Who Are the Jews of India?

by Nathan Katz

Overview

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 Based on extensive fieldwork throughout India, as well as close reading of historical documents, this study provides a striking new understanding of the Jewish Diaspora and of Hindu civilization as a whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520213234
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/18/2000
Series:	S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nathan Katz is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Florida International University, and the author of The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India (1993) and editor of Studies of Indian Jewish Identity (1995).

Editorial Reviews

This is an admirable survey of the known facts and the self-justifying legends of an ancient Jewish community that today has all but vanished. Katz calls the 'Indian chapter one of the happiest of the Jewish Diaspora.'.... Jews in the subcontinent rarely encountered hostility.... Katz is most intimately acquainted with the least studied Indian Jewish community, that of the Malabar coast, who included both 'black' Jews, whose origins are shrouded in antiquity, and 'white' Jews, who may be partly descended from Spanish traders. He shows how the Jews of Cochin and other towns of the region gradually adopted Hindu practices, without, however, abandoning Judaism. He calls their language 'a sort of Malabar Yiddish', in which Hebrew, Tamil, Spanish, Dutch, and English elements were injected into Malayalam. Written sources on these communities are scanty, but Katz's anthropological approach builds a credible picture of the Cochin Jews' historical self-understanding, their relations with their neighbours and their syncretistic customs. While generally written with great sympathy, the book occasionally slips into moralizing - as in Katz's evident indignation at the Cochin Jews' development of their own miniature caste system....

Today, for all purposes except tourism, the Cochin community is dead. Katz reports that in 1987 it could not even muster a minyan (the prayer quorum of ten men). The two other Indian Jewish communities, the B'nai Israel of Bombay and the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta, have also declined into near atrophy.
—Times Literary Supplement

Bernard Wasserstein