India was home to not one but three completely distinct Jewish communities, each with its own origin story, language, customs, cuisine, and synagogue tradition. The Bene Israel of the Konkan coast, the Cochin Jews of Kerala, and the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta and Bombay developed largely in isolation from one another for centuries, yet all maintained a clear Jewish identity across generations of Indian life.
The Bene Israel: Ancient Survivors of the Konkan Coast
The Bene Israel are the oldest and most numerous of India’s Jewish communities. According to their own oral tradition, their ancestors were shipwrecked off the coast of Maharashtra around 175 BC while fleeing persecution in the Land of Israel. Cut off from the wider Jewish world, they settled in villages along the Konkan coast and gradually took up the occupation of oil pressing, earning them the nickname “Shanwar Telis” — Saturday oil pressers — because they refused to work on the Sabbath. Over centuries of isolation, they retained the Shema prayer, circumcision, dietary laws (adapted to local conditions), and observation of the Sabbath and major festivals, but lost knowledge of Hebrew and many other Jewish practices. Contact with the broader Jewish world resumed only in the eighteenth century, when Cochin Jews helped them rediscover rabbinic Judaism.
The Cochin Jews: Traders of the Malabar Coast
The Cochin Jews of Kerala are divided into two historic sub-groups: the Malabar Jews (also called Black Jews or Malabari Jews) and the Paradesi Jews (White Jews). The Malabar Jews are believed to have arrived on the Malabar Coast as early as the first century AD, trading in spices, timber, and gems. The Paradesi Jews are a later community of Sephardic and Mizrahi refugees who arrived in Cochin from Spain, Portugal, Holland, and the Middle East after the fifteenth century. The two communities maintained separate synagogues and social lives, a division rooted in questions of descent and status. Today the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry, built in 1568, stands as one of the oldest active synagogues in the Commonwealth.
The Baghdadi Jews: Merchants of the Colonial Cities
The Baghdadi Jews arrived latest of the three communities, beginning in the late eighteenth century from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Persia. They settled primarily in Calcutta (where they built the magnificent Magen David Synagogue) and Bombay. Under British colonial rule they thrived as merchants, bankers, and industrialists. The Sassoon family — originally from Baghdad — built a business empire stretching from Bombay to Shanghai, funding schools, libraries, and docks throughout British India. Baghdadi Jews spoke Arabic and Judeo-Arabic at home, and their religious practice followed the Sephardic rite. Most emigrated to Britain, Australia, and Israel in the decades after Indian independence.
Source: Jews of India – Jewish Virtual Library