The life of Jews in India compiled in a book: that is the simplest description of Western Jews in India: From the Fifteenth Century to the Present, published by Manohar Publishers in 2013 and edited by Kenneth X. Robbins and Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, which traces a strand of Indian Jewish history distinct from the indigenous Cochin Jewish and Bene Israel communities: the Jews who arrived in India from Europe, beginning with Portuguese conversos in the sixteenth century and continuing through later waves of traders, colonial administrators, and refugees connected to the West rather than to the older Malabar coast or Konkan coast communities already native to the subcontinent. This distinction matters for how the book’s title should be understood: “Western” in this context refers not to a geographic origin within India but to a connection with Western European Jewish history and migration patterns, encompassing individuals whose ancestry traced back to Iberian Jewish communities expelled or forcibly converted during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions of the late fifteenth century, rather than to any of India’s own indigenous or Middle Eastern-origin Jewish populations. This makes the book’s scope genuinely distinct from studies of the Cochin Jews, whose presence on the Malabar coast likely predates the Common Era, the Bene Israel, who trace their origins to an ancient shipwreck on the Konkan coast, or the Baghdadi Jews, who arrived from Ottoman Iraq beginning in the eighteenth century.
Garcia de Orta: A Physician’s Hidden Faith
The book’s fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century starting point centers on the story of Portuguese Jewish conversos, Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism in Portugal in 1497 and thereafter known as New Christians, some of whom fled to Portuguese Asia as traders and physicians rather than remain under increasing suspicion in Europe. The most historically significant of these was Garcia de Orta, a physician, herbalist, and naturalist of Jewish ancestry who settled in Goa and Bombay in Portuguese India beginning in 1534. Orta’s 1563 book Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, the earliest treatise on the medicinal and economic plants of India, made him a pioneering figure in tropical medicine and ethnobotany, translated into Latin and used as a standard reference on medicinal plants for generations afterward. Portugal’s decision to force conversion rather than expulsion in 1497, following Spain’s 1492 expulsion of its own Jewish population, created a large population of New Christians whose sincerity of conversion remained a subject of suspicion for generations, with the Portuguese crown initially promising two decades before any investigation into the validity of these conversions would begin. Some conversos fled directly to the Ottoman Empire or the Netherlands, where they could openly return to Judaism, while others, including Orta’s family, chose instead to seek opportunity in Portugal’s expanding overseas empire, calculating that distance from Lisbon might offer more practical safety than religious freedom elsewhere could provide.
The Goa Inquisition’s Dark Exception
Orta died in 1568, one year before the Goa Inquisition, an extension of the Portuguese Inquisition established to enforce Catholic orthodoxy in Portuguese India, escalated its pursuit of secret Jews among the colony’s New Christian population. His own sister, Catarina, was burned at the stake in 1569 for practicing Judaism in secret, and Garcia himself was posthumously tried and convicted, his remains exhumed and burned years after his death. This history matters for understanding the broader argument scholars like Nathan Katz have made about India’s exceptional record of religious tolerance toward Jewish communities: the one significant instance of organized anti-Jewish persecution on Indian soil was imposed entirely by European Catholic colonial authorities in Goa, not by the Hindu-majority Indian society that hosted the Cochin Jews and Bene Israel without persecution for many centuries longer. The Goa Inquisition operated as an extension of European religious politics transplanted onto Indian soil, targeting a specifically European-descended Jewish population rather than representing any indigenous Indian hostility toward Jews. The Inquisition’s reach in Goa extended well beyond individual accusations of secret Jewish practice; inquisitors also seized and burned books written in Sanskrit, Dutch, English, and Konkani on suspicion that they might contain teachings deviating from Catholic doctrine, and the tribunal operated continuously, aside from a brief suspension between 1774 and 1778, until its final abolition in 1812, a run of roughly two and a half centuries that made it one of the longest-operating Inquisition tribunals anywhere in the Portuguese colonial world, comparable in duration and severity to the Lima and Brazil Inquisitions operating in Portugal’s American colonies during the same period.
Trade, Colonization, and Later Arrivals
Following the Portuguese period, later European trading powers, the Dutch East India Company and eventually the British, brought additional Jewish merchants, administrators, and professionals to India over subsequent centuries, arriving through entirely different channels than either the ancient Cochin Jewish settlement or the later Baghdadi Jewish migration from Ottoman Iraq. These “Western” Jews often existed in relatively small numbers, connected more closely to European trading company structures and colonial administration than to synagogue-centered communal life, making their historical footprint considerably harder to trace as a coherent community compared to India’s three larger, more institutionally organized Jewish populations. The Dutch East India Company’s arrival in Indian Ocean trade during the seventeenth century brought a different pattern of Jewish involvement, since the Netherlands had by then become one of Europe’s most tolerant havens for Jews who had fled Iberian persecution, meaning Dutch trading networks in India sometimes included merchants who could practice Judaism relatively openly, in contrast to the concealment required of Portuguese-era conversos a century earlier. British colonial expansion in India from the eighteenth century onward brought still more Jewish individuals connected to trade, law, medicine, and civil administration, though these arrivals typically integrated into Bombay and Calcutta’s cosmopolitan colonial society rather than forming distinct, separately documented communities of their own, making their individual biographies, rather than any shared communal institution, the main thread connecting them across the centuries this book covers.
A Companion to the Art History Volume
Western Jews in India preceded Robbins and Tokayer’s later collaboration, Jews and the Indian National Art Project (2015), and the two books function as companion volumes: the earlier book establishes the broader historical and social presence of Jewish individuals connected to India from the fifteenth century onward, while the later volume focuses specifically on the visual and material culture this presence left behind. Read together, they represent one of the most sustained efforts by any scholars to document India’s Jewish history through lenses, biography and art history, that more conventional religious or communal histories often overlook entirely. Tokayer’s own background gave him a personal appreciation for exactly this kind of individually-traced, institutionally-dispersed Jewish history, having spent eight years as the only rabbi in Japan documenting a similarly small, scattered Jewish presence disconnected from any of the world’s larger established Jewish population centers, experience that likely informed his approach to compiling scattered biographical fragments of Western Jewish individuals across five centuries of Indian history into a single coherent volume.
Why This History Matters
Recovering the history of Western, European-connected Jews in India alongside the better-documented stories of the Cochin Jews, Bene Israel, and Baghdadi Jews complicates any overly simple narrative of India as uniformly welcoming to Jewish settlement. The Goa Inquisition demonstrates that persecution could and did happen on Indian soil, but crucially, it arrived as an import, carried by European colonial power rather than generated by Indian society itself. That distinction, between persecution imposed by foreign colonial rule and the comparative tolerance shown by India’s own Hindu-majority society across many centuries, is precisely the kind of nuance a book spanning the fifteenth century to the present is positioned to draw out in ways a narrower, single-community study could not. Garcia de Orta’s case in particular illustrates why this distinction carries real historical weight rather than functioning as a mere technicality: his scientific achievements, still cited today as foundational to the study of South Asian medicinal botany, were produced by a man living under constant threat of exposure and violence not because of anything in Indian society around him, but because of a religious persecution apparatus his own European colonial rulers had exported directly from Lisbon. Removing that apparatus from the picture, as happened naturally wherever Portuguese colonial control did not extend, Jewish life in India returned to the same pattern of comparative safety that characterized the Cochin Jewish and Bene Israel experience throughout the same centuries.
For readers who have encountered Nathan Katz’s argument that India represents a genuine exception to the broader pattern of Jewish persecution across world history, Western Jews in India functions as a useful stress test of that thesis rather than a simple confirmation of it, since it forces the argument to specify precisely which actors were responsible for tolerance or its absence, Indian Hindu society on one hand and transplanted European colonial religious authority on the other, rather than treating “India” as a single undifferentiated variable across five centuries of vastly different political control.
That refinement, rather than undercutting the broader case for India’s exceptional Jewish history, ultimately strengthens it.
Further Reading
For more on the communities discussed here, see our coverage of the Baghdadi Jews of Mumbai and Kolkata, as well as the Wikipedia article on Garcia de Orta.