Tradition · religion · India
Judaism
Four communities that arrived by four unrelated routes and did not much mix: the Cochin Jews of Malabar, traders with a Chera copper-plate grant; the Bene Israel of the Konkan villages, who kept the Shema, circumcision and the dietary laws and almost nothing else until they were identified from outside in the eighteenth century; the Baghdadis who came to Bombay and Calcutta with nineteenth-century commerce; and the Bnei Menashe of Manipur and Mizoram, a twentieth-century claim.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
Almost all of them have now left, and not under pressure — the Cochin and Bene Israel populations emigrated to Israel after 1948 by choice, so the synagogues stand empty for the opposite of the usual reason.
No Indian ruler expelled, forcibly converted or ghettoised them; the persecution that happened on Indian soil was the Portuguese Inquisition's at Goa, from 1560.
Connections (3)
- Site adjacencyParadesi Synagogue, Kochi
Kochi is where the pattern is documented rather than inferred. The community held copper plates from a Chera ruler granting Joseph Rabban hereditary privileges — among the oldest such grants to a Jewish community anywhere — and the Paradesi synagogue of 1568 stands on ground given by the Raja of Cochin beside his own palace. That is the relationship in one street: a Jewish community housed by a Hindu king, next door to him.
- In the same set asBene Israel synagogues, Konkan
The Bene Israel are the strangest of the four arrivals. Konkan villagers who kept the Shema, circumcision, the Sabbath and the dietary laws and almost nothing else — no Hebrew, no written Torah, no memory of a route — and who were identified as Jews from outside in the eighteenth century, by a Cochin visitor and then by missionaries. Whatever brought them, it left them enough to be recognised by and not enough to explain.
- CampaignThe Goa Inquisition
The one persecution on Indian soil, and it was European. The Inquisition at Goa prosecuted Jews and conversos from 1560, and Portuguese action drove the old Malabar community out of Cranganore in the same century — which is why the Jews of the coast moved south to Cochin and put themselves under the Raja's protection. The persecution arrived by ship, and it was escaped by moving into an Indian ruler's jurisdiction.
Sources
Wikipedia, “History of the Jews in India”. Nathan Katz, Who Are the Jews of India? (2000); the Kodungallur copper plates.
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