Many nations of South and East Asia have, at various stages of their history, been home to prosperous Jewish communities. In India, with which the State of Israel established full diplomatic relations only in 1992, several Jewish communities have resided since ancient times. Among them are the Bene Israel, residing in Mumbai (Bombay) and its vicinity, who for centuries were engaged in agriculture; the Cochin Jews on the southern Malabar Coast; and the Baghdadi Jews, who engaged in commerce in trading centers, primarily in the port of Surat in Gujarat. India also has descendants of Judaizers: the Bnei Menashe in the east of the country, and the Bnei Ephraim in the state of Andhra Pradesh. In 2002, many of these communities united under the "Jewish Congress of India," which joined the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress in the same year.

India and Israel – Editor's Foreword

It is widely believed that the religious and cultural traditions of Buddhist and Confucian civilizations leave no room in the public consciousness for antisemitism, which is why many states of South and East Asia have, at various stages of their history, been home to thriving Jewish communities. To some extent, this also influences their foreign policy, including relations with Israel. At first glance, India long appeared to be an exception to this rule. "The connection between us is so natural that we may ask: what took so long?" remarked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017 while welcoming Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to Jerusalem.

Indeed, despite the clear parallels between the positions of India and Israel after gaining independence, New Delhi, even after recognizing the State of Israel, delayed the establishment of full diplomatic relations for 45 years. India was not among those non-aligned countries that, in a similar geopolitical situation, maintained relatively correct direct or informal relations with Israel despite all disagreements over regional and Palestinian issues. On the contrary, according to a number of commentators, throughout almost the entire era of the Indian National Congress party's stable dominance in India's political system, the attitude of its elites toward the Jewish state did not even approach the state of "cold peace" that linked Israel with Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan. The approach toward Israel by the Nehru-Gandhi political clan, which ruled in Delhi for many years, was characterized by barely concealed hostility. According to observers, statements made by the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi regarding Jews, particularly American Jews—who allegedly turned the US government and press against her due to India's policy toward Israel, despite her assertions of respect for the Jewish people—bordered on antisemitism.[1]

Only in January 1992 were full and official diplomatic relations established between the two countries. However, the Indian leadership at the time took this step not so much as a result of a fundamental review of its strategy toward the Jewish state, but rather due to the restructuring of the international relations system during the crisis and gradual dissolution of the global communist system. The situation only changed in 1998, when a coalition led by the right-wing, national-liberal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first came to power in India. With the formation of the N. Modi government in May 2014, a radical breakthrough occurred in relations between the two countries—and it immediately became clear that previous fears had been highly exaggerated. "The average Indian," writes the Indian international relations scholar Sriram Chaulia, "easily finds parallels in the positions of the two countries, both forced to live under the threat of Islamist jihadism and a hostile environment. Public opinion in India is highly favorable toward Israel, which deserves respect both for successfully meeting all the challenges and threats of the Middle East region, and because, in its existence, adherents of the Jewish faith have finally found secure protection after centuries of persecution."[2] It appears that the long history of positive ties between Jews and the peoples of India, to which the essay by Prof. M. Chlenov is dedicated, indeed remains significant today.

Prof. Ze'ev Khanin

[1]Isi Leibler, «Candidly Speaking: A Memoir – Background to Indian Prime Minister’s Visit», Jerusalem Post, 03.07.2017

[2]Sferam Chaula, «Why Modi Matters to Israel»,Jerusalem Post, 3 July 2017

M. Chlenov: The Ethnic Structure of Indian Jews in Historical Retrospective

Permanent Jewish settlements appeared in India quite early. Theoretically, it can be assumed that Jews settled on the shores of the Indian subcontinent as part of their participation in the great maritime spice trade route that connected South and Southeast Asia with the Mediterranean. Accounts of Jewish merchants from a thousand years ago seem to support this assumption. However, other models are also possible.

Ethnolinguistic Groups of Indian Jews

The largest indigenous group of Jews today, calling themselves the Bene Israel and residing in Mumbai (Bombay) and its surrounding areas, was engaged in agriculture for centuries. They were oil pressers; only in the 20th century did the majority migrate to the city of Mumbai itself, where they engaged in trade, crafts, and liberal professions. Their spoken language was and remains Marathi, possibly a specific Jewish ethnolect of it. Another indigenous Jewish group in India, the Cochin Jews on the southern Malabar Coast, spoke the Dravidian language Malayalam, evidently a Jewish ethnolect of it, and belonged to the Kshatriya varna, serving at the court of the Maharaja of Travancore-Cochin.

During the brief Portuguese rule over Kerala, Jews faced persecution by the Inquisition. However, from the second half of the 17th century until the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, Cochin was under Dutch control, which significantly eased the plight of the small Cochin Jewish community. The Dutch helped them rebuild their destroyed synagogue. The existence of Jews in this remote corner attracted the interest of the Amsterdam Jewish community, which dispatched a commission that published a report in 1668, "Notisias dos Judeos de Cochim mandados por Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva," detailing their origins and customs.

Contacts with Dutch Jews persisted for a long time; they began receiving literature and prayer books from Holland, and in 1752 and 1769, they published prayer books of their own design. The Hague banker Tobias Boas helped the Cochin rabbi David Rahabi print a local work on the calendar titled "The Tent of David" (Ohel David). Much information about the Jews of Cochin was left by Adriaan Moens, who served as governor there from 1771 to 1782. Under Dutch administration, the Cochin Jews were free to practice their religion and achieved a degree of prosperity. Both they and the Bene Israel participated in the subsequent migration of Jews into Southeast Asia, but the primary role in this eastward migration was played by the third ethnic group of Indian Jews—the Baghdadis, who appeared in South Asia in the 18th century. By that time, India had long ceased to be a mysterious and unknown land to the population of Near Eastern countries, including Jews. Many of them had for centuries visited the western part of the Indian peninsula and spent considerable time for commercial purposes in trading centers, primarily in the port of Surat in Gujarat, which, prior to the arrival of the British, was the main trading hub in the eastern Arabian Sea.

After the British founded Bombay in the 17th century, these "Babylonian" Jews, as they called themselves, began transferring their business enterprises to India and entering the service of the Raj. This term, meaning approximately "reign" or "empire," was used by locals to refer to British colonial rule in South and Southeast Asia. Most of these wealthy merchants originated from Iraq, which is why they subsequently came to be known as Baghdadis, though their numbers also included immigrants from Aleppo and Damascus, Lebanon, Yemen, and other Arab countries. The first of them appeared in western India at the end of the 18th century and established a settlement around the same time in the new capital of the Raj—Calcutta, at the mouth of the Ganges. From there, starting in the 19th century, they gradually penetrated Southeast and East Asia: Rangoon, which was then administratively part of India, Singapore, Batavia (now Jakarta), Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

The true flowering of the Baghdadis in India, as well as their formation as a distinct Jewish ethnic group, began with the settlement there of major entrepreneurs who could be described, using modern terminology, as oligarchs. The first and most famous among them was David Sassoon, who settled in Bombay in 1832. Over the next 30 years (he died in Pune in 1864), he built his commercial and financial empire, in which the highly lucrative opium trade of the era occupied a significant place. David Sassoon and his descendants, who assimilated into the British merchant bourgeoisie in 20th-century England, left a legacy in Bombay and other cities of India and the Far East as founders of charitable and educational institutions, commercial and industrial firms, builders of docks and ports, as well as numerous synagogues in places where none had existed before.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Baghdadis had begun to separate ethnically from their Iraqi compatriots. The majority transitioned from Arabic to English, and their domestic culture became a blend of British, Middle Eastern, and local Indian elements. From the very beginning of their settlement in the Raj, the Baghdadis sought to secure a status equal to that of Europeans, which they succeeded in achieving only in the 1930s, shortly before the end of their existence as a distinct element of the colonial administration of India.

This status required distancing themselves from everything "native Indian," and consequently, from the Bene Israel, whom they encountered in Bombay and who vastly outnumbered the Baghdadis. Initially, the Baghdadis did not recognize the Bene Israel as "real Jews," did not intermarry with them, and did not dine with them, although they were initially forced to pray in their synagogues. Following the construction of the first synagogue designated for the Baghdadis by David Sassoon, complete religious segregation ensued.

Only in independent India during the second half of the 20th century, where the small handful of remaining Baghdadis completely lost their privileged status, did the situation change: today, the English-speaking Mumbai Baghdadis and the Marathi-speaking Bene Israel have integrated into a relatively unified Jewish religious community. Following India's independence in 1947, the majority of the Baghdadis left the country. A small portion settled in Israel after 1948, but the majority settled in Great Britain and the United States. Some remained in Burma, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaya, and Hong Kong.

Judaizers in India

There are also the Bnei Menashe in the east of the country, who are numerically comparable to the Jews of Maharashtra, and are descendants of Judaizers who declared their affiliation with the Jewish people only in the post-war period. Today, their numbers in the states of Mizoram and Manipur have likely increased as a result of the proselytizing activities of the community's founders and the Israeli organization "Amishav," which aims to locate and return the descendants of the "Lost Ten Tribes of Israel" to the Holy Land. Ethnically, the Bnei Menashe belong to the Kuki-Chin ethnolinguistic group, whose languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. They are settled in the mountainous region between the Chindwin River in Myanmar and the Brahmaputra in India. The tribes of this group, who call themselves Mizo or Zomi, are referred to as Chins in Myanmar and Kukis in India. The Kuki-Chins currently number approximately 4 million people across the three countries where they reside (India, Myanmar, Bangladesh). At the end of the 19th century, they were converted to various Protestant denominations of Christianity, which replaced the old tribal religion for the majority, though it persists in some remote corners of Myanmar. Like all similar religious systems of Southeast Asia, the tribal religion of the Mizo relied on a developed mythology, which included myths and legends about the wanderings of ancestors from an ancient ancestral homeland to their current places of residence.

The fate of the Kuki-Chins over the past century has been highly dramatic. Conquered by the British in the 1890s, they were incorporated, without any understanding on their part, into various provinces of British India, which were subsequently divided among the three aforementioned states. The entire second half of the 20th century was marked by endless uprisings and rebellions of the Mizo, Kuki, and Chin peoples, and their related Naga neighbors, against the central Indian government, and frequently in armed conflict with one another. Unsurprisingly, against this backdrop, various revivalist movements flourished, among which the Neo-Judaism of the Mizo emerged as one of the most exotic. Its first manifestations date back to the 1920s, but the movement began in earnest in the 1950s with preaching that claimed Mizo descent from the patriarch Menashe, son of the biblical Joseph. This was based on the phonetic similarity between the name Menashe (Menase in English pronunciation) and the name of one of the cultural heroes of the Mizo.

Initially, as was to be expected, the movement developed within the framework of the Presbyterian Church, but by the 1960s, the Jewish community separated and began seeking ties with Israel and the Bene Israel. In the 1970s, the Bombay ORT provided several educational scholarships for the Mizo, but the local Bombay community refused to regard them as Jews. In 1989, the first 25 Bnei Menashe made Aliyah, and in the 1990s, the repatriation of the Mizo began to enjoy support from the right-wing political camp in Israel, including the prominent American financial magnate I. Moskowitz, who funded the settlement movement in Gush Katif in Gaza. As a result of this support, the Mizo underwent formal conversion (giyur) in their homeland, after which they had the opportunity to immigrate to Israel in accordance with the Israeli Law of Return.

The Aliyah of the Bnei Menashe continues, albeit with certain difficulties. In 2006, the government of the state of Mizoram banned giyur—the ritual adoption of Judaism—on its territory, protesting against missionary activities aimed at separating the state's citizens from their homeland. Notably, such a decree, which would be hardly imaginable in the Hindu-majority part of India, appears quite logical in the Christian-majority states of Mizoram and Manipur. Consequently, while Mizo who had previously undergone giyur departed for Israel under the Law of Return and with the support of the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut), they now enter Israel only as tourists and attempt to undergo giyur in that capacity, which is highly complex due to Israeli laws that restrict the conversion of tourists to Judaism.

Far less is known about another group of Judaizers, the Bnei Ephraim. While the Bnei Menashe ethnically belong to the cultural area of Southeast Asia, the Bnei Ephraim emerged as an untouchable caste in the very heart of the Hindu area. They live in the state of Andhra Pradesh and speak Telugu, the primary language of the state. Like the Bnei Menashe and many other untouchables, they turned away from Hinduism, but instead of converting to Buddhism, as hundreds of thousands of other untouchables in India did, they converted to Evangelical Christianity. The process of their affiliation with Judaism evidently began in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to this day. Unlike the Bnei Menashe, they do not, at least for now, relocate to Israel; only relatively recently have they established some contact with the Bene Israel community in Mumbai. Their numbers are small, presumably several hundred people.

Jews in Modern India

The emergence of Jewish organizations as a distinct form of communal functioning began among the Bene Israel in the 20th century. In 1917, at the height of the First World War, in which a portion of the Bene Israel participated as part of the British Army (General Allenby's army included a Bene Israel physician who entered Jerusalem, liberated from the Turks, alongside the British), the Bene Israel Conference was established in Bombay. It almost immediately split into two competing structures—the Conference itself and the All-India Israelite League. The leaders of the Conference attempted to prevent the politicization of the organization and of communal life in general, which was exceedingly difficult during those turbulent years. Followers of various Indian national movements emerged among the Bene Israel. In the 1920s, Dr. A.S. Erulkar, who was among the attending physicians of M. Gandhi, even founded the Jewish Nationalist Party, modeled after the respective Muslim and Christian organizations united within the Indian National Congress. However, all these organizations were short-lived and disbanded, leaving the community with a sense of distrust toward local leaders. At the same time, various representatives of the community began to hold prominent positions in Bombay, Maharashtra, and India as a whole during the first half of the 20th century. Dr. E. Moses, for example, served as the Mayor of Bombay in 1937–38.

Following the end of the Second World War, an attempt was made to establish a federation of synagogues, which also split almost immediately into two rival factions: one oriented toward the Conservative movement in American Judaism, while the other sought support from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of the United States. Much later, a new unified Bene Israel organization was formed, which joined the Commonwealth Association of Jewish Schemes. The 38 Malabar, or "black" Jews of Cochin living in the state of Kerala at the end of 2005, were united under the "Association of Kerala State Jews," led by Dr. A. Yehoshua. In the same year, 14 Paradesi, or "white" Jews, whose leader was the custodian of the Paradesi Synagogue, Samuel Halegua, did not belong to this Association and resided in the houses they still owned in Jew Town around the synagogue.

In 2002, a new organization called the "Jewish Congress of India" was formed, which joined the EAJC in the same year. It was headed by Solomon Sopher, an entrepreneur, industrialist, and horse breeder of Baghdadi origin. Two of its representatives—the Bombay attorney Albert Talegawkar and Judah Samuel, an entrepreneur and former manager of the Indian branch of the Israeli airline El Al, both Bene Israel—joined the General Council of the EAJC. However, it was only in 2016 that Indian Jews were officially recognized as a minority in the state of Maharashtra by the local government formed by the Bharatiya Janata Party. In addition to the Bene Israel, the Bombay Parsis (Zoroastrians originally from Iran, who have also lived there for about fifteen hundred years) also hold minority status in the state. This status provides for a separate category in census documents and the right to observe Jewish holidays for representatives of the minority. Mumbai Jews intend to seek state support for organizing pilgrimage trips to Jerusalem, funding synagogues and cemeteries, providing scholarships for studying youth, establishing quotas for Jewish youth in educational institutions, and regulating the registration of births, marriages, and deaths.

This newly recognized official structure faces the difficult task of uniting different edot under one umbrella. To date, this has not been fully achieved. It is possible that the support of a major regional association, such as the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, will assist this nearly vanished community in truly unifying its efforts to survive in the Indian diaspora. Welcoming the state government's decision to grant special status to the Jews of Maharashtra, Judah Samuel stated: "We are devoted to India, the country that welcomed us two and a half thousand years ago, one of the very few countries that has never, in all these years, persecuted Jews. We consider India our motherland, and Israel our fatherland."