Most popular writing about India’s Baghdadi Jews focuses on a handful of wealthy families, the Sassoons, the Ezras, the Kadoories, and the landmarks they left behind. The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity, an academic collection edited by anthropologist Shalva Weil and published by Routledge in 2019 (with a paperback edition in 2021), takes a more complicated view. Rather than a single success story, the book treats the Baghdadi Jewish experience in India as a case study in what scholars call super-diversity, a community that was never as unified as its “Baghdadi” label suggests.
Not One Community, But Several
The book’s central argument is right there in its title: Baghdadi Jews in India were maintaining communities and negotiating identities simultaneously, often pulling in different directions at once. Despite the common label, the population lumped together as “Baghdadi” actually arrived from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other parts of the Ottoman and Persian world, carrying different dialects, customs, and social standing. Weil and her contributors use the term super-diversity to describe how this single, small community was internally more varied than outsiders assumed, split along lines of wealth, geographic origin, and how closely families held to Judeo-Arabic tradition versus how quickly they adopted British colonial manners.
From Elite Merchants to Working Families
Part of what makes the book valuable is its refusal to treat wealthy trading families as representative of the whole community. Elite Baghdadi families, most famously the Sassoons, built synagogues, schools, hospitals, and civic institutions across Bombay, Pune, and Calcutta, and quickly took on British dress, language, and education. But the book’s contributors are careful to show that a large portion of the community lived far more modestly, retained Judeo-Arabic customs longer, and experienced colonial Indian society very differently than the merchant elite did. Chapters on schools and institutions, including networks like the Jewish Girls School in Calcutta, show how the community tried to maintain a shared identity even as it split along class and cultural lines.
Negotiating Between Three Worlds
A recurring theme across the book’s chapters is that Baghdadi Jews in India had to navigate three distinct social worlds at once: British colonial administration, the broader Indian society around them, and their own inherited Jewish and Arabic heritage. The book argues this three-way negotiation, rather than any single influence, is what actually produced the community’s distinctive character. Landmark institutions such as Mumbai’s Magen David Synagogue and civic buildings like the David Sassoon Library became physical expressions of that negotiation, blending Indian setting, British architectural style, and Jewish communal purpose in a single building.
Dispersion After Independence
The book does not end with the community at its peak. Following Indian independence in 1947 and the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Baghdadi Jewish population in India dispersed rapidly, with most families resettling in Israel, Britain, Australia, and other English-speaking countries. By the time Weil’s volume was assembled, only a small remnant of the original community still lived in India, making the book partly a work of historical reconstruction rather than a study of a thriving contemporary population.
Academic Reception
As an academic essay collection from Routledge’s South Asian Religion Series, the book was reviewed in scholarly venues rather than general interest press. A review appeared in the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research in 2022, several years after initial publication, again suggesting the kind of long academic shelf life that serious reference works tend to have. That the book continues to be cited and reviewed years after release reflects how few other sources cover the Baghdadi Jewish community of India with this level of scholarly depth.
Where This Book Fits
Readers who want a narrative history or a memoir should look elsewhere; this is a multi-author academic volume, and it reads like one. But for anyone trying to understand the Baghdadi Jewish community as more than a handful of wealthy family names, it fills a gap that more popular books, including Growing Up Jewish in India, only touch on briefly. Weil’s volume is the fuller academic picture behind the shorter popular accounts, and it remains the most detailed single source on how this small, internally diverse community actually held itself together across generations of colonial and postcolonial change.