Studies of Indian Jewish Identity

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When we ask who the Jews of India are, we ask who we are ourselves. When we ask whether they are Jewish or Indian, we ask whether we ourselves are Jewish or American. When we delve into the cultural mechanisms by which India's diverse Jewish communities came to define themselves and how they were defined by others, we explore the very conditions by which a group's identity is established and maintained, how it responds to changing conditions and how it anticipates and structures a future.

All of this is to say that this book is about at least two subjects.

First it is descriptive and ethnographic. It describes the beliefs and attitudes, the rituals and histories, which conditioned the identities of three distinct communities of Indian Jews. Second, it is analytical and therefore reflexive; it adheres to the standard of scholarship which insists that in studying the 'other' we learn about ourselves.

From the seven essays in this book, what we learn about is identity.

If on the first level we learn about Indian Jewish identity, on another level of abstraction we modify our understanding of Jewish identity worldwide. Our assumptions about Jewish identity as defensive in character, being based on European and American (and occasionally North African or Middle Eastern) Jewish experience, are challenged by Jewish experience in a very different culture.

The Jewish communities studied in this book are diverse, but they have one thing in common: they lived in the palpable absence of anti-Semitism, a cancer unknown in India. These new data compel us to modify our understanding of what it means to be Jewish. It is well-nigh impossible for a Jew of European origin-a Jew with a shtetl mentality or with a post-shtetl defiance-to imagine a Jewish identity which emerged in an environment which for the most part was hospitable, affectionate and nurturing. Yet, the Jewish experience in India begs us to make this imaginative leap when we henceforth ponder what it means to be Jewish. This book, then, is about Jewish identity in India and how Indian Jewish experience modifies how we understand Jewish identity in general.

But on a higher level of abstraction this book is about how human identity is created, maintained, celebrated and modified. This book's assumption is that the way in which the microscopic communities of Jews in India manage their identity informs our understanding of the issue of identity in the broadest sense.

Historical Background

The essays in this book are about three of India's Jewish communities. The first section is about the Jews of Cochin, before 1947 a princely state and now a port near the southern tip of India on the Arabian Sea. Jews may have come to Cochin as long as two thousand years ago or more, either as traders or as refugees from the Roman sack of Jerusalem. In Cochin they flourished as merchants, agriculturists, soldiers, and in politics-one seventeenth century Jewish leader was simultaneously prime minister to a Hindu maharaja and trading agent for the Dutch East India Company. The Cochin Jews were mostly prosperous, knowledgeable Judaically, and well-positioned in Hindu society.

This section contains two studies. The first chapter by Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg analyzes Cochin rituals as enactments of identity. Their Indian Jewish identity was shaped by a culture with two traditional sources of status: the royal and the ascetic, reflecting the dominant position of the nobility and of the hereditary priests, respectively. Cochin Jewish observance of the autumn holy days, Simchat Torah in particular, as well as weddings, emphasized the symbolism of royalty. The spring festival of Passover high- lighted its ascetic tendencies. Thus, the Cochin Jews' high-caste status was recognizable in their cultural context.