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Although the Bene Israel community of western India, the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay and Calcutta, and the Cochin Jews of the Malabar Coast form a tiny segment of the Indian population, their long-term residence within a vastly different culture has always made them the subject of much curiosity. India is perhaps the one country in the world where Jews have never been exposed to anti-Semitism, but in the last century they have had to struggle to maintain their identity as they encountered two competing nationalisms: Indian nationalism and Zionism. Focusing primarily on the Bene Israel and Baghdadis in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Joan Roland describes how identities begun under the Indian caste system changed with British colonial rule, and then how the struggle for Indian independence and the establishment of a Jewish homeland raised even further questions. She also discuses the experiences of European Jewish refugees who arrived in India after 1933 and remained there until after World War II. To describe what it meant to be a Jew in India, Roland draws on a wealth of materials such as Indian Jewish periodicals, official and private archives, and extensive interviews. Historians, Judaic studies specialist, India area scholars, postcolonialist, and sociologists will all find this book to be an engaging study. A new final chapter discusses the position of the remaining Jews in India as well as the status of Indian Jews in Israel at the end of the twentieth century.
Of all the Diaspora communities, the Jews of India are among the least known and most interesting. This readable study, full of vivid details of everyday life, looks in depth at the religious life of the Jewish community in Cochin, the Bene Israel from the remote Konkan coast near Bombay, and the Baghdadi Jews, who migrated to Indian port cities and flourished under the British Raj. Who Are the Jews of India? is the first integrated, comprehensive work available on all three of India's Jewish communities. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Nathan Katz brings together methods and insights from religious studies, ritual studies, anthropology, history, linguistics, and folklore, as he discusses the strategies each community developed to maintain its Jewish identity. Based on extensive fieldwork throughout India, as well as close reading of historical documents, this study provides a striking new understanding of the Jewish Diaspora and of Hindu civilization as a whole.
Winner of the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore​ Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize​ The Jews’ Indian investigates the history of American Jewish relationships with Native Americans, both in the realm of cultural imagination and in face-to-face encounters. These two groups’ exchanges were numerous and diverse, proving at times harmonious when Jews’ and Natives people’s economic and social interests aligned, but discordant and fraught at other times. American Jews could be as exploitative of Native cultural, social, and political issues as other American settlers, and historian David Koffman argues that these interactions both unsettle and historicize the often triumphant consensus history of American Jewish life. Focusing on the ways Jewish class mobility and civic belonging were wrapped up in the dynamics of power and myth making that so severely impacted Native Americans, this books is provocative and timely, the first history to critically analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews’ grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.
For two thousand years, a small colony of Jews in Cochin, South India, enjoyed security and prosperity, fully accepted by their Hindu, Muslim, and Christian neighbors. In this most exotic corner of the Diaspora, Jews flourished in the spice trade, agriculture, the professions, government, and military service. India's tolerant, nurturing atmosphere produced a Jewish prime minister to a Hindu maharaja; an autonomous Jewish principality; Hebrew and Malayalam-language poets; powerful, well-educated women; and Qabbalists revered by Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. Cochin's Jews were so well-integrated into Hindu society that they evolved an identity which was both fully Indian and fully Jewish. This book analyzes the strategies by which this dual identity was established. The Cochin Jews have narrated a historical legend which emphasizes their longstanding residence in India, the site of Jewish autonomy under Hindu patronage, and their attestable origin in ancient Israel, the center of the Jewish universe. Although the Cochin Jews remained faithful to Jewish law and custom, Hindu symbols of nobility and purity were adopted into their religious observances, resulting in some of the most exotic religious practices in the Jewish world. The Jews of Cochin mirrored Hindu social structure and became a caste, well-positioned in India's hierarchy. Yet in emulating caste behavior, Jews came to discriminate against one another, in a breach of Jewish law, giving rise to a controversy which lasted five hundred years. Despite millennia of security, when their two beloved homelands, India and Israel, attained independence in the late 1940s, virtually all of the Jews living in Cochin opted for the more precarious life in Israel. This book concludes with an exploration of their reasons for leaving India and an appraisal of their adaptation to Israeli life.
The Seven Contributions In This Volume Analyse The Historical, Social And Religious Identity In Three Distinct Communities Of Indian Jews: The Cochin Jews, The Bene Israel And The Baghdadi Jews.
The story of the Jews of India has often been told by historians, anthropologists and sometimes by Indian Jews themselves recounting their family histories in India, the land of their birth over many generations. We know that Indian Jewish communities: the Bene Israelis in Bombay, Poona, Ahmedabad and Jabalpur, the Baghdadis in Calcutta and Bombay and the Kerala Jews in Cochin, Parur or Chendamangalam lived peacefully in pluralistic neighbourhoods experiencing no anti-semitism. However, when Israel was established, thousands of Indian Jews were inspired and like their cousins from other parts of the globe, migrated to the Jewish Homeland. Yet, today 60 years since the first Jewish families made aliya and migrated to Israel (1949), little is known about this community of 70,000 Indian Jews scattered across Israel. This book, for the first time, presents a deeply researched analysis of all three Jewish communities from India, studying them holistically as Indian-Israelis with shared histories of migration, acculturation and identity in the Jewish Homeland. Based on extensive fieldwork and ethnographic research conducted among Indian Jews across Israel between 2005-8, the book reflects the authors deep engagement and familiarity with Israeli society and the complexities of ethnicity and class that underlie the cleavages within Israeli Jewish society. The volume vividly captures the immigrant experiences of first-generation Indian Jewish men and women. The tapestry of these narratives and lived experiences is skilfully woven into theoretical insights illustrating how ethnicity, gender and class intersect with Jewish-ness to create complex identities of Being Indian and Being Israeli. The authors deep engagement with the Indian-Israeli community and her accessible style enrich this book for readers across a wide range of interests.
This book explores the extraordinary differentiation of the Baghdadi Jewish community over time during their sojourn in India from the end of the eighteenth century until their dispersion to Indian diasporas in Israel and English-speaking countries throughout the world after India gained independence in 1947. Chapters on schools, institutions and culture present how Baghdadis in India managed to maintain their communities by negotiating multiple identities in a stratified and complex society. Several disciplinary perspectives are utilized to explore the super-diversity of the Baghdadis and the ways in which they successfully adapted to new situations during the Raj, while retaining particular traditions and modifying and incorporating others. Providing a comprehensive overview of this community, the contributions to the book show that the legacy of the Baghdadi Jews lives on for Indians today through landmarks and monuments in Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata, and for Jews, through memories woven by members of the community residing in diverse diasporas. Offering refreshing historical perspectives on the colonial period in India, this book will be of interest to those studying South Asian Studies, Diaspora and Ethnic Studies, Sociology, History, Jewish Studies and Asian Religion.
Exploring the image of Jews in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book looks at both the Indian attitudes towards the Jewish communities of the subcontinent and at the way Jews and Judaism in general have been represented in Indian discourse. Despite the fact that the Indian Jewish population constitutes one of the country’s tiniest minorities, the relations of the local Jews with other communities form an integral part in the history of Indian multiculturalism. This has become increasingly apparent over the last two centuries as Judaism and its image have been incorporated into the discussions of some of the most prominent figures of different religious and nationalist movements, leaders of independent India, and the Indian mass media. Furthermore, recent decades witnessed mass adoption of Israelite identity by Indians from two different regions and religious groups. Being a topic that has received little attention, Jews and India seeks to rectify this situation by examining these developments and providing a fascinating insight into these issues. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Jewish and Indian cultural studies.
"The Unconverted Self proposes that questions of difference inside Christian Europe not only are inseparable from the painful legacy of colonialism but also reveal Christian domination to be a fragile construct. Boyarin compares the Christian efforts aimed toward European Jews and toward indigenous peoples of the New World, bringing into focus the intersection of colonial expansion with the Inquisition and adding significant nuance to the entire question of the colonial encounter."--Publisher description
A history of representations of American Indians in Jewish literature and popular media. In Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination, author Rachel Rubinstein examines interventions by Jewish writers into an ongoing American fascination with the "imaginary Indian." Rubinstein argues that Jewish writers represented and identified with the figure of the American Indian differently than their white counterparts, as they found in this figure a mirror for their own anxieties about tribal and national belonging. Through a series of literary readings, Rubinstein traces a shifting and unstable dynamic of imagined Indian-Jewish kinship that can easily give way to opposition and, especially in the contemporary moment, competition. In the first chapter, "Playing Indian, Becoming American," Rubinstein explores the Jewish representations of Indians over the nineteenth century, through narratives of encounter and acts of theatricalization. In chapter 2, "Going Native, Becoming Modern," she examines literary modernism’s fascination with the Indian-poet and a series of Yiddish translations of Indian chants that appeared in the modernist journal Shriftn in the 1920s. In the third chapter, "Red Jews," Rubinstein considers the work of Jewish writers from the left, including Tillie Olsen, Michael Gold, Nathanael West, John Sanford, and Howard Fast, and in chapter 4, "Henry Roth, Native Son," Rubinstein focuses on Henry Roth’s complicated appeals to Indianness. The final chapter, "First Nations," addresses contemporary contestations between Jews and Indians over cultural and territorial sovereignty, in literary and political discourse as well as in museum spaces. As Rubinstein considers how Jews used the figure of the Indian to feel "at home" in the United States, she enriches ongoing discussions about the ways that Jews negotiated their identity in relation to other cultural groups. Students of Jewish studies and literature will enjoy the unique insights in Members of the Tribe.