Journey
Jewish India
Three Jewish communities, unrelated to each other and arriving by different routes: the Cochin Jews of Malabar, the Bene Israel of the Konkan villages who kept the Shema and little else, and the Baghdadis who came with the nineteenth-century trade. Almost all of them have now left, and the buildings are what remain.
Stops (4)
- Paradesi Synagogue, Kochi · Paradesi Synagogue, Kochi — 1568
Built beside the Mattancherry palace on land given by the raja of Cochin, with a floor of Cantonese blue-and-white tiles no two of which are alike, Belgian chandeliers and a clock tower with faces in Hebrew, Malayalam and Roman numerals. The copper plates granting the community's privileges, dated about 1000, are kept here.
- Chennamangalam & Parur synagogues · Chennamangalam and Parur — the older synagogues
The Malabar synagogues of the Periyar towns, where a Hebrew tombstone of 1269 is the oldest dated Jewish inscription in India. These were the Malabari Jewish congregations, older than the Paradesi and socially separate from it — the Kerala Jewish community was itself divided by a colour line for centuries.
- Bene Israel synagogues, Konkan · The Bene Israel of the Konkan
Village oil-pressers who kept the Shema, circumcision, the dietary laws and the Sabbath, and almost nothing else, and were identified as Jews by a Cochin visitor in the eighteenth century. They called themselves Shanwar Telis, Saturday oil-pressers, because they would not work that day. Most went to Israel after 1948.
- Magen David Synagogue, Kolkata · Magen David, Kolkata — the Baghdadis
Built in 1884 by a community that came from Baghdad, Basra and Aleppo with the nineteenth-century trade in opium, indigo and jute, and which produced the Ezras, the Elias family and, in Bombay, the Sassoons. The synagogue is maintained by Muslim caretakers for a congregation of a few dozen.