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 Based on extensive fieldwork throughout India, as well as close reading of historical documents, this study provides a striking new understanding of the Jewish Diaspora and of Hindu civilization as a whole.

Who Are the Jews of India?

History

Katz, Nathan

Middle East

University of California Press

Ethnic Conflict In Buddhist Societies: Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma

Goldberg, Ellen S.

De Silva, Kinglsey M.

Duke, Pensri

Desilva, K M

Asia

Westview Press

Teach us to count our days: A story of survival, sacrifice and success

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Cornwall Books

For two thousand years, a small colony of Jews in Cochin, South India, enjoyed security and prosperity, fully accepted by their Hindu, Muslim, and Christian neighbors. In this most exotic corner of the Diaspora, Jews flourished in the spice trade, agriculture, the professions, government, and military service. India's tolerant, nurturing atmosphere produced a Jewish prime minister to a Hindu maharaja; an autonomous Jewish principality; Hebrew and Malayalam-language poets; powerful, well-educated women; and Qabbalists revered by Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. Cochin's Jews were so well-integrated into Hindu society that they evolved an identity which was both fully Indian and fully Jewish. This book analyzes the strategies by which this dual identity was established. The Cochin Jews have narrated a historical legend which emphasizes their longstanding residence in India, the site of Jewish autonomy under Hindu patronage, and their attestable origin in ancient Israel, the center of the Jewish universe. Although the Cochin Jews remained faithful to Jewish law and custom, Hindu symbols of nobility and purity were adopted into their religious observances, resulting in some of the most exotic religious practices in the Jewish world. The Jews of Cochin mirrored Hindu social structure and became a caste, well-positioned in India's hierarchy. Yet in emulating caste behavior, Jews came to discriminate against one another, in a breach of Jewish law, giving rise to a controversy which lasted five hundred years. Despite millennia of security, when their two beloved homelands, India and Israel, attained independence in the late 1940s, virtually all of the Jews living in Cochin opted for the more precarious life in Israel. This book concludes with an exploration of their reasons for leaving India and an appraisal of their adaptation to Israeli life.

The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India

Americas

Univ of South Carolina Pr

Spiritual Journey Home is a unique memoir by Professor Nathan Katz, of Florida International University, portraying his intense lifelong spiritual odyssey in search of religious enlightenment. Beginning as an ambivalent Conservative Jewish youth in 1950s Camden, New Jersey, and ending as a confirmed Orthodox Jew in Miami Beach, Katz devoted his professional life to study of the traditions of the mysterious East, including India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Afghanistan, learning rich and closely held secrets of thought and meditation at the feet of Oriental masters and mentors like the Dalai Lama as well as from living among the Jews of Cochin, India. It is indeed a long, strange trip, as the reader weaves back and forth between the holy places of the subcontinent and the academic halls of the United States, where Katz also studied and then taught, a narrative of soaring deeds and searing disappointments. The reader enters into a world of mysticism in the throes of rationality that few besides Katz have been privileged to access. Told with an infectious wit and in a forthright style, Spiritual Journey Home is a profound and unpretentious exertion in religious passion with many unexpected turns, none of which could be more unexpected than the author s ultimate return to Judaism. Shattering preconceived notions, eliciting novel parallels, and bridging false dichotomies as history unfolds around him, Katz finds his place in the Torah because of and not despite his vast experience. This is a very personal story, but one that will be immediately familiar, regardless of background, to every seeker of truth.

Spiritual Journey Home: Eastern Mysticism to the Western Wall

Religion & Spirituality

Ktav Pub & Distributors Inc

Reprint of 1995 edition. The 7 contributions in this volume analyse the historical, social and religious identity in three distinct communities of Indian Jews: the Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel and the "Baghdadi" Jews. The authors address historical development, social interaction with Gentile neighbors, modernization and the influence of Zionism and the role of religion as a system of rituals and norms defining and celebrating the very identities of Indian Jews.

Studies of Indian Jewish Ancestry

Manohar Publishers

The 'modern' Western world was introduced to Indian Jews in 1665 when Menasseh Bene Israel of Amsterdam petitioned Oliver Cromwell's government to permit Jews to return to England from where they had been expelled in 1290, citing the tolerant maharajas of Cochin as examples of pragmatic and tolerant leadership to be emulated in England. Over the next 350 years, books, magazine and newspaper articles, travel diaries, and a variety of government and commercial documents have explored Indian Jewish experience, often sensationally. Over the past half-century, modern scholarship has applied historical, sociological, anthropological, political, cultural, literary, and folkloristic perspectives, and all the while Indian Jews themselves have narrated their stories to ever-fascinated audiences. This bibliography, compiled over three decades of research, is designed to assist students and scholars who wish to explore India's rich and varied Jewish heritage. It is organised by communities. First are general works on Indian Jewry, followed by: sections on the Cochin Jews; the Bene Israel of Maharashtra; the little-known Mughal Jews; the 'Baghdadi' communities of Indian port cities; the Ashkenazim, many of whom but not all were refugees to India from Nazi-dominated Europe; and finally, recent Judaising movements of north-east India and in Andhra Pradesh.

Indian Jews: An Annotated Bibliography 1665-2005

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