The Jew in India Neither Jew nor Indian; a Snob Who Apes Ways of Colonial Briton

Mr. David is the author of “Monsoon,” a novel of life in India. He is a Jew, of a family that has made its home in Bombay

The Hitlerite, when he first arrives in Bombay, will no doubt be appalled and horrified by the sight of so many Jews in that city. He will wonder very much why the Indian problem still exists when the way of solving it is so obvious—being, naturally, that of killing off all the Jews in India. If the Germans were to be permitted to carry out this drastic measure with customary Hitlerian dash and zeal, the question will be no nearer solution, for the Jews of India would still be there, and the Hitlerite would be scarcely repentant to find he had made a serious mistake. The multitudinous Jews he sees in Bombay are in fact not Jews but something quite different. They are Parsees, who are the Zoroastrians who ran away into India from Mohammedan persecution in their own land of Persia more than a thousand years ago.

A foreigner is liable indeed to make such an error, and in India it almost needs a Jew to tell a Jew. Besides there are Jews and Jews in India. The total number of thirty thousand-odd consists of the few untypical and unimportant Jews who have come from Europe in recent times to settle in the country, the more or less white Jews, the black Jews and the Bene-Israelites. To take the last first, the Bene-Israelites, who are not in the strict sense Jews, are the descendants of Indians and the Jews, traditionally stated to be seven women and seven men, who were shipwrecked in India when fleeing from persecution sixteen or eighteen hundred years ago.

PROOF OF TACT

Their history shows them to be an extremely tactful people, who sought at all costs not to offend their neighbors. Thus they called themselves “Bene-Israelites” (Sons of Israel) and not Jews, so as not to annoy the Mohammedans, for the Koran makes a propitious use of the term “Bene-Israelite,” and they refrained from eating beef to avoid hurting the feelings of their Hindu neighbors, to whom the cow is sacred.

Next, to come to the Jews proper of India, those of Cochin are of an old stock, some of whom claim to date back to the fall of Jerusalem; others are the descendants of later accretions from Europe and various parts of the East. The white among them are of pure race, the black of mixed blood. They are on the whole backward, ignorant and poor compared to the merchant Jews of Bagdad, who, pre-eminent among them the Sassoons, are not only the most important but the latest of the Jewish invaders of India, having settled there within the last hundred years.

It is with these Jews of Bagdad that I am going primarily to concern myself. And I may add here that I hope, in trying to be frank, sincere and objective about them, I shall not be found to be objectionable.

LACK JEWISH CONSCIOUSNESS

What strikes one at once rather forcibly about these Bagdad Jews is the absence among them of a marked feeling of Jewish consciousness and of an energetic corporate life. Their interest in Jewish culture and Jewish history is not a burning one. And the Bagdad Jews have evolved a remarkable method of teaching Hebrew, by which the children are taught to read Hebrew without understanding a word of it. I myself was a victim of this system, so that, although I was allegedly taught Hebrew for about seven years, I scarcely know the meaning of six words of it.

As to corporate life, there is nothing of it beyond a certain amount of organization for philanthropic purposes. Of course we have our charities. Splendidly rich Jews have been splendidly munificent. They could not, however, in my opinion, have been otherwise. But communal life should consist of more than that.

Now we know that it is the misfortune of India that so many vastly differing and often warring communities dwell within her boundaries, and that each of these communities insists aggressively on sticking exclusively to itself. Thus, for instance, Hindus have their own clubs, Parsees theirs, the Europeans theirs, and so on. It is not because the Jews of India have been so willingly converted to the creed of Mahatma Gandhi, and want violently to demonstrate their consciousness as Indians, that they have no clubs of their own. It is simply because they have no desire for a social life of their own. This shows itself further in the fact that they have no real social leaders (nor, for that matter, do they have a spiritual leader. Thus, India has no Rabbi.)

THE NEW POOR RELATION

This absence of leadership was never so manifest as when, a few years after the war, a Jewish lady from Europe came to collect money from the Indian Jews for their coreligionists who were being vilely persecuted in various parts of Russia and Eastern Europe. There was no one then to give the community an effective lead, to make an examplary contribution, to express real sympathy with such a very worthy cause. The meeting convened for the lady from Europe was held in an atmosphere of callous chill.

The war, we all know, began in 1914. It ended in 1918. The Jews of India heard of it in 1921, and then refused to listen. They had always looked up to their brethren in Europe, for they were most enviably whiter in complexion, and possessed further that quality, so magical and alluring in India, of being European. But the European Jew now suddenly became the proverbial poor relation. The victims of Russian, Hungarian and Roumanian atrocities were certainly to be pitied, but not to be helped very much. Besides, it was asked, hadn’t the Jews of India their own ills and troubles?

LACKING SELF-ESTEEM

Thus, so conspicuously unlike his Western brother, who has recently amazed the world with such a magnificent and refreshing display of whole-hearted solidarity, the Jew of India lacks to a large extent a sense of racial and spiritual consciousness. And it seems clear to me that if Mahatma Gandhi, though he has appealed to them to join in the fight for national freedom, were asked his opinion of the Indian Jews, he would charge them, as he has charged the Parsees, of being “tainted with the spirit of Rockefeller.” Yet at least one can say of the Parsees what, alas, one cannot of the Jews, that, if they are too materialistic and spiritually hollow, they do at least possess to a great extent a national consciousness, what the Indian calls the “izzat,” or self-esteem.

The Indian Jew, however, has no national “izzat.” And this is all the more remarkable because India is one of the few countries where practically no anti-Semitism has ever existed or exists. Indeed we may say that it is not the Indians, but the foreigners of India, who are responsible for whatever there was or is of it.