Most of India’s Jewish history is centuries old: the Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel, the Baghdadi traders. The Bene Ephraim, also called Telugu Jews, are a very different story, a small Dalit community in coastal Andhra Pradesh that began practicing Judaism only in the 1980s. The Jews of Andhra Pradesh: Contesting Caste and Religion in South India, an ethnography by anthropologists Yulia Egorova and Shahid Perwez published by Oxford University Press in 2013, is the fullest academic account of how and why this happened, and what it means for a community caught between caste politics, religious identity, and the hope of recognition by Israel.
Who Are the Jews of Andhra Pradesh?
The Bene Ephraim number only a few hundred people, concentrated in the village of Kothareddypalem near Chebrolu in Guntur district, with a smaller presence in Machilipatnam further along the Krishna River delta. The community is Telugu-speaking and traces its modern Jewish practice to the 1980s, when a local leader, Shmuel Yacobi, became convinced after a visit to Jerusalem that his community descended from the Tribe of Ephraim, one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Since then, around fifty families have studied Hebrew, built a working synagogue, and adopted Jewish holidays and ritual practice, even though the community has no continuous documented history of Jewish observance before that point.
Caste Is the Real Subject
What makes Egorova and Perwez’s book more than a curiosity is its central argument: the Bene Ephraim’s turn to Judaism cannot be separated from their identity as Madiga, a Dalit caste that has historically faced severe discrimination within India’s caste system. The authors frame the adoption of Jewish identity partly as a strategy of what scholars of caste politics call “contesting” marginalization, using a claimed Israelite ancestry to step outside a caste hierarchy that offered the community little standing. The book is careful not to reduce the community’s religious sincerity to pure political strategy, but it insists that caste and religion cannot be understood separately in this case.
An Uneven Reception from Established Jewish Communities
The book also documents a difficult reality: India’s older, established Jewish communities, and Israeli authorities, have not treated the Bene Ephraim’s claims the way they treated the Bnei Menashe of Mizoram and Manipur, who received formal recognition from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate in 2005. The Bene Ephraim have not received equivalent recognition, and the ethnography notes that caste divisions have persisted even among Indian Jews themselves, meaning the community’s Dalit background has shaped how it is received by other Jewish groups in India, not just by wider Hindu society.
Fieldwork, Not Just Theory
Egorova and Perwez base their conclusions on sustained ethnographic fieldwork in Kothareddypalem itself, including participation in synagogue services, interviews with community leaders and families, and attention to how the community’s Torah scroll and holiday observances were built up largely through self-teaching and outside contact rather than inherited tradition. That grounded, village-level fieldwork is what separates the book from more general surveys of “Lost Tribes” claims around the world; it treats the Bene Ephraim as a specific community with its own local politics, not an abstract case study.
Academic Reception
Published in Oxford’s academic list and cited by dozens of later scholars working on caste, religious conversion, and Jewish identity in South Asia, the book has become a standard reference for anyone studying the Bene Ephraim specifically or Dalit religious conversion more broadly. Its comparative framing, alongside better-known cases like the Bnei Menashe, has made it useful to scholars well outside Jewish studies, including researchers of caste and Dalit politics in contemporary India.
Why It Belongs on This List
The Bene Ephraim rarely appear in general histories of Indian Jewry, which tend to focus on the older Bene Israel, Cochin, and Baghdadi communities covered elsewhere in this project. Egorova and Perwez’s book is one of the only serious sources that takes this small, newer community on its own terms, and it is essential reading for understanding that “who counts as a Jew in India” is still an open and sometimes contested question, not a settled matter of old communities and old synagogues.