as well as the Wikipedia article on Shalva Weil.