And now it’s disappearing as they emigrate to Israel.
It makes me sad to read about these small Jewish communities that pick up and move to Israel. It leaves their home countries a little less interesting. OTOH, it makes Israel more interesting. My dad never seems to believe my stories about how multicultural Israel is - his image is apparently a county populated entirely by clones of his grandparents.
Three facts:
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I had a professor who was an Indian Jew once.
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Salman Rushdie’s book The Moor’s Last Sigh takes place in large part in the Jewish community of Cochin, India.
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I heard the author of this book on the radio last week. It’s about how she found out as an adult that her Indian Muslim grandmother had actually been born a Jew, and her trip to India to find out about her heritage. It sounded interesting.
I once read an article, in a cooking magazine, on Jewish Indian cooking. All kosher, but with Indian spices, foods, and cooking styles. Wish I’d kept that issue.
Up until reading it I’d had no idea there was a Jewish community in India.
20+ years ago, when I was just out of college, in my first engineering job, I worked for a small aerospace company in the San Fernando valley. My boss was a very dark-skinned Indian Jew.
Here is the wikipedia link on Jews in India.
Christainity reached india 2000 Years ago ( even before it reached Europe ).
Zoroastrians reached India 1000 years ago.
Actually, there were two distinct Jewish communities in India. One, of unknown origin, in the north, were traditionally oil-makers. They dispersed all over India under the British rule and began emigrating early, either to the UK or to Palestine when it still was a British mandate. The other, in the South-west, around Cochin, was mostly made up of descendants of Jews who had fled the Iberian peninsula after the Reconquista and who joined a small pre-existing community. For the most part, they packed up following Indian independence and the foundation of Israel.
There were also small local communities of merchants established during the Mughal empire on major trade routes.
The early dates given in this article for the origin of these communities seem to be legendary, rather than based on historical records. The Cochin Jews, for instance, according to Wikipedia, would have settled in India 2500 years ago. Checking it, I found that the first evidence of their presence dates back only to around 1000 AD. Similarly, it seems there’s no evidence outside tradition that the Bnei Israels actually came around 200 B.C. They are first attested during the 18th century when they came into contact with the Cochin Jews.
In this page pl scroll to the bottom links for some .
I had a classmate in my high school (for Jewish girls) whose grandparents were from India. They were themselves descended from Iraqi traders who’d moved there several generations earlier. She wore golden bangles given to her by her grandmother when she was little, to be worn forever - the idea was that she’d grow in them, to the point where they wouldn’t fit over her hands anymore.
Thank you very much for that link! I like the chicken and potatoes recipe, I am going to try it sometime soon.