Jewish travelers are rarely more welcome than at the 400-year-old Pardesi Synagogue in Cochin, a port city near the southwestern top of India.
“By the grace of God, foreign Jews show up so we can have a minyan,” said Jackie Cohen, the 77-year-old caretaker of the Sephardic synagogue standing at the end of Jew Town Road.
Five decades ago, there were five synagogues and 2,500 Jews in Cochin. Today, the community numbers seven families with 22 members who have not eaten any meat since the last kosher butcher departed 15 years ago.
The first Jews in India were seamen sent by King Solomon to find timber for his Temple in Jerusalem, Cohen asserted. Pedantic historians might disagree, but there is ample proof that Jews settled on India’s west coast, south of Bombay, at least 1,000 years ago.
“Ten to 15 years from now,” predicted Cohen somberly, “there will be no more Jews in Cochin and we’ll turn this synagogue over to the Indian government as a museum.”
The modern watershed year in the millennium-long history of Indian Jewry was 1948, when the establishment of Israel heralded to the subcontinent’s deeply religious Jews the promised return to Jerusalem.
A year earlier, the blood-drenched birth of an independent India, and fear of a socialist government, had propelled the country’s Jewish merchant princes to depart for Britain and other English-speaking nations.
Within a few years, nine-tenths of India’s Jews had left, reducing the Jewish population from roughly 50,000 in 1947 to 5,000 now.
This mass migration was unique in Jewish history because it was not rooted in persecution or discrimination by a hostile majority.
Indeed, during well over 100 interviews with Jews in Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi and Cochin, not one could recall a single personal instance of anti- Semitism in India’s history.
The three main strata of India’s former Jewish society, which emulated India’s caste system, joined in the exodus.
But the poorer went mostly to Israel, while the wealthiest Jews, who identified most closely with the British colonial regime, opted mainly for London; Sydney, Australia; and Canada.
At the apex of the Jewish “caste” system were the so-called Baghdadis, Jews whose ancestors came from Iraq, Iran and Syria in the 19th century.
Led by the fabled Sassoon clan, the “Rothschilds of the East,” they quickly made fortunes in cotton, jute or tobacco-processing – and in the opium trade with China.
The Sassoons endowed Jewish hospitals, schools, synagogues and old-age homes, which still bear their name although now are largely filled with Hindus and Muslims.
A step below were the “white Jews” of Cochin, whose ancestors were thought to have come from Spain and Portugal after the 1942 expulsion.
The bulk of India’s Jews, then as now, consisted of the Bene Israel, who tended to be small businessmen, artisans, clerks – as well as excellent soldiers and officers in the British colonial army – who claim descent from Jews fleeing the Land of Israel after the destruction of either the First or Second Temple.
On the bottom rung were the generally poor “black Jews” of Cochin, whose ancestors may have come from southern Arabia.
Until the 1948 exodus, each of these subcommunities maintained its own synagogues and rigid social boundaries, but shrinking numbers of Jews have led to desegregation by default.
“If we were to discriminate now, there wouldn’t be anybody left,” said one prominent Baghdadi in Bombay.
While the last official census was taken in 1981 and all population figures in this teeming subcontinent of close to 900 million people are suspect, it is estimated that about 4,000 Jews live in Bombay, where they work mainly in business, the professions or in government service. Although there is no single full-time rabbi in Bombay, nor or in all of India for that matter, three good- sized synagogues and a half-dozen smaller ones still operate.
Each Passover, two emissaries from the Chabad Lubavitch movement in New York come to conduct services.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee maintains an active welfare program for the aged and indigent in a community that, historically accustomed to the charitable munificence of its wealthiest families, has evolved on real structure to care for its own.
The Bombay Zionist Confederation meets three or four times a year while ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training) still operates separate schools for boys and girls, though few Jewish students remain.
Similar conditions apply to the Sir Jacob Sassoon School, located in a once predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Its Hindu principal, Bulboo Sen, explained that although only 10 percent of the school’s 700 students are Jewish, all the youngsters participate in a daily Jewish prayer assembly and an annual Passover seder, and the school is closed on Jewish holidays.
Only Jewish students, however, attend the daily, one-hour Hebrew classes.
During the last two decades, the Jewish population of India has largely stabilized. Those remaining usually have relatives in Israel but feel substantially comfortable, both economically and psychologically, in India.
At the Times of India, the leading English-language daily, Victor David Sassoon (no relation to the illustrious clan), the manager of the advertising department, recently proudly displayed a special supplement on Israel published by The Times.
Sassoon, a portly man in his late 30s, and two of his younger Jewish assistants, Isaac Sharon and Anita Haeems, had all visited Israel.
Sasson worried about the lack of Jewish knowledge in the community; Isaac said he wanted to marry a Jewish girl, though most of his friends were Muslims; and Haeems declared herself quite happy where she was, with religion ranking fairly low on her list of priorities.
Calcutta, the world’s most densely populated city, once had between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews, including small colonies of Jewish refugees from Germany, and later from Shanghai and Singapore. Among the remaining 80 Jews, one of the most visible figures is Nahoum Nahoum (“they call me Norman”), head of Nahoum & Sons Confectioners and the only Jewish bakery in India.
The business was founded 100 years ago by his grandfather, who came from Baghdad. But when Nahoum, a 65-year-old bachelor, passes on, it will be the end of the line.
The store still produces hand-made matzah and even hamantashen, but had to discontinue making bagels for lack of demand. “Even 20 years ago, I catered for Bar Mitzvahs and weddings, but there’s little business now, though recently we had a couple of mixed marriages,” Nahoum said.
“We’ll disappear in five to 10 years,” he prophesied.
It was a statement echoed by 75-year-old Benjamin Elias, who said: “I feel a sense of tragedy that our number is dwindling. But much larger Jewish communities have also perished. You have to see it in perspective.”
In New Delhi’s only synagogue, the tiny Judah Hyam Prayer Hall, a recently affixed plaque marks a reverse in the customary flow of Diaspora-Israel giving. It notes, “Air Conditioning for the Synagogue was donated by the Israel Business Delegation during the Visit of His Excellency Shimon Peres – 17 May 1993.”
The establishment of an Israeli Embassy in late 1992 has given the permanent community of some 40 Jews a badly needed shot in the arm. On the first night of Chanukah, Ambassador Ephraim Dowek and most of his 40-person staff were on hand to light the outdoor menorah, joined by a throng of young Israeli backpackers.
During the evening’s euphoria, Gulu Ezekiel, a local journalist, boasted that the congregation had solemnized a wedding the previous week, with the bride a Hindu convert. Ezekiel also noted that the daughter of a U.S. Embassy official was to celebrate her Bat Mitzvah a month later. Despite such infrequent bursts of activity, the Bat Mitzvah invitation hinted at the tiny congregation’s difficulties in India’s capital city.
To the customary announcement, the Bat Mitzvah’s parents added the heartfelt plea, “We need a minyan by 9:30 a.m.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
