The Last Jews of Kerala, published in 2008 by journalist Edna Fernandes, is a work of narrative non-fiction that documents the final years of one of the world’s oldest Jewish diaspora communities. Fernandes, a British journalist of Indian descent, spent extended periods in Kochi (Cochin) interviewing the last remaining members of the Cochin Jewish community, producing a book that is part travel narrative, part oral history, and part meditation on what happens when a community reaches the edge of extinction.
A Community Divided
One of the central threads Fernandes explores is the historical division within Cochin Jewry between the “Paradesi” (or “White”) Jews and the “Malabari” (or “Black”) Jews. The Paradesi community traced its arrival in Kerala to later waves of Jewish migration, including Sephardic refugees who arrived following the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions of the late fifteenth century, while Malabari Jews claimed a far older presence on the Malabar Coast, with community tradition dating their roots back some two thousand years to ancient trade links between Kerala and the Middle East. For centuries the two groups worshipped separately, maintained separate synagogues, and in some periods enforced strict social barriers between each other, despite sharing the same religion and, in a broad sense, the same regional history. The Last Jews of Kerala treats this internal division as one of the book’s central ironies: a tiny, historically persecuted minority that nonetheless replicated hierarchies of status within its own ranks.
Interviews at the End of an Era
By the time Fernandes conducted her research, Kochi’s Jewish population had fallen from a peak of roughly 2,500 in the early twentieth century to a small handful of mostly elderly residents, following mass emigration to Israel after 1948 and further departures over the following decades. The book is built substantially around personal interviews with these last residents, several of whom were the final custodians of the Paradesi Synagogue and its eighteenth-century Chinese floor tiles, brass pulpits, and hand-painted ceremonial scrolls. Fernandes records their recollections of festivals, family life, and the community’s slow contraction, giving the book much of its emotional weight; it is less a conventional history than a portrait of individuals living through the final chapter of a story that began roughly two millennia earlier.
Historical Context: Trade, Tolerance, and Persecution
To frame these interviews, Fernandes also surveys the broader history of Jewish settlement on the Malabar Coast, a history usually associated with the Cochin rulers’ 1568 land grant that allowed the Jewish community to build the Paradesi Synagogue in the quarter now known as Jew Town. Unlike Jewish communities in much of Europe and the Middle East, Kerala’s Jews are often cited as an example of a diaspora community that experienced relatively little persecution from the surrounding Hindu and Muslim populations; the book explores this comparative tolerance while also noting the later disruptions brought by Portuguese colonial rule, which was considerably harsher toward Kerala’s Jewish population than the Hindu kingdoms that had hosted them for centuries prior.
Emigration and the Question of Return
A significant portion of the book addresses the mass emigration to Israel that began in earnest after 1948 and continued through the 1950s and 1960s, a movement that Fernandes treats not simply as a triumphant return to a Jewish homeland but as a complicated rupture, families uprooted from centuries of settled life in Kerala, often facing significant economic and social adjustment in Israel, while a small number chose to remain behind in Kochi. The tension between those who left and those who stayed, and the occasional visits back and forth between Israeli and Kerala branches of the same extended families, forms one of the more poignant recurring themes of the narrative.
Critical Reception
The book was published to positive reviews in the British press upon its 2008 release, praised particularly for its access to community elders who have since passed away, making Fernandes’ interviews a valuable historical record in their own right. Subsequent editions were released by Penguin and, in the United States, by Skyhorse Publishing. Because so few full-length journalistic accounts of the Cochin Jewish community exist, The Last Jews of Kerala is frequently cited alongside academic works on the subject, despite being written for a general trade readership rather than an academic one.
Why It Still Matters
Today, Kochi’s resident Jewish population numbers only a handful of individuals, and the Paradesi Synagogue itself functions today largely as a heritage site and tourist attraction rather than an active congregation in the traditional sense. Books such as The Last Jews of Kerala take on added significance in this context: they preserve testimony from a generation that is now almost entirely gone, and they document, in the words of the people who lived it, what it meant to be among the last generation of a community with roots stretching back two thousand years on India’s Malabar Coast.
Further Reading
Readers can learn more about the community discussed in the book on this site’s Cochin Jews category page, and about India’s other Jewish communities via the Bene Israel category. For further historical background on the Paradesi Synagogue itself, see the Paradesi Synagogue entry on Wikipedia.