Place · Malabar Jewish synagogues · India
Chennamangalam & Parur synagogues
Also known as Chennamangalam Synagogue, Ernakulam, Malabari synagogue, Chennamangalam Synagogue, Ernakulam
The Malabar Jewish synagogues at Chennamangalam (1614) and Parur (1165) in Ernakulam district, Kerala, serving the Malabari Jewish community — distinct from the later-arrived Paradesi community of Mattancherry. The 10th-century Hebrew tombstone inscribed with Pardes Chen at Chennamangalam attests Jewish presence in Kerala long before the Portuguese arrival. The copper plate grant of 1000 CE by Cheraman Perumal Bhaskara Ravi Varma to Joseph Rabban, giving the Jews of Anjuvannam hereditary rights to a trade commune, is among the earliest documents of a Jewish community in Asia. Both synagogues are now museum-managed by the Kerala government after the community's emigration to Israel in the 1950s.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 10.170, 76.220
Connections (3)
- Teaching lineageParadesi Synagogue, Kochi
Kerala had two Jewish communities distinguished by descent and, for centuries, by a bitter refusal to intermarry: the Malabari Jews of Kodungallur, Parur and Chennamangalam, attested by a tenth-century Hebrew tombstone and by copper plates granting privileges, and the Paradesi who came later from Iberia and the Levant and built the Kochi synagogue in 1568. Both are now nearly gone, having emigrated to Israel almost entirely between 1949 and 1970.
- Teaching lineageBene Israel synagogues, Konkan
Three distinct Jewish communities reached India separately and had almost nothing to do with each other: the Malabari Jews of Kerala, attested from the tenth century; the Bene Israel of the Konkan villages, oil-pressers who kept the Sabbath and the dietary law but had no Torah, no Hebrew and no rabbinic contact for centuries until a Cochin Jew reached them in the eighteenth; and the Baghdadis, who came with the nineteenth-century opium and jute trade.
- CampaignThe Goa Inquisition
The Holy Office at Goa had jurisdiction over New Christians — converted Jews and their descendants — as well as over Hindu and Muslim converts, and its establishment in 1560 was pressed for partly by Francis Xavier on the ground that Jewish practice was continuing in the Estado. The Cochin and Parur communities on the Malabar coast lay outside Portuguese jurisdiction under local rajas, which is a large part of why they survived where Goa's did not.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Cochin Jews”. Nathan Katz, Who Are the Jews of India? (2000); the Cochin and Bene Israel community records.
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