the journal of indo-judaic studies

THE JOURNAL OF INDO-JUDAIC STUDIES

Number 15 5

From the Editors

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From the Guest Editors

2016

Special Section 9

Reciprocal (Mis-) apprehensions: Jews on Non-Jews, and Non-Jews on Jews in Indian Fiction By Navras Jaat Aafreedi

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“A Jew Living in an Ashram”: The Spiritual Itinerary of S. S. Cohen By Boaz Huss

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“Clear Are the Paths of India”: The Representation of Tagore in Jewish Literature By Shimon Lev

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Swansong on Jewish identity in India? : Yahūdῑ Gāthā (2013) in context By Heinz Werner Wessler

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Bnei Ephraim Community: Judaization, Social Hierarchy and Caste Reservation By Anton Zykov

Sheela Rohekar’s novel Miss Samuel: Ek

Article 71

The Everyday Practice of Acceptance: The Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta’ Cosmopolitan Landscape (1930s – 1970s) By Jael Silliman

Featured Review Article 93

Nina Haeems and Alysha Haeems, eds. Indian Jewish Women: Stories from Bene Israel Life. Reviewed by Joan G. Roland

Book Reviews 96

Elana Benjamin, My Mother’s Spice Cupboard: A journey from Baghdad to Bombay to Bondi. Reviewed by Luke Whitmore

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Essie Sassoon, Bala Menon, and Kenny Salem. Spice & Kosher: Exotic Cuisine of the Cochin Jews Reviewed by Nathan Katz

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The Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies

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Philippe Bornet, Rites et pratiques de l'hospitalite: mondes juifs et indiens anciens. Reviewed by Flavio Geisshuesler

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Marvin Tokayer and Ellen Rodman, Pepper, Silk & Ivory – Amazing Stories about Jews and the Far East. Reviewed by Nathan Katz

News 101

Impressions from the Anjuman Al-Pathan Conference, Jaipur, 17th May 2015 By Eyal A. Be’ere

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A Note on the Sir E. V. Sassoon Papers By Thomas A Timberg

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Indo-Judaic Book Wins Canadian Award By Joseph A. Hodes

Obituary 111

J. F. R. Jacob (1923-2016): Farewell Jakes… By Lt. Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain (Ret’d)

THE JOURNAL OF INDO-JUDAIC STUDIES Editors Nathan Katz, Florida International University Braj Mohan Sinha, University of Saskatchewan Guest Editors Navras Jaat Aafreedi, Presidency College Boaz Huss, Ben-Gurion University Heinz Werner Wessler, Uppsala University Editorial Board Navras Jaat Aafreedi, Presidency University S. R. Bhatt, Delhi University Alan Brill, Seton Hall University David R. Blumenthal, Emory University Ranabir Chakravarti, Jawaharlal Nehru University Shlomo Deshen, Tel-Aviv University T. S. Devadoss, University of Madras Arthur Green, Hebrew College of Boston Aaron Gross, University of San Diego Barbara A. Holdrege, University of California at Santa Barbara P. R. Kumaraswamy, Jawaharlal Nehru University Alan Mittleman, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Tudor Parfitt, Florida International University Anantanand Rambachan, St. Olaf College Joan G. Roland, Pace University L. N. Sharma, Benares Hindu University, Emeritus Frank Joseph Shulman, College Park, MD Mahavir Singh, Gautam Buddha University Priya Singh, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Inst. of Asian Studies Ithamar Theodor, Haifa University D. Venkateswarlu, Osmania University Shalva Weil, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Brian Weinstein, Howard University Luke Whitmore, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point In Memoriam: Founding Editorial Board Members Daniel J. Elazar, Bar-Ilan University M. L. Sondhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University Bibhuti S. Yadav, Temple University Copy Editor Amit Ranjan Layout Alexander Conroy

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Subscriptions begin with the current issue or may be backdated. Journal rates listed below are effective with the current issue: Canada U.S.A. Elsewhere

$20.00 (Can. funds) $20.00 (U.S. funds) $25.00 (U.S. funds)

Cheques should be made payable to: THE JOURNAL OF INDO-JUDAIC STUDIES c/o Prof. Braj Mohan Sinha Dept. of Religion and Culture University of Saskatchewan 9 Campus Drive, ARTS 918 Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A5 Canada [email protected] Manuscripts and books for review should be sent to: THE JOURNAL OF INDO-JUDAIC STUDIES 4545 Royal Palm Avenue Miami Beach, FL 33140 U.S.A. [email protected]

The Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies is subsidized by grants from the Foundation for Remote Jewish Communities, the Publications Fund Committee of the University of Saskatchewan, and the Global Jewish Studies Program at Florida International University. Additional support is entirely welcome. ISSN

1206-9330

Copyright © 2016 The Society for Indo-Judaic Studies

From the Editors Our fifteenth issue includes, for the first time, a special section of papers presented in an academic panel. We are very pleased that Boaz Huss (Israel), Navras Jaat Aafreedi (India), and Heinz Werner Wessler (Sweden) convened the panel at the 23 rd European Conference on South Asian Studies at Zürich, Switzerland, in 2014, and then edited them and submitted them to JIJS. We believe our journal is an ideal forum for such exploratory essays from scholars who are new to our journal. The Guest Editors introduce the panel and the papers below. We are also pleased to welcome back Dr. Jael Silliman to our journal. She had a fine article on Kolkata’s Baghdadi women in our very first issue. This time, she explores relations between Kolkata’s Jews and their neighbors. Prof. Joan G, Roland, another longtime friend of this journal, then provides an extensive review of Nina and Alysha Haeems’ work on Bene Israel women. This is followed by reviews of three books on food and hospitality, and a review of Rabbi Marvin Tokayer’s new book of Jewish tales of the East in tribute to the “Zayde” of our fascination with Jewish life in Asia. In addition, there are news items, and an obituary for Lt Gen. J.F.R. Jacob, Indian war hero and Jewish leader, by one of his esteemed military colleagues.

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From the Guest Editors The five articles in this edition of the Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies go back to a panel at the 23rd European Conference on South Asian Studies on “Jews and Judaism in South Asia: Cultural Encounters and Social Transformations” in Zürich, Switzerland, July 2014. The panel, convened by Boaz Huss, Shimon Lev and Heinz Werner Wessler issued a rather general call for papers that would examine “transformations of Jewish Identities in South Asia and the dynamics of the encounters between Jews and Non-Jewish South Asia”. The panel intended to examine transformations of Jewish Identities in South Asia and the cultural dynamics of the encounters between Judaism and South Asian cultures in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The migration of Jews into South Asia in the 19th and 20th century, as well as the mass migration of Jews to Israel in the mid-20th century had a significant impact on the identity of the Jewish South Asian communities. Old forms of Jewish identity were redefined and new forms constructed. At the same period, various forms of cultural interactions occurred between Jewish and South Asian cultures. In this context, the interactions between prominent Indian leaders and intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru with Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman and others play an important role in the intellectual history of the 20th century. We are happy to present five of the papers presented in the panel in this volume. Navras Aafreedi’s article engages with the reciprocal perceptions of Jews and non-Jews in Indian fiction, mostly in English. The article goes back to a close reading of a tremendous amount of modern literature, presents and quotes from a multitude of Indian authors and texts, analyzing and evaluating a vast and variegated kaleidoscope of motives and images, metaphors and plots, characters and narratives. Aafreedi also covers Meera Mahadevan and Sheila Rohekar, Jewish authors writing in Hindi. Sheela Rohekar’s latest novel, Miss Samuel: Ek Yahūdī Gāthā, (Miss Samuel: A Jewish Saga) is the focus of the article of Heinz Werner Wessler, who relates its motives and narrative to an earlier novel of Rohekar, Tāvīz. Both these works display a sharpened sense of sensitivity toward minority issues in general, but it is the later work that openly refers to Jewish identity issues in India. It delineates the direct and more subtle forms of discrimination that Jews have to go through in their personal life, even though India is proud that its Jewish history appears to have escaped the brutal forms of discrimination and violence that mars the history of Jewish Europe. Shimon Lev explores literary influences from India on the Jewish community, i.e. the impact and the image of Nobel award winner Rabindranath Tagore in Jewish and Zionist literature as a catalyst of the Asian orientation of Zionism in the formative phase of the development of the Zionist National Movement. As part of the repercussions of Tagore as a person and his writings among Jewish Intellectuals, Lev also engages with the relationship of Martin Buber and Rabindranath Tagore, and their interactions on the questions of spiritual identity, Zionism and nationalism. Boaz Huss delves into S.S. Cohen’s interest in Indian philosophy. Cohen’s journey saw him dip into various Indian spiritual traditions and movements: he turned a theosophist, a follower of Ramana Maharshi and an ardent lover and translator of Vedanta for the Jewish world. S.S. Cohen demonstrates the extraordinary attraction of certain formations of Indian religion and philosophy, and of living Hindu “saints” for Western intellectuals, including the Jewish, who combined an interest in exotic forms of religiosity with a search for their own “Asian” identity. Anton Zykov analyses the dynamics of establishing a visible Jewish identity amongst a marginal community in South India, the Bnai Ephraim. This group is one of two in India that “discovered” their own Jewish identity in recent decades. While the Jewish identity of the Bnai Menashe from North East India has been accepted by the Chief Rabbinate in the recent past,

as belonging to the lost tribes of Israel; the claims of the Bnai Ephraim are not yet accepted, even though after decades of identity formation, their Jewish identity has reached an advanced level. Boaz Huss, Shimon Lev, Heinz Werner Wessler

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Reciprocal (Mis-) apprehensions: Jews on Non-Jews, and Non-Jews on Jews in Indian Fiction Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi In 2002, anthropologist Tudor Parfitt wrote: Today the population of India is around one billion. After China it is the second most populous nation on earth. The Jewish population of India reached perhaps thirty or forty thousand after the Second World War, but today it is much less. In other words Jews count for a miniscule fraction of Indians. Why then in The Moor’s Last Sigh, a novel set mainly in Bombay, should Salman Rushdie use as a figure of baroque, incarnate evil a Jew from Kerala? Why in In an Antique Land should the equally gifted Amitav Ghosh be fascinated by a twelfth-century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju of Mangalore? A surprising number of other Indian literary works deal with Jews and there is still an interest in comparing the religious systems of India with Judaism. India has a dazzling array of problems, real and imagined. It is difficult to imagine that the Jews figure prominently among them. And yet they seem to. 1 Dohra Ahmad attempts to explain this idea by pointing out that, “Indian Jews represent the ultimate test of the category of ‘Indianness’ to absorb diverse subjects…Jews are important both in their own right, and also as symbolic of a more generalized minority existence in India”.2 As the famous declaration in The Moor’s Last Sigh not only brings into sharp focus the marginality of Jews in India but also projects them as an index to the nation’s acceptance of the otherness: “Before the Emergency we were Indians. After it we were Christian Jews.” 3 Jewishness is seen as “an ongoing interest and thematic device in Salman Rushdie’s fictional oeuvre” by Anna Guttman.4 Rushdie published three novels with Jewish characters, viz., The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh and Shalimar the Clown. Guttman suspects that “the significance of Jewishness to The Moor’s Last Sigh may have more to do with that novel’s condition of composition and literary influences than its actual content. The Moor’s Last Sigh was published directly after The Satanic Verses and was written while the fatwa was still in effect, and Rushdie’s interest in Jewishness needs to be understood in that context.” Guttman further points out that, “J. M. Coetzee, in his review of The Moor’s Last Sigh, interprets Rushdie’s declaration of Jewishness in that novel as an assertion of solidarity “with persecuted minorities everywhere.””5 In both The Satanic Verses as well Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie pairs Jewish characters with South Asians. Both Gibreel and Saladin are paired with Jewish women in The Satanic Verses, and the relations between them are seen by Guttman as “indicative of the larger dynamics of contemporary diasporic existence”, specifically the “relationship between diasporic Indians and diasporic Jews”. 6 We get an idea of what was on Rushdie’s mind when he did this South Asian-Jewish pairing from his argument in Imaginary Homelands: …that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews… 7 The proximity and the relationship between diasporic Jewish and South Asian Muslim identities becomes even more prominent in Shalimar the Clown when the American ambassador to India, a Jew, Max, has extra-marital affair with a Hindu woman, Boonyi. This brings him into a direct relationship with her Muslim terrorist, Kashmiri separatist husband, Shalimar, who increasingly resembles Max as he draws deeper into a global network of anti-state violence. He is the doppelgänger of Max. The equation of Jewishness with Western-ness not only

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ignores the complex and troubled relationship between the Jews and the Christian West – which makes it impossible for the Jew to be seen as a true representative of Western modernity, but also the diversity of color and culture within Jews. Guttman finds Boonyi’s declaration upon realizing that Max is not interested in their liaison any more that she “should have known better than to lie with a Jew,” extremely problematic as in this text the word Jew acquires a pejorative connotation.8 Boonyi goes on to say that “the Jews are our enemy”. 9 What is interesting to note is that most of the Jewish characters in the books published by non-Jewish Indian authors are from outside India, with the sole exception of Moraes Zogoiby of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. There are characters with strong Indian connections, but not Indian themselves, like Alfie Judah in the title story of Calcutta-born and America-based Bharati Mukherjee’s collection The Middleman and Other Stories. Judah is originally from Baghdad and has relocated to Brooklyn via Bombay. In Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers10, Abravanel is a Syrian Jew who sells fancy goods to Calcutta’s elite. The absence of Indian Jews in the works of these writers can perhaps be explained by the fact that all non-Jewish Indian writers who have Jewish characters in their works are either based in the West or have lived there for long periods of time. The only Jews these writers ever interacted with were those in the West and not in India. Most of the Indians never come into any direct contact with them because of their small numbers, estimated to be around three thousand11 in a population that exceeds 1.2 billion. Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land of 199212 has Jews and their history right in the centre of the narrative, much like Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay. The book is impressive in its scholarly depth and in its engagement with how present is informed by the past. In spite of being non-fiction, it is as captivating and absorbing as fiction. There are two tales intertwined with each other, though separated by no less than eight centuries. One is the author’s personal account of his stay in an Egyptian village during the 1980s for his doctoral research in social anthropology. The other is the tale of a 12 th century wealthy Jewish international trader and scholar who shuttled between Egypt, Yemen and India. Shalom Walds contends that it is this Jewish link to India that captured Ghosh’s imagination, fascinated as he was by the confluence of these two ancient civilizations.13 Ghosh develops a fondness for Egypt which is “far gentler, far less violent, very much more humane”14 than his homeland India. But his book, instead of beginning with his relocation to Egypt, begins with an enigmatic phrase: “The slave of MS H.6 first stepped upon the stage of modern history in 1942”.15 The “slave”, which Wald considers to be “probably a misleading translation of the broader, ancient Hebrew term eved,” is Bomma, a well-known name in certain regions of South India. Bomma is Abraham Ben Yiju’s Indian business agent, his assistant and a highly respected member of his household. He undertook long voyages for his master and took care of huge sums of money. He might have embraced Judaism, though that is not clear. One finds his mention in a medieval letter first reported in 1942 in a Hebrew academic journal. The Hebrew University National Library catalogue number of the letter is MS H.6, which is one of many thousands discovered in the late 19 th century in the Geniza of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo which housed a massive collection of Jewish manuscripts of past centuries. The monumental work on the Mediterranean Jewish society of the Middle Ages produced by historian Shlomo Goitein was based on these very letters. 16 Goitein also prepared a book focused on the Jewish India traders, though he could not complete it before his death in 1985.17 The stories and travels of Abraham Ben Yiju, Bomma and other Jewish traders, as discovered in Goitein’s work, completely consumed Ghosh. It led him to identify with Bomma, giving him a feeling of familiarity and belonging to the thriving and open multi-cultural world of the past, which in turn led him to follow the trails of Bomma and Ben Yiju wherever they took him, to India, Egypt or Western university libraries. Already fluent in modern Arabic, he soon acquired proficiency in Medieval Judeo-Arabic which is written in Hebrew letters, so that he was able to read these letters in the original. This was a significant achievement. Conscious of the historical importance of the study of the life of Ben Yiju and others beyond their personal

Reciprocal (Mis-) apprehensions: Jews on Non-Jews, and Non-Jews on Jews in Indian Fiction

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adventures, he devoted himself to the task with full vigor. The Egyptian city of Fustat and the Yemenite port of Aden played a crucial role in the international commerce of the time by connecting the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean, and Jews played an important role in this international trade. Son of a Tunisian rabbi, Ben Yiju was a scholar, a calligrapher, and a trader, all rolled into one, like many of his Jewish contemporaries. His trade commitments brought him to the Indian western coastal city of Mangalore, where he married an Indian girl, Ashu, after converting her to Judaism, and fathered her children, and stayed for seventeen years, earning a great fortune for himself by establishing factories. As evident from their letters, most of his main trade contacts were observant Jews, who were also part of the dominant Arab civilization. Thus, for a number of years, Amitav Ghosh in his mental landscape, straddled different worlds – one separated by space, between Egypt and India, and the other by time – between Ben Yiju’s and his own. His book In an Antique Land is an exploration of the link between the two. The narrative comes to an end with an unpleasant incident, symbolic of things much deeper in meaning and connotation. Ghosh had heard from his Egyptian friends of an annual pilgrimage to the nearby tomb of a “Sidi Abu-Hasira” in Damanhour. Legend had it that the said saint was a Muslim man of Jewish origin. Ghosh failed in his attempt to visit it; he was stopped by the Egyptian police, who saw little reason for an Indian to visit the shrine of Rabbi Yacov Abu-Hadzera, to whom the shrine in contention actually belonged and attracted many Jewish pilgrims. He was instead driven to the railway station and ordered to take the very next train to Cairo, thus breaking the link between the Ghosh’s two worlds, the ancient and his own when he was just about to touch it. This incident made him realise that “the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago”. 18 Egypt’s indifference to the removal of all Geniza documents to other countries had left Ghosh wondering as to how genuine the often celebrated “golden ages” between Muslims and Jews were: “In some profound sense, the Islamic high culture of Masr (Egypt) had never really noticed, never found a place for the parallel history the Geniza represented (read: the history of the Jews), and the removal only confirmed a particular vision of the past”. 19 Here Amitav Gosh deals with an issue that Indian writers do not even like to touch, namely the issue of Muslim and Arab attitudes to Jews and Jewish history. Kumaraswamy has emphasized more than once that Indian intellectuals often refused to acknowledge the fact that Indian Muslims’ hostile attitude towards Israel played a crucial role in keeping India from establishing diplomatic ties with Israel for the first four decades of its existence and also influenced her to repeatedly vote against Israel at the United Nations.20 Admitting this would have punctured India’s claim that as a secular state, no religious community could determine or even influence its policies. Generally, Indians fail to realise that Jews have also suffered at Arab and Muslim hands, the way they did in Christendom, though there was great variation in their position from time to time and place to place. Wald sums up the trajectory of this politics, thus, “It could be good or tolerable but often enough it was bad. Some of the facts were, or should have been known to Indians because the Indian press did report on antiJewish discrimination and persecution in Arab lands. But the Indian elites mostly did not see it because Muslim anti-Semitism is counter-intuitive and not part of India’s intellectual baggage. What India wishes to remember is a long history of friendship between Indians and Arabs, and particularly Egyptians.”21 The perception Ghosh gathers from this is that Islamic high culture had no consideration for Jews and their history is an exception. Ghosh is aware of occasional massacres of Jews at the hands of Arabs and even mentions such massacres in 12th century Morocco, but only because their memory is evoked by the many anxious questions about these tragic events Abraham Ben Yiju asks in his letters that Ghosh has peruses. However, Ghosh remains absolutely silent about the expulsion of Egyptian Jewry, whose number stood at 100,000, that occurred just three decades prior to his arrival in Egypt. It is these expulsions and similar ones from other Arab countries which bring to an abrupt

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end Amitav Ghosh’s Judeo-Arab syncretic world, and the incident in Damanhour could only be called a minor ramification. Amitav Ghosh gives us a peek into a long vanished colorful world, known until now only to a few specialist historians. He loves this cosmopolitanism of medieval world where a Jewish trader and scholar could comfortably make India his home and link it to other continents; and live in peace and harmony with Hindus, Muslims and Jews and trade and thrive together. Steven Bowman contends that In An Antique Land “reads like a diachronic travelogue that interweaves the stories of two clans of people (his 20 th century Muslims and his 12th century Jews) around a Hindu double helix consisting of the author’s contemporary search for the meaning of history and his painstaking recovery of a usable biography from an enigmatic series of references to a 12th century Hindu slave and to a genizah merchant. Each facet of his research becomes a comparison between the respective clans whose lives and loves appear to progress along parallel lines.”22 There are two books in Indo-Anglian literature that are about the Holocaust - one nonfiction – Vikram Seth’s Two Lives; and the other a work of fiction - Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay. It was the death of an Austrian Jew who left behind a trove of letters related to the Holocaust that inspired Anita Desai – born of a German mother and an Indian father –to weave a story around him. The setting of her novel, Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) is postwar Bombay.23 Except for the stamp number on each of those letters, Desai did not find anything unusual in the letters. Desai was inspired to fill in the blank spaces in those letters sent from Nazi Germany by weaving this story. It is not the first Indian novel to raise the theme of Jewish exile and migration, for it had already been done way back in 1939 by Vishram Bedekar in his Marathi novel, Ranangan. Drawing from the Western stereotype of the wandering Jew, Desai depicts her eponymous protagonist Hugo Baumgartner as a wandering Jew, tired of discrimination and persecution, and caught in the midst of clash of cultures: “In Germany he has been dark – his darkness had marked him the Jew, der Jude. In India he was fair – and that marked him as firanghi [“Frank”, meaning a European]. In both lands, the unacceptable.”24 “In the figure of Baumgartner,” Lotz and Kamath find, “Anita Desai has created the counterpart to the post-modern cosmopolitan who celebrates his ‘borderness’. What characterizes Baumgartner is his marked indifference to all assertions of cultural identities and origins, his own included.” 25 Son of an educated, well-to-do Jewish middle-class family in Berlin, Hugo escapes the Holocaust by finding refuge in India because of the business links his father’s erstwhile company had in the timber trade, while his old parents, who refuse to emigrate, perish in the Holocaust. Although he fled Germany to escape persecution at the hands of Nazis, yet ironically in India he is mistaken for a Nazi sympathizer and imprisoned in an internment camp as an enemy alien by India’s British rulers. In an absurd sequence of events, the British in India fail to make a distinction between German Jews and Nazis. When a desperate Baumgartner tries to make a British official realise the difference, he is snubbed by him: “Stop that whining and show me your passport, will you?” “German, born in Germany,”26 he snaps - that is all that mattered to him. Even in prison he does not bother with the issue of identity. His indifference to cultural identity coupled by “a patient, receptive and pragmatic approach” is best reflected in his perception of his linguistic position, as pointed out by Lotz and Kamath27: He found he had to build a new language to suit these new conditions – German no longer sufficed, and English was elusive. Languages sprouted around him like tropical foliage and he picked words from it without knowing if they were English or Hindi or Bengali – they were simply words he needed: chai, khana, baraf, lao, jaldi, chota peg, pani , karma, soda, garee ...what was this language he was wrestling out of the air, wrenching around to his own purposes? He suspected it was not Indian, but India’s, the India he was marking out for himself.’ (p. 92) After his release at the end of the war Baumgartner tries to make a living in Calcutta but the mass violence that rocks the city in partition-fated India drives him back to Bombay,


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where he degenerates into a derelict beggar in a slum. In the end he is left with only the company of his cats and another lonely expatriate Lotte. The novel ends with his murder by a blond German hippie who wants to rob him of even his meagre belongings in order to support his drug addiction. Weinhouse observes that Desai “connects two pivotal experiences: her encounters with an Austrian Jew on the streets of Bombay; and with the letters he left behind and her memory of a photograph of her non-Jewish mother leaving Germany for India to join her Bengali husband a decade before the war. Desai uses these two disparate memories, her knowledge of the history of German Jews, and the stories her mother told her about Germany and the fate of those Germans to show the ways in which Germans and Jews are inextricably linked by nationality and history and explores the postcolonial ramifications of that history for an understanding of pluralism in India’s multicultural society as well as for the outsider status of the ‘Jew’.”28 It is a fact of history that two thousand European Jews managed to find refuge in India before the British closed the doors to them, fearing Muslim antagonism. Their excuse was that thousands of additional Jews could cause social and economic hardship to India’s native population, which stood at 378 million then. This fear of a massive influx of Jews even overcame Gandhi’s and Nehru’s sincere desire to save some more. Baumgartner enabled Desai to recreate the “strange lives” and “strange histories” of her German mother and her large circle of German friends, about whom it was not possible for her to write because of the emotional intimacy she had with them. Although, both, Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Vikram Seth’s Two Lives are about the Holocaust, yet what sets them apart is the fact that unlike Baumgartner’s Bombay, Seth’s Two Lives is based on intimate personal knowledge of the two lives it talks about, those of his grand-uncle, the dentist Dr Shanti Behari Seth from India and his Jewish wife Henny Caro from Germany. It was also a bigger success than Baumgartner’s Bombay, reprinted several times and translated into foreign languages. In 1933, a couple of years after his arrival in Germany for studying dentistry, Shanti Seth moved into the Caro house as a paying guest. With the entry “Race and Caste: Aryan [sic] Hindu Khatri" in his British passport, made in 1938, Shanti Seth had nothing to lose in Nazi Germany. Henny found refuge in London just a month before the war and Shanti found employment with the British army in 1940. Upon his return to London in 1951, he married Henny. Eighteen years later they welcome the author Vikram, then just seventeen years old, into their home, and treat him like their own offspring that they never had. Upon Henny’s death in 1989, Shanti destroyed all documents related to her so as not to be troubled by her memories, but missed a trove of letters left by her in the attic, which Vikram decided to base his book upon when he discovered the letters, driving him to look for all traces of Henny’s murdered family even as far as Israel, where at Yad Vashem (Israel Holocaust museum) he discovers the Gestapo records of Henny’s mother Ella’s and sister Lola’s deportation in 1943. Ella and Lola perished in Theresienstadt and Ausschwitz-Birkenau respectively. The fact that the events have been described by Vikram Seth in excruciating detail, from “the selection at the railway ramp in Auschwitz and the sadism of the SS guards to the agony in the gas chamber and the removal of gold teeth and hair from the corpses,” 29 makes it a very significant book in India, where there is a widespread ignorance of the Holocaust. As Rosenfeld rightly points out, “It is not primarily from the work of historians that most people gain whatever knowledge they may acquire of the Third Reich and the Nazi crimes against the Jews but rather from that of novelists, filmmakers, playwrights, poets, television program writers and producers, museum exhibits, popular newspapers and magazines, internet web sites, the speeches and ritual performances of political figures and other public personalities, and the like.”30 The exercise of going through the Gestapo records left Vikram Seth incapable of reading German poetry which he had come to enjoy so much, not even Heine. “The stench of

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the language in which I had read the phrases from the Gestapo letter clung to his words as well...The very verbs stank.”31 After the war, Henny never spoke to her Indian husband about the death of her mother and sister and even evaded young Vikram’s questions, leaving her husband Shanti ignorant of how much she had mourned for them. Had Vikram not discovered the letters from the attic he would have never come to know of his grand-aunt Henny’s silent pain: “I have suffered unending torment over the fate of my loved ones, and will never get over it”, she wrote to a Jewish friend. Vikram Seth’s Two Lives is the only book from an Indian author to note the silence of holocaust survivors, their refusal to speak of the unspeakable. Wald feels “it will be difficult to find another non-Jewish author from a remote, not directly affected country who has shown such deep insight into long-term psychological consequences of the Holocaust.” 32 Contemporary writers of East and South Asian origin have drawn our attention to the relations between Asian diaspora and the Jewish ones in ways that have been perceived as provoking for both. Jewish American fiction helps Bharati Mukherjee “measure the ethno-racial and religious nastiness that dark-skinned, non-Judeo-Christian immigrant communities face.” 33 Explaining the development of the title story of her signature collection, “The Middleman”, Mukherjee says: "When I was working on [an uncompleted novel], a character with a minor role, a Jew who has relocated from Baghdad to Bombay to Brooklyn, took control and wrote his own story. He attracted me because he was a cynical person and a hustler, as many immigrant survivors have to be."34 Mukherjee’s protagonist Alfie Judah does not seem to be very far removed from those common to Jewish American writing, like Henry Roth’s David Schearle, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, etc. Split between the world of their parents in East Europe and their land of promise, America; frequently victimized, even if not triumphantly, by those less morally scrupulous than he. While this victimization places Alfie on a morally superior position, it denies his practical efficacy. Yet he is polar opposite “of this figure of Noble Schlemiel, for he is Sephardic – Iraqi born, dark complexioned, making him acceptable to the Central American revolutionaries among whom he finds himself: “at least he is not a gringo.” And instead of making efforts to assimilate, he is trying to flee America because of his violation of the law there through some shady deals. He is deeply amoral and another thing that distinguishes him from the Jewish-American quasi-hero is the lack of sexual guilt. “I must confess my weakness. It’s women,” announces Alfie, as the reader gets to see his lust for Maria, the concubine of his American host.35 Alfie’s amoral attitude pervades both his business as well as bedroom, as does Maria’s, who exploits him for the delivery of some supplies to the guerillas, led by her lover Andreas, and then obliges him with sex. The story ends with Alfie plotting his next move after realizing that it was only his compassionate response to her physical needs that kept her from killing him even though she did briefly point a gun at him before fleeing from the jungle with her lover. Jonathan Freedman argues that Mukherjee’s portrayal of Alfie is not a stereotype, but rather a deliberate invocation to counter such an idea: Alfie is not just unlike, but the polar opposite of, the sensitive Ashkenazic Jewish man: he is the embodiment of the worst nightmares of the generation that produced that figure. After all, the specter haunting assimilating American Jews of this period was not only the Holocaust, but also the anti-Semitic projections of the Jew as the horny trader standing outside national and moral borders alike. Memorialized not only by anti-Semitic pamphlets of the 1890s but by the spirited endeavor of Henry Ford— whose Dearborn Independent editorials on Jews and Jewishness were collected in a widely-circulated tome called The International Jew in the 1920s—and high-art literature by the likes of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the concept of the hyper-phallic, dark-complexioned Asiatic or non-European Jew as morally corrupt and corrupting cosmopolitan, frequently associated with exotically corrupt (and hence covertly


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attractive) sexual practices, suffused Middle America and high-art modernism alike. If Alfie Judah seems like a literal embodiment of such a figure it is surely not because Mukherjee wants to revive the Ford- or Eliot-sponsored anti-Semitic notions of the Jewish man, but rather because she wants to invoke—if not make her own—all that the Great Tradition of Jewish-American fiction had to expel in order to make its successful march into respectability.36 We have few works of fiction with Jewish characters in India’s vernacular literature and even fewer by non-Jewish writers. The only ones by non-Jewish writers that the present author is aware of are the Marathi novel Ranangan and the Urdu short story “Mozelle”. Vishram Bedekar’s Marathi novel Ranangan (1939) is the first Indian novel with Jewish characters. This novel is based on the author’s own experience of an ocean voyage from Europe to India in 1938, where he met a number of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Europe. Guttman finds it “a fascinating and simultaneously troubling book that calls attention to the plight of German Jews at a moment when their progressive marginalization was known by, but of little interest to, Western governments,” and “also makes extensive and often uncritical use of anti-Semitic stereotypes.”37 It is the story of a Maharashtrian, Chakradhar Widhwans, who falls in love with a Jewish refugee from Germany, Herta Van, whom he meets on an Italian ship en route to India, Chakradhar’s destination; and Shanghai, Herta’s destination. The novel is troubling because even while the novel’s protagonist and narrator Chakradhar falls for a Jewish woman, he accepts unquestioningly the anti-Semitic notion that Jews generally are profiteers and arms speculators who were responsible for the military and economic defeat of Germany in the First World War. But at the same time he comes to sympathize with the Jews when he is subjected to racism by an Italian steward onboard. Had the surprising end of Manto’s Urdu story Mozelle – in which the eponymous Jewish protagonist makes the supreme sacrifice to save the fiancé of her Sikh lover –not been what it is, one would have thought of the famous and progressive Muslim writer Manto as being biased against Jews because of his portrayal of the only Jewish character in the story as a woman of easy virtue and loose morals, seen by her dejected lover Trilochan as “careless, self-centered Jewish girl…nothing more than wild girl with a cold heart who jumped from here and there like a bird”, who “didn’t like underwear because they felt tight.” Manto was, perhaps, influenced in his portrayal of Mozelle by the encounters he might have had with the Jewish women operating as prostitutes in Bombay during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Joan G. Roland reports in her book, The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era that: In the census of 1901, seven Baghdadi women even listed their occupation as prostitutes. …As early as 1894, the Reverend J. Henry Lord, Jewish Mission Field, 1921, claimed that some two hundred European “Jews and Jewesses” were engaged in prostitution in Bombay and that the government had deported some of them because they were “purveyors of vice.” In 1916 the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (London), having heard about Jewish prostitution in India, wrote to the government of India to find out how extensive the problem was and whether or not they could undertake work in India to eradicate it. The central government wrote to the provincial governments asking for information on Jewish prostitution and discovered that the main centres were Calcutta, Rangoon and Bombay, with a total of 101 European Jews and 85 Asiatic Jews identified as prostitutes. The European Jews, mainly from central and eastern Europe, were professionals who had already been in the business for some years in Middle Eastern cities before coming to India, especially Bombay and Bengal. They would be unlikely to reform, the government thought. The Asiatic Jewish prostitutes, however, who carried on their trade with more secrecy than the Europeans, were mainly girls from low and depressed classes. They either had been recruited voluntarily in Baghdad, where they were prostitutes before being brought to India, or were the victims of parents and guardians who employed them as

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commercial speculation. The government felt that the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women might well do useful work among the Asiatic Jewish prostitutes…Sir Jacob Sassoon, with whom the association had communicated about the problem in 1909, felt that the trade could best be fought at the ports of embarkation, as the law in India made it difficult to eradicate the traffic in Bombay (The Jewish Chronicle [London], 25 June 1909, 20).38 Although Jews never faced any persecution in India, yet their numerical insignificance makes the Indian Jewish authors very sensitive to the plight of minorities, as manifested in the fact that the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 figures large in the works of mother-son duos, Esther David and her son Robin David; and Sheela Rohekar and her son Akash Verma.39 It is also important to mention here that of the four it is only Verma who did not grow up in Gujarat. Esther David’s most recent work, The Man with Enormous Wings (2010), focuses on the anti-Muslim pogrom that hit Ahmedabad in 2002. In it she imagines Mahatma Gandhi as a big bird flying over the city. In other books of hers too, like The Walled City (1997), Book of Esther (2002) and Book of Rachel (2006) there are repeated references to the 2002 antiMuslim pogrom in Gujarat. Akash Verma’s maiden novel It Happened That Night (2010) is set against the backdrop of the anti-Muslim pogrom of Gujarat. In Rohekar’s Miss Samuel (2013), one of the fellow residents of the protagonist in their old age home is Amina Iqbal Rizvi who lost her entire family to the pogrom. In the works of those Jewish writers with no connection to Gujarat, like Nissim Ezekiel, Bunny Reuben, Meera Mahadevan, Sophie Judah, Jael Silliman, Carmit Delman, Moses Aaron and Sadia Shepard, the anti-Muslim pogrom of Gujarat does not figure but there is a strong sensitivity to minority issues in general and one even finds references to the sectarian violence that accompanied the partition of India in 1947. In Meera Mahadevan’s novel Apna Ghar (1961) and Sophie Judah’s stories, “Nathoo” and “My Son, Jude Paul” from her collection, Dropped from Heaven (2007), there are references to the partition. Despite feeling connected to their Indian homeland, many Jews also faced trepidation and alienation. Rohekar in Miss Samuel discusses in detail the fear of Indian Jewish men about being mistaken for Muslims, as they are similarly circumcised. Esther David too writes about it in her novel Shalom India Housing Society: During the riots, some of them saw an angry mob armed with spears and swords stripping a young boy to see if he was circumcised. He had been burnt alive. The Jews had been terrified, as they were also circumcised. 40 Sadia Shepard in her auto-ethnographic book The Girl from Foreign (2008) recounts the story of David, who upon being chased by a Muslim mob in Mumbai, manages to save himself only by revealing his circumcised penis in order to convince the potential attackers that he was not a Hindu. David is conscious of the fact that the very physical mark that saved him in this case could have become the reason for his murder had he been chased by a Hindu mob instead, as happens to be the fate of the protagonist’s brother in Rohekar’s Miss Samuel: Ek Yahudi Gatha. This fear of Indian Jewish men of being mistaken for Muslims finds portrayal in Aparna Sen’s film Mr & Mrs Iyer. Indian Jewish writer Robin David, author of The City of Fear (2007), wrote about it on his blog: I was majorly offended by a scene in Aparna Sen’s Mr & Mrs Iyer. There is this part where rioters enter a bus scouting for Muslims to kill and randomly pull down pants of passengers to check if they are circumcised. One man gives away the identity of an old Muslim couple because he was Jewish, circumcised, and there was no way in hell that he would have been able to explain to the rioters that he was not Muslim. This was his way of distracting them from him. If I was in his place, I don’t think I would


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have given away the identity of the old couple. ...I had been put in the same situation in 2002.41 Indeed, this was just one of the several occasions that made Robin acutely conscious of the vulnerability conferred by his circumcised penis. In everyday life though, violence against Jews has been a rare thing. Instead, these feelings of separation often came in more subtle forms. Rohekar explores this exceptionally well in her novel Miss Samuel: India neither ever exiled the Jews nor persecuted them. They were never discriminated against for being Jewish. They got equal rights as citizens of India. But they were always seen as different and thus deprived of the joy of full integration in the Indian society … They were always seen as fellow human beings, but could never be included among ‘our own people’. It is for this reason only that they remained rootless and could never muster enough courage to play any significant role in Indian politics and culture. And it is perhaps for this reason only that successive generations went to their graves with the unfulfilled desire of reaching the land they had set out from. 42 Nevertheless, these books also help bring nuance to this sense of Jewish separation in Indian society – it is quite possibly this careful and unhurried portrait of these communities that are their greatest strength. We see that Jewish communities did often forge strong connections and emotional bonds with other Indian communities. For example, Silliman describes how Jews would regularly form relationships with their Muslim cooks, attend Christmas parties, and celebrate the festival Simchat Torah in the same way that the Hindus celebrated Holi, by spraying water at each other using water pistols. About Passover, she writes: Granny loved giving presents. Each year, Rachel and Jacob looked forward to the Easter eggs she brought them. If Easter and Passover coincided, the painted chocolate filled eggs from Nahoum’s would come before Passover started, so they could enjoy eating them while still observing the holiday. At Christmas time, she brought each of them brightly colored boxes filled with crepe paper bonbons trimmed with silver paper.43 Interactions with other communities didn’t often extend into the realm of marriage, however. Intermarriage was frequently looked down upon, so much so that we can see the characters in these novels often avoid contact with non-Jews. In Meera Mahadevan’s Apna Ghar (1961) the only Hindi novel on the Bene Israel other than Rohekar’s Miss Samuel, when Maizie’s Jewish sports club decides to play with a non-Jewish club, the decision of most of the Jewish parents is not to permit their daughters to play the match. Discrimination against the children of intermarriages also gets reflected in Rohekar’s Miss Samuel. Children of intermarriages were called ‘Kala Israel’ (Black Israel) and considered impure by the rest of the Bene Israel community to the extent that they were not even allowed near the cooking utensils of the ‘Gora Israel’ (White Israel). In the novel, Miss Samuel’s grandfather David Reuben (18821937) resents not being permitted into the Lal Deval Synagogue of Pune because of his being considered a ‘Kala Israel’ for his grandfather Isaji Eloji had married a Hindu. The taboo of intermarriage also figures prominently in Esther David’s Shalom India Housing Society. Meera Mahadeva’s Apna Ghar (1961), was also published in English in 1971 under the name Shulamith. Apna Ghar preceded Rohekar’s Miss Samuel by fifty-two years. In it, the eponymous heroine, Shulamith experiences a “sense of dual fidelity” between her devotion to her husband and to her way of life. She chooses her way of life and remains in India when her husband leaves for Israel; but she withers away in the agony of this separation, and eventually dies. It is significant to note how distinct the two novels are from one another, perhaps owing to a gap of more than half a century between the narratives. Unlike Apna Ghar, Miss Samuel deals with the ostensible absence of anti-Semitism in India. Apna Ghar presents a rosier picture of Jews in India:

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“There is no such nation in the world which could equal India in what it has given to the Jews. India has nourished us with affection for two millennia. No restrictions were ever imposed on the observance of our religion. We got land for our synagogues. We received such warmth that we started considering ourselves children of India. Now returning to Jerusalem is like turning our back towards our mother.” “But is it not bad to not return to one’s mother?” “Yes, of course! But can we forget what India has done for us. Everyone will have to admit that Jews have never been able to live in peace anywhere except India. Our religion was never defiled, on the contrary every deserving member of the community has been appropriately honored.” “I accept that.” “As far as I know,” Shulamith starts speaking, “We have been living here for two thousand years. Just think that in all of this long period we have never been persecuted or discriminated against and this is despite the fact that there is no commonality between our religion and Hinduism. …It is necessary for Jews from Germany to return to Israel, for what happened there can happen again. But here? What never happened in more than two thousand years will never happen here. Is this one reason not enough for us to continue to stay in India?”44 Perhaps Rohekar was emboldened to write the way she did because of the success of Esther David, India’s best known Jewish writer, and the two decades of diplomatic relations between India and Israel – during which India has emerged as the biggest purchaser of Israelimanufactured arms, with annual civilian (non related to defense purchases) trade between the two countries worth six billion dollars. India has also become a favorite tourist destination for the Israeli youth. In contrast, Mahadevan published Apna Ghar in 1961, at a time when there were no relations between the two states – India had refused, despite the absence of any conflict or dispute. In South Asia – a land of minorities, the challenge of pluralism is truly formidable. More than 800 languages are spoken in the region and only 66% of the population has access to education in their mother tongue. “The Minority like everywhere is a fluid identity in South Asia,” as Tapan Bose reminds us, “Its markers are language, culture, religion and ethnicity. But the most important marker is the position of ‘non-domination’ or ‘powerlessness’. The history of the last seven decades of state or nation making in South Asia proves the axiom – democracies create minorities. Nation and state are majoritarian concepts. These are also repositories of power. Access and control over these institutions of power and the distance from these sources of power or denial of access define the majority and the minority.” 45 Minorities suffer from inescapable complexes, including a persecution complex, or a discrimination complex. There may not always be a basis. We must be conscious of the fact that in a secular country like India, there are many false perceptions; and it suits certain people or parties to strengthen those tendencies. These are the distortions of reality which the press often willfully fosters.


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Notes Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002): 107. 2 Dohra Ahmad. “‘This Fundo Stuff is Really Something New’: Fundamentalism and Hybridity in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.1 (2005): 1–20. 3 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995): 235. 4 Anna Guttmann, “’People set apart’: Representations of Jewishness in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 42, no. 3-4 (2011): 103. 5 Ibid, 106. 6 Ibid. 7 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays in Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 20 8 Anna Guttman, Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 40-45. 9 Ibid. 10 Sarnath Banerjee, The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers (Delhi: Penguin, 2007) 11 Robin David, “In Israel’s mini-India, the rockets don’t scare them,” Sunday Times of India, July 20, 2014, 15. (The figure does not include the Judaizing communities.) 12 Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London: Granta,1998) 13 Wald, Shalom Salomon, “Jews, Judaism and Israel in India’s English Language Fiction: A Glimpse of What India’s Elites Read or Believe”, The Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies14 (2014): 61. 14 Ghosh, op.cit, p. 210. 15 Ibid. p. 13. 16 S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society – The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 Vols (Los Angeles, 1967-1988) 17 The book was completed and published twenty-eight years after Goitein’s death. It is a comprehensive collection of the India-related letters from the Cairo Geniza, in English translation: S.D.Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, India Traders from the Middle Ages Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008) (Also published in Hebrew by the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem). 18 Ghosh, op.cit., 95 19 Ghosh, op.cit., 95. 20 P.R. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) 21 Wald, Op.cit., 63. 22 Steven Bowman, “Review of Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land,” The Journal of IndoJudaic Studies I, no. 2 (1999): 145. 23 Rainer Lotz and Rekha Kamath, “Interculturality: A View from Below – Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay”, in Anil Bhatti and Johannes H. Voigt, Jewish Exile in India: 19331945 (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers in association with Max Mueller Bhavan, 1999) 24 Desai, op.cit., 20 25 Lotz, op. cit., 167. 26 Desai, op.cit., 104 f. 27 Lotz, op. cit., 167. 28 Linda Weinhouse, “Baumgartner’s Bombay: Postcolonialism and Postmemory”, Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies XI (2010): 37. 29 Wald, op.cit., 71. 30 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011): 15. 31 Vikram Seth, Two Lives (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), 236-237. 32 Wald, op. cit., 71. 1

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Freedman, Jonathan, “’Who’s Jewish?’: Some Asian-American Writers and the Jewish American Literary Canon,” Jewish in America (Part Two) XLII, no. 1 (Winter 2003.) Accessed April 10, 2016, url: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0042.126 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Anna Guttman, Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 72. 38 Joan G. Roland, The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era, Second Edition (New Brunswick (USA) and London (UK): Transaction Publishers, 1998): 329. 39 Verma is not a practicing Jew, but would be considered Jewish according to the Jewish oral law Halakha because of his Jewish mother. 40 Esther David, Shalom India Housing Society (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2007), 9. 41 Robin David, “The Reading” (Blog – City of Fear, 23 April, 2007) Accessed 10 April, 2016. Url: http://cityoffearblog.blogspot.in/2007/04/reading.html 42 Sheela Rohekar, Miss Samuel: Ék Yahūdī Gāthā (New Delhi: Bhartiya Jnanpith, 2013): 179. 43 Jael Silliman, The Man with Many Hats (Kolkata: Privately Published, 2013): 72. 44 Meera Mahadevan, Apna Ghar (Delhi: Akshar Prakashan, 1961), 44-45 (The present author’s translation) 45 Rita Manchanda, “Introduction: Majority-Minority Discourses in South Asia,” in Living on the Margins: Minorities in South Asia, ed. Rita Manchanda, (Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights, 2009): 3-4. 33

“A Jew Living in an Ashram:” The Spiritual Itinerary of S. S. Cohen Boaz Huss, Dept. of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev In the July 1952 issue of the journal India and Israel, a letter to the editor was published under the title “Hindu View on Dignity of Labour: A Jew Living in an Ashram Replies.”1 The letter, signed by S. S. Cohen, from Ramanashram, Tirunvannamalai, is a response to discussions concerning Jewish and Hindu views of the dignity of labor, which had been published in previous issues of India and Israel.2 In the letter, Cohen cites Hindu texts regarding the importance of manual labor, and exalts the heroism of the young state of Israel. Cohen says that he considers Israel a second India, and that he loves India “as the tenderest of mothers, who treasures in her immortal soul the most precious spiritual gems.” He argues that there are great affinities between Hindu and Jewish traditions and religious concepts, as well as their “inherent dynamism and practical mysticism.”3 Cohen was born in Basra, in the modern day Iraq, and buried in Ramanashram, in Tirunvannamalai, in southern India. Prior to becoming a follower of Sri, Cohen had joined the Theosophical Society, lived for five years at the Society's headquarters in Adyar, and was one of the founders of the Association of Hebrew Theosophists. This paper will describe the life of S. S. Cohen, his activities as a Theosophist and follower of Sri Ramana, and his ideas concerning Judaism and the state of Israel. The paper also looks at several other early-twentieth century followers of Indian gurus, who were of Jewish origin, and compare their attitudes to their Jewish origins with that of Cohen. Finally, I will suggest that we may understand the attraction of spiritual seekers of Jewish origin towards Hindu spirituality, and their different attitudes to the question of their Jewish identity, in the context of Jewish Orientalism. Sulman Samuel Cohen was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1895. He came from a very poor Jewish family, and was the eldest of eleven children. As a young man, he arrived in Mumbai, where he worked as a shop assistant and was trained as an accountant. 4 In Mumbai, Cohen joined the Theosophical Society, and met with its president, Annie Besant (1847-1933). At her request, he moved to the headquarters of the Society in Adyar. Cohen lived there for over five years during the 1920s, and studied at the Theosophical Brahmavidya Ashram. He became acquainted with the other leaders of the Society, including Charles Webster Leadbeater and J. Krishnamurti.5 Cohen was one of the founders of the Association of Hebrew Theosophists, established at Adyar during the jubilee congress of the Theosophical Society, in December 1925. Cohen was active in the Association during the following years, which saw the opening of several branches in India, Iraq, Europe, and the United States of America.6 He served as secretary of the committee for building a synagogue at the Adyar compound. 7 In 1931, Cohen was based in Kandy, Ceylon.8 He was still active in the Theosophical Society and the Association of Hebrew Theosophists, and got involved in a controversy concerning the excommunication of a Jewish Theosophical group in Basra. In 1927, a Theosophical lodge had been founded in Basra by Kaduri Ani, a local Jewish businessman (whose brother, Reuben Ani, was active in the Theosophical Society in India). In 1931, following a controversy that involved Rabbi Leo Jung, a leading orthodox Rabbi from New York, and Rabbi Joseph Herz, the chief Rabbi of the British Empire, the Iraqi rabbinical authorities excommunicated the Jewish Theosophists in Basra, because they claimed that Theosophy was incompatible with Judaism. Following the excommunication, the Jewish Theosophists and their supporters established a separate Jewish community, which had its own religious institutes, and provided its own kosher meat. The community, named “The Sincere Jews,” functioned independently and successfully until 1936, when a truce between both sides was achieved, and the excommunication annulled.9

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Cohen, who originally came from Basra, and knew the parties involved in the controversy, defended the Jewish Theosophists, and vehemently criticized the rabbinical authorities that opposed them. On June 5, 1931, he sent an open letter to Chaim Weitzman, the head of the World Zionist Organization. The letter, entitled, “Excommunication in a Modern Synagogue” was printed in The Jewish Advocate, a Zionist journal published from Bombay. In it, Cohen described the rabbis of Basra as “primitive, uneducated, half literate, religious autocrats,” and called on Weitzman to act in order to annul the excommunication: The Jewish Theosophists in Basra who have lived all these years in peace and in perfect harmony with their co-religionists and within the fold of the Jewish Congregation as true worshippers of the God of Abraham, are now excommunicated to die of starvation and in disgrace. It is up to you then and other influential co-religionists to save them, and in saving them, to save the Jewish race from the opprobrium brought down on it by the discreditable activities of the Rabbis of Iraq in mischievous collaboration with Dr. Jung of America. Will you not rise to the occasion and cause the Excommunication to be withdrawn? 10 Between 1932 and1933, Cohen continued his attacks on the rabbis of Basra, and his defense of the Jewish Theosophists. In a letter published in October 1932 in Israel Messenger (a Jewish journal published in Shanghai) he wrote: Let us by all means be frank over the poisonous germs that are feeding on the heart – the purity, the spiritual beauty and the fundamental truths – of our religion. Let us confess that our orthodoxy is moving in a dreamland of its own making blissfully ignorant of the passages of time over its cherished traditions and obsolete dogmas. 11 In another letter, published in the same journal in January 1933, he wrote: We have, therefore, reached the breaking point, and it is high time for the Rabbis to call off this dirty game, and to begin to think of reforming themselves before they can hope to succeed in reforming us whose sole guilt is reading books which they do not comprehend and joining a Society which they know nothing about. 12 In 1933, there were exchanges in a theosophical journal, in which Cohen is visibly angry over the stance of a German academic. The matter was the persecution of Jews in Germany, and these views were expressed in the main journal of the Society, The Theosophist. In June 1933, C. Jinarajadasa, the editor of The Theosophist (who later became the president of the Society) published a condemnation of the persecution of the Jews in Germany in the editorial column, entitled “On the Watch Tower.” He wrote: Persecution anywhere and in any form is an outrage on Universal Brotherhood, and the campaign of persecution launched vigorously against the Jews by official Germany has sent a thrill of horror throughout the world.13 Prof. Johannes Maria Verweyen (1883-1945), the former general secretary of the Theosophical Society in Germany,14 responded in a letter defending Hitler and the Nazi regime and its persecution of the Jews: The so-called persecution of the Jews in Germany had not been a primary act, but in answer to the persecution of non-Jew by Jews, that means their predomination in theaters, literature, commerce, and so on. 15 In the October 1933 volume of The Theosophist, Cohen responded to Verweyen’s letter:

“A Jew Living in an Ashram:” The Spiritual Itinerary of S. S. Cohen

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It is beyond the comprehension of any right-thinking man, let alone a Theosophist, to read Professor Verweyen appealing for ‘Wisdom, Brotherhood and Justice’ in The Theosophist for September … it beats my “wisdom” to understand how predominance in theaters and literature can be called persecution – jealousy-provoking should be the appropriate term – and how can the one persecute the ninety-nine? I hope, in conclusion, that there will come about a change of attitude on the part of the Professor and his sympathizers, if any, to help the German nation to rise from its present perilous moral situation and to return to prosperity through the spiritual path of real “Wisdom, Brotherhood and Justice.”16 Following the death of Annie Besant in September 1933, Cohen was involved in the elections for the new president of the Theosophical Society. He published a letter in The Theosophist in which he raised objections to the decision of the editor not to publish the manifesto of Earnest Wood, who had campaigned for the office of president against George Arundale. 17 It appears that after the election of George Arundale as the new president, Cohen became less active in the Theosophical Society. During the same period, Cohen read Paul Brunton’s, In Search of Secret India (1934).18 In the book, which describes his voyages in India in 1931, Brunton describes his enthusiastic impressions of Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950), an Indian saint who resided near the sacred mountain Arunachalla, in Tiruvannamalai, in southern India. Cohen, like many others, was very much impressed by Brunton’s book, and decided to travel to Tiruvannamalai and meet the Indian teacher. On February 3, 1936, Cohen arrived at Ramanashram. In his memoirs, he recounts his first encounter with Ramana: I was led to a small dining room, at the door of which I was asked to remove my shoes. He was the Maharshi himself… I was alone in the Hall with him. Joy and peace suffused my being – never before, had I such a delightful feeling of purity and well-being at the mere proximity of a man. My mind was already in deep contemplation of him – him not as flesh, although that was exquisitely formed and featured – but as an unsubstantial principle which could make itself so profoundly felt despite the handicap of a heavy material vehicle … It is needless to say that from that day Ramanashram became my permanent home.19 Cohen became one of Sri Ramana’s devoted disciples. Yet, he did not completely cut off his contacts with the Theosophical Society, nor did he abandon his Jewish identity, and his interest in Jewish affairs. In August 1942, he sent a letter to the editor of The Theosophist, entitled “The Jews and Poland.”20 The letter was written in response to the journal’s previous issue, which had been dedicated to Poland. Cohen criticized The Theosophist for ignoring Polish cooperation with the Nazi regime and its persecution of the Jews: “No amount of whitening Poland’s sepulcher abroad can whiten her deeds against her 3,300,000 Jewish nationals,” stated Cohen, and called on Polish Theosophists to make amends for the persecution of the Jews. He wrote further, “Perhaps it will help them, after the war clouds have rolled back from their Motherland, to use their talents among their compatriots to make amends for all this.”21 Cohen's identification with Judaism and his sympathy for the recently-established State of Israel come to the fore in a letter – which he published about a decade later, in 1951, in the Journal India and Israel – entitled, “Backing the Wrong Horse.”22 In the letter he attacks Pakistan and the Arab countries and speaks of the “the recent inhuman treatment meted out by Iraq to her 120,000 law abiding, helpless Jewish citizens – a blot which will forever blacken the history of that country.” Cohen continued, extolling “the tiny but valiant Israel,” which “routed seven Arab armies, and sent them licking their smarting wounds to this day.”23

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Cohen’s identification with both Hinduism and Judaism comes to the fore in a letter he published a year later – mentioned at the beginning of this paper –which was titled “Hindu View on Dignity of Labour: A Jew Living in an Ashram Replies,”24. In the letter, which was sent from Ramanasharam, Cohen offered proof for the importance of manual labor in Hindu sources, and related this to the current situation of the State of Israel. Cohen referred to the Brahamasutras, the Viveka Chudamani, the Kaivalyam, the Srimad Bhagavatam, the Mahabharta, and the “Blessed Gita,” in which: “physical labor is being enjoined and appreciated even better than tapas (religious practices) because the times called for it.” He emphasized that he was not preaching a gospel of the extremely active mind: “I am a pure Advaitan … and would be extremely happy if every human being, while working, would take to repeating a thousand times a day the great Mahakavya “Tatwamasi” (That thou Art)." Yet, he said, one must distinguish between times of great national stress and those of peace and normalcy when one can repose and brood: “Did not the Lord of Creation, the teachers of teachers, Sri Krishna himself become a charioteer to drive Arjuna’s Chariot on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, because of the national crisis of the time?” Cohen uses the allegory of Mahabharata to fathom the affairs at Israel: Israel needs hands and more hands, and still more hands and muscles to build, to produce wealth for the enormous human influx driven out from their hearths by persecution and barbarous laws from Arab countries in particular without money and clothes and for the security of the state of Israel.25 Cohen contended that the highest Indian military honor, the Param Vir Chakara, should be conferred on “every one of these heroes who shouldered the gigantic burden and performed the miraculous transformation of the Holy Land, for their heroism unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of mankind.”26 Cohen affirmed his Jewish identity, his connection to Israel, and his love for India: Some Jews take India as a second Israel, some others, like my humble self are keener still, and take Israel as second India. These love India as the tenderest of mothers, who treasures in her immortal soul the most precious spiritual gems which lighten “cruel” life’s heavy burden, sweeten it, and give it a meaning and a goal.27 After the passing of Sri Ramana, Cohen stayed at the ashram for a couple of years and then left for Vellore, where he worked as a homeopath.28 In 1952, he published a book based on the notes he had taken during conversations between Sri Ramana had his devotees, Guru Ramana: Memories and Notes (Madras: S. Viswanathan, 1952).29 The book was published for the second time in 1962, and has been republished many times since. In 1965, Cohen published a condensed translation of Srīmad Bhāgavata (Madras: Chinmaya Publications Trust, 1965). Cohen’s other published works include: Advaitic sādhanā: or The Yoga of Direct Liberation (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1975); Residual Reminiscences of Ramana (Tirunvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam, 1975); Ulladu Narpadu (forty verses on reality), by Ramana Maharashi: Translation and Commentary (London: Watkins, 1978) and Reflections on Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi (Tirunvannamalai: T.N Venkataraman, 1979). He also wrote the epilogue to B. V. Narasimha Swamy’s Self-Realisation: or Life and Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (Tiruvannamalia, Sri Ramanasramam, 1976). Cohen resided for several years in Vellore. When his physical and mental health deteriorated, his friends took him back to Tirunvannamalai.30 During the last years of his life, he resided again in the ashram.31 In May 1980, he passed away. According to his request, he was buried in the ashram’s compound.32


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Cohen was probably one of the first Jewish followers of Advaita Vedanta. Yet he was not the only Jew who resided for a long period in an Indian ashram during the early twentieth century. Interestingly, many of the early non-Indian devotees of Sri Ramana were of Jewish origin. One of the first followers of Ramana, who contributed much to his fame in the west, was Paul Brunton (1898-1981), mentioned earlier in this paper as the author of In Search of Secret India (1934). Brunton was born as Raphael Hurst in London, to Jewish parents who had immigrated to England from Eastern Europe. He joined the Theosophical Society in the 1920s and later, in the early 1930s he traveled to India. In 1931, Brunton arrived at Ramanashram and became an enthusiastic admirer of Sri Ramana. 33 His description of his visit in the Ashram in his In Search of Secret India made a great impression, and contributed much to the popularity of Sri Ramana in the west. As mentioned above, Cohen, upon reading Brunton’s book, got curios about Sri Ramana, and decided to visit the Ashram. Another disciple of Ramana was Maurice Frydman (1901-1976), who was born in Poland in a Jewish family, and later lived in France, where he worked as an electrical engineer. He became interested in Theosophy in an early age, and in time, got acquainted with Annie Besant and Krishnamurti. In 1935, he moved to Bangalore in India. He traveled to Tiruvannamalai, and became an ardent admirer of Sri Ramana. Later, he also studied with other Indian Gurus, continued his relations with Krishnamurti, and went on to become a disciple of Gandhi and a close friend of Nehru. 34 Another disciple of Ramana of Jewish origins was Lucia Osborne, originally Ludka Lipszyc35, from Katowice, Poland. Lucia and her husband, Arthur Osborne (1906-1970), were followers of René Guénon. They visited India in 1941. Because of the war, Lucia traveled to Tirunvannamalai with her three children, to stay at Ramanashram, while her husband returned to Bangkok where he was had a teaching job. Arthur was interned by the Japanese, and was able to join his family only four years later, upon his release. He later became the editor of the ashram’s journal, The Mountain Path.36 It is noteworthy to mention another person of Jewish origin, who resided in an Indian ashram (although not Ramana’s), and who played an important role in the early twentiethcentury spiritual culture of India – Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), who became known as The Mother, was born in a Sephardic Jewish family in Paris in 1878. She became interested in the occult, and joined the Cosmic Movement, headed by the Jewish occultist, Max Theon. She arrived at Pondicherry, then a French Colony in southern India in 1914, with her husband, Paul Richard (who was also a member of the Cosmic Movement). There, they both became close to the Indian political activist and spiritual leader, Aurobindo Ghose. In 1920, after a few years in Japan, Mirra returned to Pondicherry. She was recognized by Aurobindo as the cosmic, divine Mother, and together, they founded Sri Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondicherry. 37 As mentioned previously, S. S. Cohen became a follower of Sri Ramana following his activities at the Theosophical Society. His interest in Indian spirituality and subsequently, his becoming a disciple of Sri Ramana and a resident of Ramanashram, were undoubtedly stimulated by the interest of the Theosophists in Hinduism. Other disciples of Ramana of Jewish origin were also followers of the Theosophical Society, or other western esoteric movements, before their reaching Tirunvannamalai in pursuit of enlightenment under the guidance of this renowned holy man. Undoubtedly, their interest in Hindu spirituality was also stimulated by the fascination with the “Mystical East” that was prevalent at the time in western esoteric movements. The attraction of spiritual seekers of Jewish origin toward Hindu spirituality in the early twentieth century can be understood through the framework of Jewish Orientalism and it complexities. As David Biale observes, “Jewish orientalism involved a complex dialectic of projection and displacement of oneself onto an object that was never really other.”38 Jews and Judaism were perceived in the Christian West as having essentially Asian and Oriental characteristics. Some Jews, especially in Western Europe, embraced a negative perspective on the ‘Orient,’ and tried to purge Judaism of its perceived Oriental elements. They thus

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attempted to construct a new, Western, “enlightened” Jewish identity. 39 On the other hand, from the late nineteenth century, many Western acculturated Jews adopted a positive neoRomantic image of the Orient and embraced their perceived Oriental identity. In this framework, Jews promoted and valorized the perceived Eastern, Oriental and Semitic elements of their culture, and called for a return of the Jews to their homeland, in the East. Yet European Jews who embraced their supposed Eastern origins often expressed an ambivalent stance towards this new assumed oriental identity. 40 The Zionist movement regarded East-European Jewish culture as degraded, and aspired to create a modern western nation in the East.41 As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin suggested, the emigration of the Jews to the East was perceived “as the transformation and regeneration of the Jew; that is, the overcoming of oriental elements.”42 Most of the above mentioned “Jews in ashrams” were ambivalent towards their Jewish origins, and distanced themselves from the Jewish community. Brunton changed his original Jewish-sounding name, had a cosmetic surgery performed on his nose, and advised his Jewish followers to do the same.43 Frydman and Lucia Osborne did not relate to their Jewish origins. Alfassa did not identify herself as Jewish and most of her followers were not aware of her Jewish origins. Travel to Indian ashrams can be seen as another way of grappling with and negating Jewish-Oriental identity. By embracing Oriental spirituality and relocating to the East, Jewish followers of Indian gurus could distance themselves from their Jewish origins and enhance the perception of them as Westerners. Jews of Middle-Eastern and East-European origins who were perceived in Europe as “Orientals” were transformed, in India, into “Westerners” (including Cohen, who arrived in India from Iraq). Brunton, Cohen, Osborne and Frydman were described as Western followers of Ramana,44 and Mirra Alfassa as “the first Westerner to become an Indian Guru.”45 Interestingly, in comparison to the Jews who arrived in India from Europe, and who distanced themselves from Judaism, Cohen spoke openly about his Jewish origins and had an active interest in Jewish topics, including the State of Israel. As has already been mentioned, before he joined Ramanashram, Cohen was one of the founders of the Association of Hebrew Theosophists, and raised funds for the building of a Jewish synagogue at Adyar. After the rise of Nazism and the Second World War, he expressed his sympathies for the Jews of Europe, and later, his admiration for the State of Israel. The fact that Cohen was more openly interested in Judaism and the State of Israel, and that he was vocal about this interest46 may be related to the fact that he did not arrive in India from Europe. As a member of the Iraqi Jewish community, he was less susceptible to the ambivalence of acculturated European Jews with regard to their Jewish “Oriental” origins and was less estranged from Jewish tradition. In contrast to the others mentioned above, Cohen regarded his Jewish identity as compatible with Hindu spirituality. In a letter that he published in India and Israel, he emphasized upon “the great affinities that exist between the Hindu and Jewish traditions and religious concepts … their inherent dynamism and practical Mysticism.”47 It was because of his belief in the fundamental spiritual and mystical affinity between Jewish and Hindu mysticism that Cohen was able to be a Jewish “pure Advaitan,” and present himself as “a Jew living in an ashram.”


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Notes * The research for this study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant no. 774/10). I would like to thank David Godman and Dorab Framji who shared with me their memories of S.S Cohen. I am grateful to Julie Chajes and David Godman who read the drafts of this paper and offered valuable comments. 1 S.S Cohen, “Hindu view on Dignity of Labour, A Jew in an Ashram Replies”, India and Israel 4, No. 13 (1952): 37. I am grateful to Shimon Lev, who found this letter and brought it to my attention. 2 “Jewish Views on Dignity of Labour”, India and Israel 4, No. 11 (1952): 25; J.C Khanna. “Hindu View on Dignity of Labour,” India and Israel 4, No. 12 (1952): 25. 3 Cohen, “Hindu View,” 37. 4 V. Ganesan, The Human Gospel of Ramana Maharshi, (PDF file for personal sharing via eBook readers): 459-460. David Godman “Talks on Sri Ramana Maharshi: Narrated by David Godman - Tales from Palakottu (Part I)”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxCuGtCvkcg. Cohen relates that he was born in Basra in a letter he published in Israel Messenger (January 1 1933): 21. 5 See Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 461; Godman, “Talks on Sri Ramana Maharshi”; S. S. Cohen, “Letter to the Editor,” Israel Messenger (January 1 1933): 21. 6 See Boaz Huss, “‘The Sufi Society from America’: Theosophy and Kabbalah in Poona in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Kabbalah and Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2010), eds. Boaz Huss et al, 187-188; Boaz Huss, “‘Qabbalah, the Theos-Sophia of the Jews’: Jewish Theosophists and their perceptions of Kabbalah” in Theosophical Appropriations, eds. Julie Chajes and Boaz Huss (forthcoming). On Gandhi's Jewish associates in South Africa, who were affiliated with the Theosophical Society, see: Shimon Lev, "Gandhi and his Jewish Theosophists Supporters in South Africa,” in Theosophical Appropriations, eds. Julie Chajes and Boaz Huss (forthcoming). 7 The president of the committee was Gaston Polak and its chairman, A. B. Salem. A. Schwartz, the treasurer of the Theosophical Society in Adyar, served as the treasurer of the committee. See Leonard Bosman, A Plea for Judaism (Adyar: Association of Hebrew Theosophists, 1926), 22-23. Cohen published appeals for donations for the Adyar Synagogue in The Jewish Theosophist 1, No.1 (1926): 5; 1, No. 2 (1926): 10-11; 1, No. 3 (1927): 2627; 1, No. 4 (1927): 13; 1. No. 5 (1927): 7. Cohen wrote the report on the activities of the A. H. T. for the annual report of the Theosophical Society. See The General Report of the Fifty Second Anniversary and Convention of the Theosophical Society (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1928), 260. 8 Letters by Cohen, sent from Kandy, were published in The Jewish Advocate (June 1931): 184, and in Israel Messenger (1 October 1932): 18-19; (1 January 1933): 21-22. According to an interview with Dorab Framji (February 5, 2012), Cohen was working as an inspector of Arabic studies in Kandy. 9 Hayim Cohen, “Jewish Theosophists in Basra, a Symptom of the Struggle of the Generation of Enlightenment,” Ha-Mizrah ha-Hadash 15 (1965): 401-407 [Hebrew]; David Sagiv, The Jewish Community in Basrah 1914-1952, (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2004), 73-88 [Hebrew]. 10 The Jewish Advocate, (June 1931): 184. 11 Israel Messenger (1 October 1932): 19. 12 Israel Messenger (1 January 1933): 22. 13 The Theosophist (June 1933): 257. Interestingly, Jinarajadasa writes that Theosophists removed the Swastika from their seal at this period, because of its association with antiSemitism and Hitlerism. 14 On Verweyen and his relations with the T. S., see Helmut Zander, “Johannes Maria Verweyen (1883-1945) als Theosoph,” in Gaesdoncker Blätter 7 (2005): 37-70; and Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 226-227.

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Notwithstanding his initial support of the Nazi regime, Vereweyn was later arrested by the Nazis and died in Bergen-Belzen concentration camp. 15 The Theosophist, (September 1933): 724. This journal also contains another response to Jinarajadasa, by Jutta Todenhaupt, denying the persecution of the Jews and defending the Nazi regime, ibid, 727-728. It also contains an unsigned letter, which admitted the persecution of Jews (It nonetheless objected to some of Jinarajadasa's observations), ibid, 726. 16 The Theosophist (October 1933): 110. Following Cohen’s letter, another prominent German Theosophist, Hugo Vollrath (1877-1943), from Leipzig, published a letter. Vollrath criticized the Indian Theosophical Society for its stand against the Nazi regime, and defended the latter’s acts against the Jews, claiming that: “In the interests of racial hygiene also, great care is being taken that this strange race may no longer hold a position, which does not belong to her, in a country not her own.” C. Jinarajadasa published a response to Vollrath, in which he wrote: “What is one a Theosophist for, except to denounce such crimes against the root principles of humanity? I for one am not disposed to keep my Wisdom in one pocket and my Brotherhood in another,” The Theosophist (October 1933): 111. 17 The Theosophist (April 1934): 113-114. 18 Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 461. 19 S. S. Cohen, Guru Ramana, Memoires and Notes (Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam, 2003) (8th edition): 4-5. 20 Cohen, “The Jews and Poland,” in The Theosophist 64 (1942): 263. 21 Ibid. 22 India and Israel, 4, no. 4 (1951): 37. 23 India and Israel, 4, no. 4 (1951): 37. 24 India and Israel 4, no. 13 (1952): 37. 25 India and Israel 1 (July 1952): 37. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 469-470. 29 Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 468-469, 474. 30 Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 470. 31 Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 470-472. 32 Cohen was first buried in the public graveyard outside Ramanasramam. About a year later, it was decided to move his remains to the ashram, as he had requested. I am grateful to David Godman for this information. See also Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 472-473. 33 Annie Cahn Fung, Paul Brunton: A Bridge Between India and the West. Accessed 24th April, 2015, http://www.paulbrunton.org/files/PBThesisPt1.pdf, 13-51. See also Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 400-418. 34 Pant, Apa B., “Maurice Frydman,” in The Mountain Path, Vol 28, no. 1-2 (1991): 31-37; N.K Srinivasan, N.K., “Maurice Frydman – Jnani and a Karma Yogi: A Biography,” Accesed 24th April, 2015, https://www.scribd.com/doc/97304328/3/Chapter-3-The-Karma-Yogi. According to Apa Pant, Frydman was born in Krakow, and became a Theosophist in 1926. David Godman kindly informed me (private e-mail, June 4, 2015) that he was able to ascertain that he was born in Warsaw, and that in a letter in his possession, Frydman relates that he had read a book by Krishnamurti already when he was 16 (1917). Pant tells that in the early 1920s Frydman converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. Yet, as Godman informed me, there is no other source for this. 35 I am grateful to Chris Quilkey for this information. 36 See: Osborne, 25-89. Malcolm Tillis, New Lives: 54 Interviews with Westerners on Their Search for Spiritual Fulfilment in India (pdf ebook, www.lulu.com, 2011), 275-279. Accessed 24th April, 2015. Ganesan, 739-741.


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Kumari Jayawarden, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Woman and South Asia During British Colonial Rule (New York: Routledge, 1995), 204-217; Peter Heehs, The Life of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press: New York, 2008), 250-257; 347-415; Idem, “The Kabbalah, the Philosophie Cosmique, and the Integral Yoga: A Study in Cross-Cultural Influence,” ARIES 11, no. 2 (2011): 228-229. 38 Beale, David “Shabbtai Zvi and the Seductions of Jewish Orientalism,” in Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 16-17 (2001): 89. 39 Paul Mende-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 82-83. 40 Mende-Flohr, Divided Passions, 77-132; David Beale, “Shabbtai Zvi and the Seductions of Jewish Orientalism,” 85-90; Khazzoom, Aziza “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel," American Sociological Review 68, no. 4 (2003): 481-510. Ivan Davidsin Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, “Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction,” in Orientalism and the Jews (Lebanon: NH, 2005): XIII-XL. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective,” Ibid, 163-181. 41 Khazzoom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism,” 499-500. 42 Raz- Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West,” 167. 43 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, My Father's Guru (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), XI. 44 Ganesan, The Human Gospel, 21. 45 Peter Stockinger, “Mirra Alfassa, The Mother,” accessed 24th April 2015, https://starsandstones.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/mirra-alfassa-the-mother/ 46 It should be noted that Mirra Alfassa also showed some interest in Jewish themes (especially in connection to the teachings of her Jewish teacher, Max Theon), and in 1967, expressed her sympathy with the State of Israel, before the Six-Day War. See for instance, Sujata Nahar, Mothers’ Chronicles: Mirra the Occultist (Paris: Institut de Recherches Évolutive, 1986), 4546, 49. Mother's Agenda 7, (May 18, 1966), accessed 24th April, 2015, http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/ma/agenda_07/1966-05-18-01_e.htm. It is also interesting to note that Arthur Osborne, Lucia Lipszyc’s husband (who was not Jewish) had some interest in Jewish topics. In 1951, he published an article on “Kibbutz and Ashram,” in the journal India and Israel. India and Israel 4, no. 5 (1951): 28. In 1964, he published a Poem, entitled "Ahad" (One in Hebrew) in the second issue of the Ashram's journal, The Mountain Path, which he edited. The Mountain Path 1, no. 2 (1964): 19. 47 India and Israel 1 (July 1952): 37. 37

“Clear Are the Paths of India”: The Representation of Tagore in Jewish Literature Shimon Lev (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) Synopsis The poet, writer and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore (1876-1941) was the first Asian to win the literature Nobel (1913) following the publication of his poetry book, Geetanjali. Today, Tagore is considered to be one of India’s greatest poets. It is surprising to note the extent of significant and diverse references to him in Hebrew and Yiddish literature and journalism in Europe and Palestine in the first decades of the 20th century. 1 In this paper, I examine how the Jewish literary world reacted to Rabindranath Tagore’s writings and lectures. I claim that Tagore had considerable representation in, and substantial literary and ideological influence on the Jewish world, due to his special role as a representative of “Oriental India” and his idea of Pan-Asianism. Tagore was a symbol of modern India’s cultural and national revival. Yet, he did not reject Western liberal values, but emphasized the “East-West” dichotomy and called for a bridging of the two. Tagore claimed that Asia constitutes one entity of cultural continuity and hence carries a much-needed healing spiritual message to the West. As a product of orientalist European ideology of the late 19th century and a synthesis of the Bengali encounter between the English and an elite Brahmin stratum, Tagore somehow adopted much of the orientalist paradigms related to Indian cultural self-perception. Tagore was India’s most prominent representative in the Jewish and Zionist world of his days. Through the reception of Tagore’s writings, India constituted an additional component in the construction of an Asian identity in Jewish Palestine, emphasizing the revival of the East and connecting it to its historical roots. At the time of the emergence of the Zionist Movement, India was sufficiently distant and exotic to not constitute a threat to the Western cultural hegemony, which dominated Zionism. Some stray “Pan-Asian” voices in the Jewish world remained on the margins. This distance enabled a discussion of “the return to Asia,” emphasizing its idealistic romantic aspect, namely the revival of the East. Introduction “Clearer are the paths of India than paths of renowned countries in Europe and America. All this was achieved by the power of Tagore’s poems and Gandhi’s endurance,” so wrote Rabbi Benyamin (1880-1957) (Yehusu Redler Feldman 1944, 184), one of the most prominent representatives of the Pan-Semitic-Asian Zionism, about what seemed to him to be the Yishuv (Jewish population of Palestine) Jews’ profound familiarity with India in the 1930s, which he believed emanated from joint cultural aspects. After he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, Tagore figured as India’s primary representative to the extra-Indian world in the first half of the 20th century. He became significantly more prominent than any other contemporary Indian intellectual. His lectures and writings stimulated and energized authors, literary critics, scholars, philosophers, and religious and political leaders in Europe, the United States and other Asian countries. Responses to his ideas on the relationship between the East and West, and his criticism of nationalism were discussed, consolidated and contextualized in different discursive setups. Due to his fame, Tagore turned from a poet into a modern prophet and preacher. He became an agent and a prominent cultural catalyst of high stature and great popularity, and obtained the status of an Eastern prophet and mystic that few before him had attained. The questions he raised dealt with issues similar to those preoccupying the Jewish-Zionist world, and he was widely published in Jewish literature and journals in Europe and in Palestine.

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The Jewish discourse on the question of the attitude to the East and its revival was part of a wider international discourse taking place at the peak of the European imperialist era. Many scholars began to reject the superiority and hegemony of the “European civilization” and supported different models (Cemil 2007, 39-70). The positive image of the mystical East, which was cultivated in Germany in particular since the 19th century, influenced the discourse on Jewish assertion and created an opportunity to enable a more positive image of the Jew as a descendent of the East (Mendes-Flohr 2010, 231).2 It also enabled European Jews to develop an affinity with their Asiatic roots and a new perspective on the perceived “half-Asian East European brothers,” a term coined by the writer Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904). From the point of view of the Jewish world in Europe, the definition of the Jews’ identity was more complex than that of the national identity in India. British India’s position as the Jewel in the Crown, and the great importance the British attached to Western imperialism was in its classic form. The Jews in Europe, in contrast, constituted a kind of “other,” a “Semitic” pariah and were called “the Asians of Europe” and “Asia’s refugees” (Acheheim 2010, 8). The attitude towards the Jews as such was characterized by colonial and orientalist perceptions. Thus, on the one hand, the Jews took part in the orientalist discourse when they themselves spoke about the East as a rather vague geographic and cultural entity, but on the other hand, they were simultaneously its subject. Acheheim referred to this discourse as “the intricate web of orientalism”, since it was characterized by parallel, contrasting and ironic capacities. Khazzoom (2003) characterized the multi-ambiguous and self-contradictory strategy in the Jewish world regarding the term “East-West” as the “great chain of orientalism.” The discussion of these questions in the Jewish world was also at the center of the racial discourse prevalent at the advent of the 20th century in the formulations of Ernest Renan (1892-1928) and the Indologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900). The inclination to “the Orient” became an even more significant component following the emergence of the national and cultural Jewish revival movements in Eastern and Western Europe. Questions of cultural belonging to the East or the West were usually discussed in Zionist discourses from a clearly Western perspective, while the employment of rhetoric on the “return to Asia” served as a justification, directed both internally and externally, for Zionist national aspirations. Paradoxically, these national aspirations, both in India and in the Jewish world, were mainly a result of modern European thought.3 Max Nordau (1849-1923), Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), Ben Gurion and several others presented the idea of Zionism as conveying European culture to the East, in order for it to function as a European barrier against Asia. Nordau, for example, proclaimed: The word Asianism does not scare us […] So confident are we in our two thousand years of Europeanism that we can scoff at the teasing that in Israel we shall become Asians. We shall not become Asians there […] We intend to come to Israel as the emissaries of culture and expand Europe’s moral boundaries to the Euphrates. (Nordau 1960, 44) However, despite the dominance of Western orientation among the leaders of the Zionist Movement, Pan-Asianism had an important place as a result of the disappointment with the attitude toward Jews after the failure of the Enlightenment Movement and the increase in antisemitism. In his study on the view towards the Orient in the Jewish world, Hannan Harif claims that this voice, which he terms “Pan-Semitic,” was clearly and significantly present in the Zionist discourse in Europe and Israel (Harif 2004). Following the escalation in the violent struggle between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, this voice became marginalized. The PanSemitic voices were part of the wider Pan-Asiatic view. This view was, indeed, removed from Zionist consensus with the escalation of the violent struggle, but it was heard in Hebrew journalism and could not be ignored. Within the Pan-Asiatic discourse were those, like Rabbi Benyamin and Eugen Hoeflich (1891-1965) among others, who gravitated towards India and Japan.

“Clear Are the Paths of India”: The Representation of Tagore in Jewish Literature

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Hence, as far as they were concerned, India and the Liberation Movement, together with the need for religious sociological reforms presented by Tagore and Gandhi, constituted an inspiring source as the most significant example of “the revival of the East.” The Pan-Semitism advocates of Zionist political views were usually moderate and they mainly discussed the affinity and integration in Palestine as part of integration into Asia. However, they were also part of the Pan-Asiatic stream. They watched the events and the political struggles in Asia, and wrote about them. The two prominent countries in this context were India and Japan, but with time, the main emphasis was shifted to India due to its outstanding leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore. The inclination towards Asia contained contrasting components like what the definition of Asia was, where its geographic borders were, and the terms and notions used to describe it. This kind of vagueness existed throughout the Western world as part of the orientalist discourse. On the one hand, there was a negative and critical view of the caste system, of the lack of civilization leading to backwardness, poverty, “passivity,” ignorance, child marriages, burning of widows and so on; on the other hand, there was an imaginary romantic view of the spiritual, exotic India and its ancient culture – the “Aryan Mythos.” The Jewish world’s view contained an additional stratum, especially due to the ease with which it adopted the notion of an ancient culture undergoing a revival, like Zionism did. This, in my opinion, is the explanation for the Jews’ great interest in Tagore and his writings: Tagore’s Pan-Asiatic approach – which not only emphasized Asia’s unity, but also simultaneously desired to bridge East and West – fitted the aspirations and doubts in the discussion of the nature of integration in Palestine. Reading Tagore and responding to him in the Jewish world were made possible by the fact that he was an exceptional figure of worldwide eminence. Tagore adopted and represented internal Indian orientalism that emphasized the revival of the East’s and India’s cultural-religious superiority in conjunction with a universal view of the love of man and nature. Thus, Tagore represents a unique combination of a universal, i.e. cosmopolitan approach and a cultural patriotic one (S.Tagore 2008). His role as the bearer of Asia’s voice enabled the Zionist world to view him as the basis for its arguments in favor of rejecting Western culture without totally rejecting the West itself. Tagore rejected extreme patriotism and represented a moderate Pan-Asianism, in contrast to Gandhi who emphasized the necessity of repudiating the West and its institutions as a precondition for India’s liberation (Gandhi 1910). Tagore was severely criticized for not being a patriot in the sense of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Tagore wrote to the Gandhian and Anglican priest Charles F. Andrews (1871-1940) in 1921: “What an irony of fate it is that I preach for cultural cooperation between East and West on this side of the ocean, while at the same time others preach for the doctrine of non-cooperation on its other side” (Tagore 1958, 123) 4. Within the framework of dealing with the question of Western nationalism, the question of the relation between modern nationalism and religious tradition arose as well, both in India and in the Jewish world. Discussion in the Jewish world was centered on how to bridge the gap between relating to tradition, maintaining Jewish cultural identity; and the need for a cultural revolution in the spirit of European enlightenment and modernism. Another question was the Zionist Movement’s attitude to Asia. Is the “return to Asia” a colonial project with Western values which patronizingly brings “Western progress” to the “abandoned,” backward country, or should Western culture be rejected completely and the Jewish people be entirely integrated into the Semitic-Asiatic realm instead? Or is there perhaps a third option that combines the two approaches? Regarding India’s role, Tagore argued that only when Indian spirituality, which the West needs, is combined with Western technology and organization, which the East needs, can humanity achieve perfection via the transcendent East-West conjunction. This option attracted the Zionist world as well, and there were those who viewed the Jewish revival movement as a bridge between Europe and the Levant.

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The important Jewish literary journals of the time show that Tagore’s status as the expression of Asia’s voice was unique, predated Gandhi, and was more prominent. The Jewish Yishuv’s interest in Gandhi developed only at the beginning of the 1930s, especially after the Salt March, when Gandhi became famous worldwide, and following the translation of Romain Rolland’s (1866-1944) book on Gandhi, which was published in 1924, translated into Yiddish in 1926, and into Hebrew in 1930. Paradoxically, it was Tagore who generally supported Zionism, viewing it mainly as a movement of cultural revival and almost completely ignoring the political-national dimension of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. Gandhi, in contrast, opposed Zionism from the early 1920s since he believed it contradicted morality and justice and that it brought Europeans to Arab territories under the protection of British bayonets and cannons. The paradox is that the aspect of reform in the society as a precondition for national liberation, which was so strongly emphasized in Zionism’s ideology of “the new man,” was close to Gandhi’s heart and constituted a central motif in his ideology. Gandhi’s prestige in the Jewish settlement declined following his 1938 article in which he expressed his opposition to Zionism and even called upon German Jews to employ passive resistance against the Nazis (Gandhi 1938). 5 Tagore, however, was favored by the Jewish world for much longer. His status in the Zionist-Jewish world rose even further in contrast to Europe and the United States where his status as a writer declined after the 1920s, as his image as preacher and spiritual leader overshadowed his image as an author who had won the Nobel price for literature. Tagore’s status in the Jewish world, however, continued for many years, until the 1970s. The Western world, including the Jewish world, discovered Tagore upon the surprising announcement about him winning the Nobel Prize. Immediately afterwards, a rather strange discussion arose, which attested to the Zionist world’s ideological affinity with Tagore. The question at the center of this discussion was as to why Tagore had been awarded the Nobel Prize whereas the Jewish “national poet” Hayim Nahman Bialik had not been considered for the honor.6 Tagore, the poet of the renewed India, is often seen as a prophetic intellectual and Bialik has a similar stature in the Jewish world. Both were Asians representing oppressed peoples who were re-ascending on the stage of modern history against the background of a declining West, and proclaiming a new literary voice connected to their historical past. But more importantly, immediately after Tagore won the Nobel Prize, translations of his works into Hebrew and Yiddish appeared. Frishman’s translations were popular and were received enthusiastically. In addition to translations of his famous works, journalistic essays and prose were also translated; for example, his book Nationalism (1923) and his novel Home and the World (1930) dealt with criticisms of Western nationalism and the Indian liberation movement. The development of nationalism received much attention, especially following the catastrophic results of World War I. Therefore, as in Japan, China, Europe and the United States, the Jewish world too listened to the voice of “the modern Indian prophet” and reacted to his views in various ways (Hay 1970). Literary and cultural Jewish personae read the translations of Tagore and thronged to hear his lectures. They welcomed him at train stations and a few even met with him in person. Tagore was a “rabbi,” a “biblical prophet,” and “the voice of India and Asia.” It is impossible to describe the wide variety of reactions, but the attitude towards Tagore in the Jewish world were largely due to the resonances between Tagore’s ideas and the Jewish-Zionist discourse on “East and West”: Biblical romance, criticism of nationalism, and Jews and Indians as bridges between East and West. Tagore as an Orientalist Indo-Centric Cultural Agent Tagore was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905), a patron of the Brahmo Samaj Movement, which was active as part of the 19th century Bengali Renaissance under the leadership of Rammohun Roy (1772-1833) and his successor Keshub Chandra Sen (183334). Tagore was educated under the auspices of Indian culture and Sanskrit, Bengali and


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English literature. At the age of 17, he was sent to complete his education in England but returned after two years. Upon his return, he embarked on fruitful literary activity, which continued for sixty years until his demise in 1941. In 1901 he established a school which later developed into the Visva Bharti University, where he desired to form bridges between East and West. Tagore invited Western scholars, including a number of Jews such as the Indologist Sylvain Levi (1862-1935), the Sanskrit scholar Moritz Winternitz (1863-1937), the Hebrew kindergarten teacher Shulamit Flaum (1893-1963), and the literature scholar Alex Aronson. In 1915, Tagore was knighted by the British government, but he returned his knighthood in protest against the British massacre at Jalianwala Bagh, Amritsar in 1919. Tagore was a multifaceted artist, but he was primarily an extremely prolific poet who wrote over two thousand poems. He also wrote plays, short stories, essays, articles and letters encompassing a wide variety of subjects in the fields of education, society, and critique of nationalism. Even before he became a Nobel laureate, his poems were read by millions in Bengal, but only when he translated a number of his works into English did he become popular in the West. It should be noted that the translation of Geetanjali done by Tagore himself (1912) is often criticized as imprecise and not matching the Bengali original. The problems regarding his translations from Bengali accompany his works to this very day, and may be one of the reasons for the decline of his literary stature. He won the Nobel Prize thanks to the efforts of a number of key people from English literary and artistic circles who were attracted to the East, such as the artist William Rothenstein (1872-1945), the Irish poet and mystic William Butler Yates (1865-1939) and the American poet Ezra Pound (1865-1973). Tagore travelled around the world extensively, more than any of his Indian intellectual contemporaries, and this positioned him as the most prominent figure representing India and its culture to the West. “The East is One” Culturally, it is clear that the imaginary Orient or ‘The East” does not and has never existed. Chinese culture differs radically from that of India, and Indian culture is entirely different from Mediterranean cultures, as it is from Western culture. However, despite these differences, terms like “Eastern culture” and “the Asian spirit” have become prevalent, common figures of speech and an accepted paradigm, so much so that it has become impossible to discuss the subject without referring to the “East-West” dichotomy. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said (2000), showed that since the emergence of Europe as a cultural and political entity with selfawareness in the 17th century, the distinction between East and West has been axiomatic in Western society. According to this approach, the contrasts are pivotal and even contradictory. Orientalism expresses the rendering of the East as an object of study and research in the framework of the West’s colonial control, and an oppressive mechanism of the “other.” With the spread of colonialism, Western ideas penetrated India, China and Japan. This enabled various intellectuals in Asian countries to view themselves as the West defined them – “the East” – and as a culture emphasizing the spirit versus the technological West. This is why the “East-West” paradigm was also at the center of Indian reformist discourse, which emphasized the polarity between the two blocks. However, the process was bilateral, a fact that also enabled American and European intellectuals to easily adopt this dichotomy. A prototypical example of this was expressed in Joseph Rudyard Kipling’s famous sentence, which became a popular slogan: “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” (Kipling 1916, 11). As a product of the synthetic symbiosis between the English and the Indian Brahmin elite that took place mainly in Bengal, Tagore can be said to have represented an Indianinternal orientalism. Tagore created an affinity and a cultural sequence between his own work and the ancient Indian literary work The Upanishads, the poet Kalidasa, Buddha and others. In so doing, Tagore became one of prominent spokesmen of Pan-Asianism, which intertwined the paths of Japan, India and China but emphasized India’s central position as the place

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through which the messages of The Upanishads and Buddhism were distributed to the rest of Asia. Hence, it can be termed Indo-centric Pan-Asianism. Tagore began to publish articles on “East and West” as a result of the influence of his father, who was on friendly terms with the Indologist Max Muller, one of those responsible for the spread of the common view of India as a spiritual place diametrically opposed to the materialistic West. Another movement toward the Pan-Asiatic approach occurred following Tagore’s 1901 meeting with the Japanese author Okahura Kakuzu (1862-1913) when the latter finished his book The Ideals of the East, which generated great interest in Europe. The book called for a revival of a Pan-Asiatic movement. Its opening sentence became a common slogan: “Asia is one” (Kakuzu 1903). The main similarity between the two writers lies in their efforts to revive cultural traditions whose very existence was in danger due to modern influence; and in them both being products of the orientalist modes of thought, which influenced their self-perception as sons of the East (Hay 1970, 35-44). Encouraged by his American art teacher Ernest Fenollosa (1772-1833), Kakuzu chose to conserve and save Japanese traditional art. Tagore’s trips to the West meant that he met with key figures. These meetings are extremely important in understanding the constant conflict in his heart. Tagore needed the West no less than the West needed him. As a romantic idealist, Tagore could not reject the qualities and merits he found in British liberalism and he was full of admiration for British culture. This correlated with his literary works, which included the experience of a romantic, idealist and religious view of the human soul, nature and the surrounding universe. At the beginning, Tagore saw the British government as essential for leading necessary religious and social reforms in Indian society. However, he simultaneously believed in the importance of ancient culture’s spiritual values, and their necessity in modern India. The horrors of World War I and the suffering it caused, seemed to him to be consequences of sick modern Western nationalism. Thus, he found himself walking a tightrope. In India, he defended “Western values” and opposed the denial of Western culture’s qualities and achievements; outside India, he was a spiritual ambassador exporting Indian spirituality to the West. Tagore was aware of his stereotypical image and despite the fact that this frustrated him as a poet, he himself was responsible for this and tried to exploit the situation as much as possible in order to raise money for his educational institutions. This representation was enhanced by his appearance and apparel, which fit those of the stereotype of an Eastern mystic. Even before he became a Nobel laureate, there was strong opposition to him in Bengali intellectual circles, which viewed him as a product of English influence. After he won the Nobel Prize, the attitude toward him became ambivalent. On the one hand he was the butt of relentless slander, but on the other hand he was highly revered as the emissary bearing India’s spirit to the West. After his demise, he became part of the Indian canon as a cultural hero (Dutta and Robinson 1995). In fact, his obsessive preoccupation with the East-West dichotomy eventually overshadowed his literary work. Tagore’s Encounter with the Jewish World “Each revival movement should be believed in” The historiographical controversy within the academic study of Zionism asks whether it was just a modern national political movement which should be understood mainly in the context of European 19th century nationalism, or a unique pioneering revolutionary and Eastern revival movement. Was it a secular pragmatic movement, a religious-messianic one or, perhaps, a combination of the two? Was the pioneers’ passion only a cover for the Zionist colonial project, i.e. an economic-political interest like that of any other European colonial project that invented a country and a people as its objective or was it, in fact, a unique national Eastern movement? (Neuman 2011; Eyal 2006).


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Be this as it may, Tagore should be viewed as a “supporting player” in the process of the construction of the new Zionist-Asian identity in its various streams. The parallel is clear. Tagore attempted to do in India what the early Zionists settlers tried to do in Palestine – produce a modern utopian revival necessitating social and religious reforms but based on a connection to the past. Therefore, it was easy for the Jewish world to view Tagore as a Biblical prophet and poet. In this way, as a revelation and a meeting with a modern prophet with the appearance of a Hebrew prophet, the Hebrew kindergarten teacher Shulamit Flaum describes her meeting with Tagore in New York in 1921: This is the image I may have seen of the heroes of those legends told to me in my childhood, or one of our prophets, the Hebrew prophets from Jerusalem or in Anatot, thus did I see? (Flaum 1936, 130)7 The parallelism between the Biblical prophet and Tagore takes place against the background of the (Biblical) scenes of the renewing land of Israel and the current scenery of India, to which “progress” has not arrived. Women clad in saris draw water from the well in the shadow of mango trees, men plough their small plots with bulls under the scorching sun, believers go on a pilgrimage and sacrifice offerings reminiscent of those in the Temple. Seeing India as it once was, is a prominent motif in the literature on India (Hirschbein 1930; Karlibach 1956) and is also prevalent in current writers’ and travelers’ experiences and descriptions. When Flaum arrived in Shantiniketan, she decorated the humble straw house with pictures of Herzl and the Bible (Flaum 1922, 1, 6). The then editor of Al Ha’mishmar, Ben Yishai, emphasized the reason for publishing her letters: “From this echo from India which will be presented in these letters, we too, in these days of revival, can learn something” (Ibid.) The affinity with the Bible led Flaum to discover her self-identity as a Hebrew-Asian: Only a few days – and I already feel as if I have been living here, amongst the “wild” Indians, for many years. […] Since indeed, in us too, still resides something of that primitive “wildness”, or, in one word: “Asianism” – and indeed this is the nice word I repeat to myself day and night – “Asianism”, “Asianism!” and my heart rejoices because of this […]And if so, I came here as one returning to the home he has built and planned. (Ibid) In her first meeting with teachers and pupils at the school, Flaum read chapters from the Bible and sang songs by Bialik and Shneour. She saw the image of King David in Tagore: If it is true that King David sang and played the violin, then – as different as it may be – he too would certainly have sat … with the dark daughters of Zion, like ‘Arabian tents, sheets of Solomon’ and pleasing their swarthiness like the modern poet from the land of yore. (Flaum 1922, 2; 7). Tagore asked Flaum numerous questions about the Land of Israel and the national revival and noted his extensive knowledge of the Jewish people, the deep closeness he felt towards them and his desire to see the ancient people’s revival with his own eyes: “Amongst the Jews he found many who understand him. There is something in the mind that joins all those of the East” (Flaum 1936, 143). When Flaum returned to Jerusalem and wrote her book while watching the university students on Mount Scopus “clutching the Bible to their chests and reading its exalted pages,” Tagore appeared to her in a prophetic vision: My thoughts wandered to days of yore and I looked at the scenery of the city of prophets, sages and heroes who lived in this wondrous country in the past – the Land of Israel. And before me appeared a figure clad in long white garments, wide shouldered, gaunt faced, white hair adorning his head and shoulders, an awe inspiring beard. The figure is that of nobility itself, and in his hands he is tying and rolling a scroll. His face glows and his eyes are dreamy, his gaze wanders afar and reflects luminosity from out of this world. Amazed I sat, my heart telling me to fall to my knees before the divine inspiration appearing in front of me in its splendor of glory, and the silence of the vision was broken and I heard the voice of a celestial choir and like a

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great song the words sounded: awaken, awaken from the circle of life. Time and posterity are yours forever, and I knew I was standing before my divine teacher Rabindranath Tagore (Flaum 1946, 13). Flaum was only one of the people who acted to acquaint the growing Jewish population (Yishuv) with India and its culture, and in her numerous lectures throughout the country she conveyed India’s exotic fragrance as a primary source for her authority: In (Kibbutz) Degania on the shores of the Jordan River and on the shores of the Sea of Galilee did I once spend a gentle evening beneath the shade of a palm tree […] Despite being tired from a long day of hard work, everybody listened very attentively to my stories about my travels in India and my memories from Tagore’s school. (ibid. 9-11). Introduction of Tagore to Hebrew Literature: Frishman and Tagore Despite the fact that he had never been to India, the writer and translator David Frishman was the one who first brought Indian literature on a large scale to the Hebrew reader. Frishman began translating Geetanjali in as early as 1915, but his translation was only published in the literary journal Haknesset (edited by Bialik) in 1917. Later, he continued translating other works that were published in the literary anthology Hatkufa until his demise in 1922. His translations were very popular and were also published in many editions in Warsaw and in Palestine, and later in the state of Israel. This attests to the affinity felt towards Tagore in the Jewish world. This is notable since Tagore was translated into only a few languages such as English, German and French, thereby rendering the Hebrew translations quite noteworthy. Frishman’s attitude to Zionism was critical and the aim of his translations was not national but literary-cultural. Frishman aspired to free Hebrew literature from being an ideological tool and a means to educate the masses and argued that a work of literature should be referred to only for its aesthetic cultural value. As part of this effort, he translated literary works close to his heart such as Pushkin, Heine, Tagore and others. The writer Jacob Fichman (1881-1958) attested to Frishman’s enthusiasm. The latter would read sections of Geetanjali he had translated, on nights when he couldn’t sleep. “He read with excitement, and his face was illuminated. He read from the longing of his heart, as if the greatest hour of his life had arrived and his heart’s desire was completely fulfilled” (Fichman 1940, 28-29). He accounted for Frishman’s attraction to Tagore by the resemblance to the Biblical style: “The simple idiomatic links, the chain links of the Hebrew verse together with something childish, cleansing, noisy, laughing and tearful – that was the voice of the East, the magic of the East, the nakedness of the soul upon finding itself…” (Fichman 1952, 161-164).8 Tagore’s figure clad in a robe and his long hair and beard were reminiscent of a Jewish “rabbi”; also his first name, Rabindranath, which could be shortened to ‘rabbi” – it was a play on words but it also resulted in Tagore’s identification as a Jewish rabbi. 9 His poetry verses seemed like those of the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls and created an affinity between two “ancient cultures” undergoing a process of national revival. The figure of the prophet essentially belongs to Asia, under whose skies all the prophets appeared. Natan Bistritski (1896-1980) also published a poetic-ritualistic essay (1931) worshipping the poet “doing holy work,” whose poems are “majestic grandeur.” In the essay, Tagore is represented as a priest emanating from the reviving East, constituting a contrast to decadent, sinking Europe. For him, Tagore constitutes a universal symbol and human unity in the spirit of prophetic morality and so brings the Jewish people the ancient-new message. At the end of the essay, Bistritski speaks to the Hebrew reader: Blessed for us be such a poet, who brings us the moments of despair and the reviving message that the world’s culture does not depend only on the ruling culture of the West, that the dream of human ruling is formed also outside this official culture in


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humble hidden corners and that human redemption will not come by the main road but via the numerous hidden paths of East and the West, of Europe and Asia (ibid. 476). Josef Klausner (1874-1974), who was on the right wing of the political spectrum, used the image of a prophet when describing Tagore in a lecture about his world view. Klausner criticized the Indian and Buddhist lack of activity arising from Tagore’s doctrine in the face of the tragedy of the Holocaust in Europe which, according to him, resulted from Western inactivity: “Dearer to us is the active participation in history than knowing the Maya and Nirvana” (Klausner 1944, 42). However, he added: “It is impossible not to remember reverently the late great Indian, who foresaw what the mechanization of European life would cause, and was unconsciously, or perhaps even against his will, influenced by the Hebrew prophets…” (Ibid.). Another Yiddish poet and playwright who felt internal identification with Tagore’s poetry was Peretz Hirschbein (1880-1948). His popular book India was translated into Hebrew from Yiddish in 1931. It generated much interest, and the small Jewish population in Palestine found its acquaintance with India deepening. Hirschbein devoted a large part of a chapter to Tagore out of solidarity with “gentlesouled poets” who see the world via their poetry. The two spoke about the discrepancy between the world of poetry and practical politics. Hirschbein wrote: A wondrous people are the Jews – said Tagore after a long silence – so dispersed and scattered throughout the world, and yet productive in all professions, a wondrous people […] Our conversation was long, only a few words were heard: “East,” “West,” “Europe,” “Socialist revolution in Russia,” “America and India,” “Man and his world,” “the joy of life,” “dust clinging to bare feet” (Hirschbein 1931, 124-125). Tagore’s meetings with numerous Jews around the world, such as Einstein whom he met three times and whose conversations with him were widely publicized; and the occasional arrival of Jewish visitors and lecturers to Shantiniketan attest to Tagore’s deep knowledge of the Jewish world and its various streams. In accordance with what was close to his heart, Tagore chose to relate mainly to the parallel between the Hebrew and Indian cultural revival, and less to the political dimension of Zionism. Interestingly, it was Flaum who noticed the significant point in the ambivalent attitude of Zionists towards the National Movement’s struggle in India. In her writings, she emphasized the fact that no Zionist stream had dared to openly support the national Indian struggle for liberation. This attests to the central Zionist stream’s rhetoric and lip service, since it viewed itself as part of the West. On the one hand, there was India’s demand to support the return of the Jewish people to Palestine/Eretz Israel and acknowledgement of it as an Asian people integrating into its homeland in “Asia”; on the other hand, there was avoidance of open support for the Indian liberation movement. As Pan-Asiatic as it was, the approach towards India was noncommittal and at no stage was it transformed into practical and open political support. For Indian leaders such as Nehru, this constituted unequivocal proof that Zionism was a European colonial project under British auspices. And, indeed, this should be remembered when criticizing India for its historical opposition to Israel until the 1990s. Criticism of Nationalism “The idea of the nation is one of the means that kill emotions to a much greater extent than all those invented by the human brain. Under its influence, nations persecute each other using a certain method and according to a fixed plan” (Tagore 1923, 30). The famous scholar of nationalism, Hans Kohn (1891-1971), who also wrote extensively about nationalism in India, compared in his article “Tagore and Nationalism in India” (1921), Tagore’s and Gandhi’s attitudes to nationalism. He noted that there was a fundamental point they shared despite their differences – both agreed that nationalism must not have a superior role or be a goal unto itself, and that it should be regulated by absolute morality. Regarding Tagore’s books, Nationalism and the novel Home and the World, Kohn

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noted that “Their value is great, far beyond the extent of India” (Ibid. 27). And, indeed, despite its historical distance, Nationalism is still considered to be one of the alternative manifestos to the concept of the nation state. These writings were translated into Hebrew as well and received a variety of responses in the Jewish press. The nationalist-political model versus the nationalist-cultural model were a mirror image of a similar debate taking place within the Jewish Zionist world, between those supporting political Zionism in the spirit of Herzl and those supporting cultural Zionism in the spirit of Ehad Ha’am. Tagore distinguished between the people and the nation. The people are a spiritual entity passed on from one generation to another as a genetic and cultural legacy. The political nation, in contrast, is established on public organization based on political and national power. When nationalism becomes a goal unto itself, it stands against cultural nationalism. It should be noted that this criticism of Western nationalism and its imitation in India was in opposition to the dominant common view in the first decades of the 20 th century. The Hegelian idea of nation and national identity, including the right of national self-determination, seemed a natural right for the West in the age of nationalism. It was the same for peoples around the world who desired to liberate themselves from Western colonialism. Paradoxically, Tagore ignored the fact that the core of national liberation is already hidden in colonialism, as an inevitable ending. Nationalism is based on lectures given by Tagore during his visits to Japan and the United States at a time when nobody in these countries wanted to listen to the moderate message criticizing modern nationalism and the consequences of bloody wars, especially after proving how the two were connected to each other. However, in alternative schools of thought, the book was received as a counter-reaction and a different, sane, humane voice “emanating from the East” to the kind of nationalism that had brought down a terrible catastrophe on the world. One such example was the writer and pacifist Romain Rolland, who became one of Tagore’s and Gandhi’s important supporters in Europe. One of the first to respond to Nationalism in Hebrew was Rabbi Benyamin. In an essay entitled “A Voice from India” (1921) he holds an imaginary conversation between “a man of Judea” and “a man of India” taking place on a boring train ride. In fact, however, it is a monologue by the “man of India,” who severely criticizes Western nationalism to his fellow traveler, the “man of Judea.” The latter finds the conversation extremely interesting both because of the great amount of news arriving from India, but mainly because of the similarity of the issues in the conversation to issues preoccupying the Jewish world. Rabbi Benyamin writes: If the reader finds that these words imply and raise thoughts about us, the Jewish settlement, as well, I would not argue with him. I, too, upon listening to his fluent words, did not avoid pausing occasionally and creating for myself parallels to us and our desires. (Ibid. 229) At the end of the essay, it is discovered that Rabbi Benyamin is reading Nationalism and that he calls Tagore “India’s poet and prophet, the voice of the East who now shouts loudly and calls the name of forgotten gods.” Finally the “man of India” voices his opinion on the destructive consequences of nationalism in the spirit of the Hebrew prophets’ words on the end of days: And we did not cease to believe in God and the spirit of man. And in our hearts will rest the hope that one day the power will abdicate its throne in shame and will vacate its place to love of man. And that the morning will alight in which the traces of the blood left by nationalism in the hearts of peoples will be washed and rinsed. On that day we will be called upon to purify with holy water the history of man and bless the subdued earth of the generations with fruitfulness (Ibid. 229). 10 One can draw a single general line between all the Jews that gravitated towards India. They held moderate viewpoints (including their Zionism), were people of culture who emphasized the moral dimension over the nationalist one, and were usually on the margins of the Zionist camp. Most of them believed in integration in the East with some patronage towards the Arabs


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and “Eastern backwardness.” Some of them, such as Magnes, were inclined to religious pacifism or even to highly extreme pacifism like Natan Hofshi (1889-1980) from Nahalal. They emphasized the moral injustices done to the country’s Arab residents as a result of political Zionism’s activity. Therefore, it was only natural that after World War I the alternative, “other” voice would fall on attentive ears in these circles. Another unusual figure was Eugen Hoeflich (1891-1965) who acted strenuously for Pan-Asianism and dedicated his book Fire in the East to Ku Hung Ming, Martin Buber and Tagore, the three who upheld him during his moments of doubt regarding his “love of Asia and faith in its final victory” (Hoeflich 1920 in Harif 2011, 84). Hoeflich also published an enthusiastic review of Nationalism (the German edition) and considered it obligatory reading. Over time, Hoeflich’s admiration of Tagore diminished since Tagore’s constant call for a bridge between East and West and his lack of total negation of Western culture seemed to him to be a Pan-Asianism that was too moderate. He later leaned towards militaristic Japan, which combined modernity with an anti-Western approach, and in it he saw a source of identity necessary to the Jewish people as a model of integration into Asia. In his review of the novel Home and the World, Sh. Shmueli also emphasized the similarity between the country “shrouded in mystery” and “those coming here to establish a people and a country, to create a homeland,” and called upon them to learn from “the chapters of supreme wisdom, over which the spirit of exalted poetry hovers” (Shmueli 1930, 11). When Tagore visited Germany in 1921, his popularity ascended to a new peak. The person mainly responsible for this was Duke Keyserling (1880-1946), who organized “Tagore week” in “The School of Wisdom” he had founded in 1920. Keyserling’s book The Travel Diary of a Philosopher (1925), in which he described his journeys during which he also met Tagore, became a bestseller. It should be noted that Keyserling was profoundly impressed by Tagore before the latter became a Nobel laureate and was among the first to write about him. The worship of Tagore in Germany emanated, among other reasons, from Germany’s state after World War I and it was impossible not to hear about Tagore and the message he bore to the West. Thus, a surprising response from the circles of Agudat Yisrael in Germany in support of its arguments against Zionism was found, of all places, in Tagore’s views. Jakob Rosenheim, one of Agudat Yisrael’s leaders, published an editorial in Der Israelit in 1921. The article opens with the claim that nobody expects an Indian poet coming from a far, foreign place to voice an opinion on Judaism. However, it is clear that he understands well the physical suppression of people and the true spirit of human culture. In his opinion, Tagore touches people’s hearts wherever they may be and, therefore, the distant voices arriving from India relate to echoes extant in the Jewish people from times of yore and express a connection to the real Jewish spirit. Rosenheim believed that Tagore shared his views. Despite the difference between the Jews in the Diaspora and the Indians who resided in their own country, the Jews succeeded in maintaining their spiritual values and cultural identity. According to him, if Jews imitated other peoples it would be akin to one person wearing another person’s skin. Hence, the message emanating from the Indian poet was valid for the Jewish people as well, and they proved this validity by their very existence as a separate spiritual and cultural entity. Rosenheim’s article expresses the view of the “world of Torah” as the definition of the Jewish people in the framework of Agudat Yisrael’s struggle against the Zionist Movement and the process of secularization of the Jewish people as well as against the Reform Movement and no less against the Mizrahi Movement. After the shock in Agudat Yisrael following the Balfour Declaration and the feeling that historical events were developing in contrast to conservative religious ideology, Agudat Yisrael began speaking of “the Torah State”. Isaac Breuer (1883-1946), the Agudat Yisrael ideologist in Germany who was active in its leadership after his immigration to Israel in 1936, opposed Zionism vehemently but expressed a worldview combining extreme ultra-orthodoxy with practical Zionism, which can be called “anti-Zionist Zionism”. His view of the concept of nationalism is clearly close to that of Tagore’s. The term ‘people’ expresses objective features like language, culture and race and

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this is true for all people except the Jews. The shared consciousness renders individuals a nation and the Torah is the unique Jewish consciousness. In its modern nationalist outlook, Zionism is attempting to form a new nation – one like all others – which differs from the “true” Jewish nation that is subject to the Torah and its commandments. Had Tagore read Rosenheim’s response he would have liked it, at least in the sense of defining national identity in a context of tradition and culture. It is likely that he would have also agreed with the Jews’ cultural uniqueness, in the same way that he emphasized the Indian cultural uniqueness in Asia. However, there are significant differences, mainly in relation to the component of religion and religious law in Agudat Yisrael’s ideology. Rosenheim responded from the position of an observant man abiding by Jewish law and protecting himself against the secularism spreading in his community, whereas Tagore protested against Western nationalism as an intellectual and a poet, while also actively promoting religious and social reforms in India. While it is possible to attribute a cosmopolitan, humane ideology to Tagore, it is impossible to define Agudat Yisrael’s ideology as universal, moderate and antiracist. The Spirit of the East and Judaism – Tagore and Buber In 1912, Buber gave a speech entitled “The Spirit of the East and Judaism” to the members of Agudat Bar Kochva in Prague. Buber was the spiritual father of the Aguda, which had great influence on the Jewish world. The Aguda tried to design a more vigorous, profound cultural Jewish identity than the sparse bourgeois assimilated Judaism whose ideological framework was cultural Zionism. Generally speaking, the inclination “towards the East” should be viewed as emanating from romantic influence, especially from Germany, which called for renewal and investigation of irrational fields characterizing literary and artistic schools in Europe as part of the “revival of the East” trend. All the lectures given to the Aguda were characterized by a renewed revival of Jewish pride and enhanced interest in Eastern spirituality and mysticism. (Mendes-Flohr 2010, 232). Buber’s article “The Spirit of the East and Judaism” is of special interest and particularly close to Tagore’s position, as it reflects the general Eastern worldview and its connection to mysticism and Hassidism (Buber 1960, 1). In this sense, in contrast to the view of the European Jew as a son of Europe, Buber argued that the European Jew has never ceased to be a son of the East. His friend Ernst Simon (1899-1968) defined Buber as a Western-Eastern Jew, a definition that can definitely be extended to Tagore as an Indian-Western-Indian (Chatterjee 1997, 56). Buber argued that the European person is “sensory”, his senses are disconnected from the uniform base of organic life due to his ability to use wisdom, time and space. The Westerner experiences the world disconnectedly and independently of the senses and hence, the world appears to him as a plethora of phenomena, of which he is one. The Eastern person, in contrast, is “motoric”: there is a correlation between his senses, all of which are connected internally, he experiences the world dynamically and the independent things as part of it. Buber claimed that the experience of unity is the source of the Easterner’s dissatisfaction with the world as he experiences it. Hence his desire for redemption and unity: This is an immemorial process within the Jew, an immemorial process that the sages of Israel, in whom the most profound Judaism revived, led him to discovery in the entire power of his Asian genius: it is the unification of the soul. They are those who demonstrated alive to the Westerners the great Asia, this boundless Asia, that of unity and holiness, Asia of Lau Tse and Buddha, that is Asia of Moses, first and second Isaiah, John, Jesus and Paul (Buber, 1960, 34-35). There are similarities between Buber and Tagore. Both took the “East-West” dichotomy for granted. They saw the East as the source of the desire for unity, which diametrically divides the blocks. Both were preoccupied with cultural revival and combined spiritual life with social-


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educational journalism, but were part of the central national stream both in India and in Zionism. Both criticized Western nationalism and preferred spiritual cultural renewal, which they saw as the only means to secure and maintain the people’s pride and identity in contrast with religious piety on the one hand and national patriotism on the other. Both searched for the bridges between the poles and viewed humanistic universal values as the key for such bridging. Buber viewed the Jews as a “cultural force” in the East, bringing progress to the East just as Tagore viewed the Indians as “cultural agents” bringing spirituality to the West. Buber went to hear one of Tagore’s lectures during “Tagore week”, but expressed dissatisfaction with the festival surrounding Tagore. Therefore, despite the fact that he was asked to participate in public events, he avoided doing so. A conversation between the two took place in 1926 in Wienternitz’s home in Prague. It dealt with East-West relations with emphasis on the Jews’ role as a bridge between “East and West”. Tagore expressed anxiety about the spiritual fate of the Jewish people after their return to their land because of the strong Western cultural influence that could not be both accepted and resisted. He valued the Jews for what he perceived as their ability to preserve tradition and culture despite being the Diaspora. In his opinion, the Jews’ characteristics were an admiration of the spirit and universalism. In the meeting, he expressed his fear that the Jewish people’s return to their homeland and their struggle for national independence would exhaust the precious traits: “After becoming self-reliant, it will, as a people, become adapted to the narrow minded nationalism and soulless pan-technicism of Western peoples in order to exist in this country, which is a very difficult geo-political spot” (Buber 1966, 17). Buber replied that such danger does exist, but is unavoidable. He used the image of Sisyphus carrying a heavy symbol on his back up the mountain – the symbol clings to the man as the man does to the symbol. Man cannot discard the burden of his human culture; hence, power should be concentrated on acting in the spirit of the settlers of the land, but with the agreement of the Eastern peoples while maintaining spiritual cultural Zionism in order to “construct together with them the establishment of a great covenant, which can learn from the West and take from it without falling before the tattered and purposeless influences” (Ibid.) To Tagore’s question regarding the Jews’ role, Buber responded with a call for help from “the brothers in the East”, and argued that the Jews are the most exposed nerve in the new humanity. “In their existence they loathe the daring and summons of culture. Their very existence is an experiment”. This experiment will intensify in the Land of Israel: “We must go forth to confront this danger in order to withstand it. For this we need brotherly aid from you” (Ibid. 18). Tagore and Buber parted with a warm handshake and Buber felt the universal solidarity emanating from the poet. Being more of a realist than Tagore, Buber understood that, as eventually happened both in Israel and in India and Japan, the powers of the “narrow minded” nationalism are stronger than the worlds of scholars and poets. The conversation between the two expresses the prevalent paradigm that the spiritual East should teach the materialistic West, and that Jews and Indians should serve as a bridge between East and West. Sylvain Levi (1863-1935) expressed this well in relation to Tagore’s obsession with the subject of “East-West”: “Tagore, who in denouncing the flaws and crimes of the West to his friends in China and Japan and contrasting them with the East which is founded on pure fantasy, harms Asia, Europe and his own ideals” (Aronson 1979, 140). “How Strange They are – My Dreams” – Korczak and Tagore Not many read Tagore’s poetry nowadays. To most, it seems too “idealistic” and “romantic,” but Tagore’s play The Post (1911) is still considered a classic play and is performed on the world’s stages from time to time. The play tells the story of Ammal, a boy with an incurable disease who learns to cope with his impending death and accept it. At the end of the play,

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the boy falls asleep into his death with an illusion and expectation for a letter from the king, which will arrive at the new post office and which will bring him a cure and redemption. Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit 1878 – 1942) deliberately chose this play in July 1940 as the last play performed by the children of his orphanage in a Warsaw ghetto, knowing about their impending demise in the death camps.11 Korczak explained his choice in his desire that the children of the orphanage learn to accept the angel of death calmly – “the tranquility of those entering the secret of death, the calm wisdom at the tragic moment, which is not the end according to his faith” (Olczakowa 1961, 159). There is some evidence regarding the play and the feelings of sadness felt by the audience. It was a moving event and tears rolled down the cheeks of some of the spectators. Korczak himself sat stooped with abysmal grief on his face. It was clear to the audience why Korczak chose a play from a strange world but relevant to the forthcoming events. Like many others in Warsaw, Korczak knew of Tagore and had read his poetry. In his diary, Korczak describes a conversation with the Indian poet taking place in a dream (Studies in the Heritage of Janusz Korczak 1993, 151): “I lay down a bit and fell asleep again – and here I am travelling again… I am in a very faraway land which is not similar to any other country I have known. I am on a wide road… people dressed strangely walk and ride carts lead by two horses and ride elephants. Yes, elephants. I ask: What is this country? India. Yes, a very wild country, a hot old, ancient country. Some say that it is a wild country… And then an old man emanating solemnity, with a long, white beard, good eyes and a forehead expressing wisdom approaches me. I think I know him, I have seen his face before. Yes, of course. This is Rabindranath Tagore. I have seen his picture numerous times in the writings of this great Indian poet and thinker. And something strange happened, and this happens often in dreams. Rabindranath Tagore invited me to his school. You too have a school, sir, -- he said – and in your school one of the teachers is also my pupil – Miss Esther – right? Right. Very well. If it does not trouble you, sir, I will give you a small book for her. A new post office was just built in our town. It is a new and nice building. And that is why I wrote our boys about the post. And if Miss Esther wants, your boys can also act in the play, and I will come to see it. But that is impossible, I said. He smiled peacefully and said: You will not notice me, but I will be there with you. Besides, sir, you can ask the yogis about this. I awoke again. A few days later, a package with cheese, salami and jam arrived from Copenhagen and Miss Esther arranged the “mail” in Passover. How strange they are – my dreams.” Conclusion As shown in this paper, India’s representation via Tagore met the Jewish world at a convenient time when a huge section of it was gravitating towards the East. This compelled the majority of the Jewish and Zionist ideological spectrum to respond to Tagore and to hone its responses. In so doing, he aided the construction of the Zionist Movement’s Asian Western identity. Nowadays, too, the relation between “East and West” is far from being resolved in the State of Israel. Although the discourse is Western orientalist, which does not take Eastern Jews into account, it attests to a deep affinity and an attraction of deeper profundity in its


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attraction to India. The depth of this affinity can be seen in the attitude to Tagore in Hebrew literature since 1913. In this paper, I presented a number of examples from the extensive references to Tagore in Hebrew literature. More than any other Indian of his time, Tagore was the representative of the “imagined” India and the revival of the East. Tagore was received with great favor in the first two decades of the 20 th century worldwide, but the attitude to Tagore amongst Jewish intellectual and writers contained additional levels directly connected to the discourse taking place in the Jewish world at the time. Bibliography Aronson, Alex. 1979. Europe looks at India. Callcutta: Riddhi. Aschheim, Steven E. 2010. The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism. Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel Institute Studies IV. Ben-Ishai, Zeev. 1961. Davar. 19.9 (Heb.). Bialik, Hayim Nahman. 1938. Igrot Bialik, (Heb.) vol.2. Tel Aviv: Dvir. Bistritski, Natan. 1921. Hasihloh 38. Buber, Martin. 1966. Olelot, (Heb.). Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik. ─ 1974. Pointing the Way, Collected Essays by Martin Buber. Edited and Translated by Maurice Friedman. New York: Schoken Books. ─1960. Teuda Vyeud Vol. 1. Jerusalem: The Zionist Library. Cemil, C. Aydin. 2007. The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia. New York: Columbia. Cherniak, Alexander and Serenbriany Sergei. 2014. Tagore in Jewish Diaspora and the State of Israel in Rabindranath Tagore: One Hundred Years of Global Reception. Edited by Martin Kämpchen and Imre Bangha. Delhi: Oriental Blackswan. Chatterjee, Margaret. 1997. Studies in Modern Jewish and Hindu Thought. London: Macmillan. Eyal, Gil. 2006. The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kohn, Hans. 1921. Tagore and Nationalism in India. H’poel Hatzir 21, no. 23-24. Dutta, Krishna, and Andrew Robinson. 1995. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad – Minded Man. London: Bloomsbury. Epstein, Zalman. 1913. Shiloh 30, No. 2. Odesa. Fichman, Jacob. 1940. Hapoel Hatzair 12, no. 28-29, Elull 26. (Heb.) ─ 1952. Rohot Managnot (Heb.). Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik. Flaum Shlomit, (1936), Bat Israel Noddet,(Heb.), Ahiasaf, Jerusalem. ─ 1946. Rabindranath Tagor,(Heb.). Jerusalem: Shanti. ─ 1923. Al Ha’mishmar 29, Iyar 4 (Heb.). ─ 1923. Al Ha’mishmar 30, Iyar 11 (Heb.). Frishman David, (1917) Haknesset (edit; H.N Bialik), Odesa. ─ 1913. Hatzifira 245. Fenollosa, Ernst. 1898. “The Coming Fusion of East and West”, Harper’s Monthly 98, 122. Gandhi, M. K. 1910. Hind Swaraj. Phoenix: International Printing Press. ─ 1938. “The Jews,” Harijan 26, no. 11. Harif, Hanan, “The revival of the East, ‘Pan-Semitism and Pan-Asianism within the Zionist Discourse,” PHD Dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2013. (Heb.) Hay, Stephan N. 1970. Asian Ideas of East and West, Tagore and his Critics in Japan, China and India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hirschbein Peretz. 1931. Hodu (India), (Heb.). Tel Aviv. ─1929. India, (Yiddish). Tel Aviv. Karlibach Azriel. 1956. Hodu -Yoman Drachim, (Heb.). Tel Aviv: Ayanot. Kakuzo, Okakura.1903. The Ideals of the East. London: J. Murray. Keyserling, Hermann Alexander Graf. 1925. The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, Translated by J. Holroyd Reece. London: Jonathan Cape.

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Khazzoom, Aziza. 2003. “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel,” American Sociological Review 68, no 4: 481-510. Kipling. Rudyard J. 1916. The Ballads of East and West. London: Review of Reviews. Klausner, Josef. 1944. Mishnei Olamot (Heb.). Jerusalem: Masada. Kohn, Hans. 1921, Ha’poel Hatzair, 21, 23-24. Lev, Shimon. 2012. Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. ─ 2013. “Melting Hitler’s ‘heart of stone’ - Gandhi’s Attitude to the Holocaust,” The Journal of Judeo Indo Studies 13 (Autumn). Mendes-Flohr, Paul. 1991. Divided Passions, Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ─ 2010. Progress and its Discontents, The Struggle of Jewish Intellectuals with Modernity, (Heb.). Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Neuman, Boaz. 2011. Land and Desire in Early Zionism. Waltham: Mass: Brandeis University Press. Nordau, Max. 1948. Zionist Essays (Heb.) Edited by B. Netanyahu. Jerusalem: The Zionist Library. Olczakowa-Mortkowicz, Hanna. 1961. Januz Korczak, (Heb.) Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Ein Harod. Rabbi Benyamin (Feldman Redler, Yehusu). 1921. Kol Mehudu. (Heb.) (A Voice from India). Mabarot 3, Ha’poel Hatzair. ─ 1944. Partzufim- Mamarim Vershimot, (Heb.) (Faces- Essays and Notes). Tel Aviv: Mitzpa. Shmueli, Sh. 1930. H’apoel Hatzair 23, Vol 7 (18). Studies in the Heritage of Janusz Korczak, New Sources From the Ghetto 4. University of Haifa: The Janusz Korczak Association in Israel, Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, 1993. Tagore Rabindranath. 1930. Habit Vhaolam (The House and the World) (Heb.), Translated by Pesach Ginzburg. Jerusalem: Mitzpa. ─ 1926. Haleumiut (Nationalism) (Heb.). Translated by Y. Adulami. Warsaw: Traklin. ─ 1958. Letters to a Friend. Edited by C. F. Andrews. London: Allen and Unwin. ─1923. Natoinalism (Yiddish). Translated by Y. Rapaport. Warsaw: B. Kletzkin. Tagore, Saranindranath. 2008. “Tagore’s Conception of Cosmopolitanism,” University of Toronto Quarterly 77, no. 4. Notes Cf. A list of Tagore’s works translated into Hebrew and Yiddish in Russia, Europe and Israel in Alexander Cherniak and Sergei Serenbriany, “Tagore in Jewish Diaspora and the State of Israel” in Rabindranath Tagore: One Hundred Years of Global Reception, eds. Martin Kämpchen, et al, (Delhi: Oriental Blackswan, 2014): 175-192. The list, which is mainly bibliographical in nature, does not include many journalistic and critical articles as well as numerous references in the Hebrew literature that are partially mentioned in this paper. This article is a first attempt to examine Tagore’s ideological and literary reception as well as his influence on the world of Hebrew literature against the background of the emergence of both the Indian and the Zionist national movements. 2 See also Mendes-Flohr 1991, 67-76. 3 It should be noted that in India, too, there was disagreement on the nature of the future state. Whereas Gandhi, as he stressed in his book Hind Swaraj (1909), objected to modern Western culture, the majority of India’s leaders viewed adopting technological and governmental “modernity” as the key to India’s revival and the development of its ability to deal with poverty and hunger as well as its ability to stand as an independent state in the future. A comparison between the discussion of “East and West” and the Indian disagreement 1


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regarding its nature as an “Asian” modern state is a wide topic, far beyond the scope of this paper. 4 This letter was first published in Calcutta’s Modern Review of May 1921. 5 Martin Buber and J.L. Magnes published their response in the form of “Two Letters to Gandhi,” The Yoke, 1939. For details, cf. Lev 2012, 2013. See: Bialik 1938, 151; Epstein 1913, 165-167; Frishman 1913. Flaum published several articles about Tagore in the Hebrew press and two books: one about her travels in the world at whose center is her sojourn in Shantiniketan (1936), and a biography of Tagore (1946). 8 The writer and editor Ben Yishai wrote: “The language of the Bible, the language of Psalms, The Song of Songs, Job, Ecclesiastes, a language breathing the air of the East and peaks of poetry – none other suits Tagore’s poetry of the East… It is hard to believe that these are not verses from the Judean Desert Genizah deliberately or inadvertently omitted from the 24 holy books” (Ben Ishai 1961). In addition, he claimed that Tagore’s poetry influenced poets like Yisrael Cohen and especially Matityahu Shoham. 6 7

For example, when Tagore’s winning the Nobel Prize became known, a French journalist interviewed Sylvain Levi about “Rabbi Tagore” (“Le Rabinn Tegoro,” Dutta and Robinson 1995, 186). 10 Rabbi Benyamin translated this himself, probably from German, and his translation differs from that in the Hebrew edition. 11 The German censor forbade reading Tagore’s works and plays but Korczak ignored this. 9

Swansong on Jewish identity in India? : Sheela Rohekar’s novel Miss Samuel: Ek Yahūdῑ Gāthā (2013) in context By Heinz Werner Wessler (Uppsala University, Sweden) Sheela Rohekar (born 1942) started publishing short stories, first in Gujarati, in the 1960s. Her first collection of short stories (in Gujarati) was published 1968 under the title “Laiflain nī bahār” (“Outside the lifeline”). Born a Bene Israel Jew, brought up in Ahmedabad and Pune, she has lived in Delhi and Lucknow for decades, and is presently probably the only living Jewish Hindi author. She has been teaching natural sciences at college level, and is married to the Hindi author Ravīndra Varmā (born 1936).1 After her marriage with Ravīndra Varmā, she moved to the Hindi-speaking northern India – to Delhi and later to Lucknow – and started writing in Hindi. Together with her husband, she established herself as an author of Hindi fiction. Her short stories were published in established Hindi magazines like Sārikā and Dharmyug, and later Hans, Kathā Deś and Kathā Kram. Her first novel Dinānt (“The end of the day”) came out in 1977, and the second, “Tāvīz” (“The amulet”), in 2005. In her third and latest novel in Hindi, Miss Samuel: Ek Yahūdī Gāthā2 (2013) (“Miss Samuel: a Jewish saga”), Rohekar for the first time, delves into her own identity as a Bnai Israel Jew, which she had never directly touched in her fictional work before. Before we get into further discussion: it would be useful to have a look at the synopsis of the novel. Miss Samuel finds herself isolated, between a father who dreams of emigration to Israel, but never realizes it; and a brother who overstates his Indian identity, downplaying or even negating his Bnai Israel identity. The family members remain isolated from each other as well as from their surrounding society. The Jews being such a small minority numerically, the society clubs them with Muslims, Parsis with Christians, but fails to recognize her “difference”. However, she sticks to her belief that “one day this difference will bring the change into the story”. Completely isolated at the age of 70, Miss Samuel in her rest home, lives off her memories, trying to put the different strings of her life together. In the end, it is her loneliness becomes a character of the narrative. Communalism in Hindi literature Stories on communal tensions have been in currency in modern Hindi literature. They are usually on Hindu-Muslim relationships. The subject is common in colonial and post-colonial Hindi writing as well, starting from Bhāratendu Hariścandra (“Bhārat Durdaśā”) to Premcand (“Panch Parameśvar” and many others), and in postcolonial literature from Amritlal Nāgar (“Taslīm Lakhnavī” and other stories) to Yashpāl (“Pardā”, “Gamī kī Khuśī”, “Prem kā Sār” etc.), Viṣṇu Prabhākar, Kamaleśvar (“Kitne Pākistān”) and many others. Partition stories are also usually labelled under “Sāmpradāyiktā kā Sandarbh” (“the context of communalism”) in Indian histories of Hindi literature – as, to mention a recent example, in Ashok Bhatia’s Samkālīn Hindī-Kahānī kā Itihās (“History of the contemporary Hindi short story”, p.203ff) or in a book like B.R. Panerū’s Bhārat-Vibhājan aur Hindī Kathā-Sāhitya (“The division of India and Hindi fictional literature,” Nainital 2011), for whom the creation of Pakistan was caused simply by “the influence of the poisonous fruits of communalism” 3. The probably most popular example of this genre in Hindi literature is Bhīṣham Sāhnī's novel Tamas (1974) and Govind Nihalani’s 1987 film based on it, broadcast on Indian national television 40 years after the tragic events that might have cost more than 1.5 million lives. Religious feelings are very often fictionalized in the light of what is conveniently called “communalism” in South Asia in general, and stereotypically juxtaposed by what is conveniently called “secularism”. The creation of Pakistan is therefore still primarily perceived as an epiphany of communal sentiments, which means a construction of collective identities according to religious identities, with disregard towards modern nationalism. Hence the idea

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communalism and communal riots. The claim on an alternative concept of nationhood and nationalism historically realized in the creation of Pakistan is refused. This conceptualization of the binary of communalism versus secularism is the reason why the idea of Israel is difficult to explain in an Indian setup of discourses on identity, religion, and nationhood. In the 1980s, the matter of communal violence against the Sikh community after the murder of Indira Gandhi also occasionally surfaces in Hindi fiction, like in Punnī Singh’s short story “Śok” (“Lament”). Primarily however, communal violence has usually always been perceived in terms of Hindu-Muslim riots exclusively. The 1990s witnessed another wave of writings about Hindu-Muslim relationships and contemporary communal clashes –this was in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, and a subsequent wave of communal violence throughout India. I would like to mention particularly Sudhā Aroṛā’s long short story “Kālā Shukravār” (“Black Friday”) and Geetanjali Shree’s novel Hamārā śahar us Baras (“Our town that year”) (1998) as examples of literary responses to contemporary communal riots and their rootedness in deep psychological structures within personalities in general; and social relationships in particular. Stories on the general subject of communal relationships without any concrete reference to contemporary politics continue to be written, as for example Namitā Singh’s “Rājā kā Chauk” (“The king’s square”). Another example is Uday Prakash’s “Aur ant mein prārthnā” (“And in the end, a prayer”), which goes into the subtle details of the psychological setup of Dr. Wākankar, a devoted RSS volunteer. Over the last decades authors from Muslim background like Asghar Vajāhat, Abdul Bismillāh, Śānī and several others have contributed Muslim perspectives on these issues in Hindi, as have been analyzed in Ulrike Starck’s excellent study on Muslim Hindi writing. Needless to say that communal riots, communalism and intercommunal relationships in general, rank high on the list of subjects of Muslim authors, and I would like to mention Muśarraf Ālam Zauqī’s novel Laboreṭarī (“Laboratory”) as a recent example of a novel based on the 2002 Gujarat riots. “Tāvīz”4 Rohekar’s Tāvīz belongs to this genre. The plot is based on the story of a love marriage of a Hindu woman (Revā) with a Muslim man (Anvar) and the social, psychological and political consequences of this conscious transcending of religious boundaries.5 Tāvīz (2005) is a novel that grapples with communal identity and violence. It starts off with the last announcement, in a Lucknow newspaper, to identify the dead body of a middle aged lady. Nainā and her husband Nīraj are having a casual conversation about the matter as she serves tea while he is poring over the morning’s newspaper. His wonders that “If this poor thing is not even identified, who might cry about her?” Nainā responds that the police would definitely be crying because it would be their responsibility to have the final rites performed, and to finish the paperwork (Rohekar 2008, 9). At the end of the novel, the readers get to know that the corpse was of a woman called Revā. The above-mentioned protagonists remain unaware that both of them had known the dead lady, who is declared to have committed suicide by throwing herself under a train. At the end of the novel however, the reader is informed that she was actually killed. On the next page, they talk about Revā’s son, who also had disappeared some years ago – the reader would find out to her chagrin, that he also was killed. Both of them simply disappear – without leaving name and memory even amongst close relatives and friends. The frame narrative of the middle class husband and wife help the writer make the story of the fate of Revā, her husband Anvar Siddīqī, and their son Annu (aka Anant) more poignant. All the three end up being brutally killed on different occasions. The narrative in focus is set in the 1960s. Revā is an extraordinary girl who takes on her family and community, by deciding not just to marry out of her own choice instead of an arranged marriage, but also to marry a Muslim. Her father though, supports her in the limited ways he can, and does not let her go without his blessings.

Swansong on Jewish identity in India

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The narrative goes back and forth in time, shifting grounds between auctorial narration, reportage and forms of non-linear story-telling – including flashback, suspense; and particularly a series of references back to the 19th and the early 20th century reflected in the diary of Revā's grandfather. This diary forms a meta-narrative, juxtaposing the contemporary time’s exclusivist identity politics with the colonial and early postcolonial past when the options of transcending religious boundaries were less rigid. Revā's paternal grandfather, a freedom fighter, describes his time and also narrates stories that he has heard from his ancestors. Compared to Revā, her grandfather is much more outspoken. After 1947, he becomes more and more critical of the new state and its society. For Revā, the national enthusiasm and moral rigor of the freedom struggle is already part of a past narrative; her visits to the Sabarmati Ashram close to Ahmedabad on free Sundays have already become part of middle class weekend rigmarole. Mahatma Gandhi as a moral ideal is somehow present, but disputed (Rohekar 2008, 127) or without any impact on one’s own life or the social and intellectual reality around. During a later visit to Sabarmati Ashram together with her son Annu, some five or six years after Anvar’s (her husband) murder, Mahesh Jhā, the future second husband joins them on a Sunday trip to Sabarmati Ashram, and proposes marriage. At crucial points in the book, critical reflections on the situation before and after independence juxtaposed, and particularly through the grandfather's diary, which Revā keeps reading, and which constitutes the memorial link between not only between the political past and present, but also between her and her relationship with her family (which is broken because of her love marriage). While Revā’s love relationship and marriage with Anvar is a symbolic act of transcending the borders of religious communities, the brutal murder of her husband, her son and herself, reveal the structure of a society which is threatened when walls between communities are disrespected and borders transcended. Annu and his identity crisis as a young lad (“main kaun hūn?”) is the symbol of the failure of identity constructions beyond traditional social boundaries in modern India. Annu experiences his hybrid origin not as a positive gift, but as a burden. Annu studies in college, but his main concern is his sense of belonging, which he does not get either from his mother or his murdered father. The question, “main kaun hūn?” (“Who am I?”) reverberates through his being (Ibid. 217, 219, 224 etc.). When his friends turn towards Hindutva nationalism, he decides to follow suit and starts participating in political meetings and denies his Muslim descent. So he turns into a kār sevak (Ibid. 239), an activist for the construction of the notorious Rām-janmabhūmi temple in Ayodhya. He substitutes his lack of identity through radicalism. He breaks away from his stepfather and his mother, but shortly afterward, he is killed in Ayodhya in 1990, during the Ram-janmabhoomi agitation, by a police bullet. What follows is central event of the plot: While being prepared for cremation, his friends find out that Annu is circumcised – “He is circumcised! … This damn Mussulman! What is this sisterfucker doing here?”6 The first reaction of the onlookers to the naked truth is that this aberration must be some kind of “cālākī”, some trick (Ibid. 244). This leads to a number of questions. Hindu activists spontaneously and immediately turn aggressive and start swearing and maltreating the dead body. The political leaders – all of them Brahmins – discuss the issue more seriously. There is suspicion that this issue might easily lead into complications. Annu could have been a Pakistani agent provocateur (“sārā bavelā śurū kahān se huā? To jī uttar milā, Toṃṭī se.”). Simply because of the visible circumcision, it is taken for granted that a Muslim has maliciously crept into the Hindu campaign, and thereby polluted and desacralized the “śobhāyātrā” (the glorious journey), i.e. the campaign for the destruction of the Babri Masjid (p.247). Other options are also discussed with the Superintendent of Police, who appears to be a close associate of the Hindu zealots, and also Brahmin. In any case, it is taken for granted that Annu must have been part of a larger conspiracy. The cremation is at first denied – only when

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Annu’s friends Vikās and Bhabhu take care of it, the cadaver is at last cremated. But a netā (leader) argues that his ashes should be thrown into the dust bin instead of being strewn in the river (Ibid. 248). It is thereafter decided that this matter must be hushed, for if Muslim becomes a martyr for Rām Janmabhūmi-issue, who would be the “other”? In order to achieve this, silencing Annu’s mother, who lives alone in Ahmedabad, is decided upon as important strategy. This would avoid complications, even though it is clear that Annu did not maintain contacts with any of his relatives, not even with his mother. The decision to have Annu’s mother killed is taken because the influential politicians behind the communal riots are scared that Annu’s family might demand the body for burial. At the end of the novel, Revā is abducted and thrown on the rail tracks by the henchmen of the said politicians, to let it look like a suicide. A central element in Revā's biography are visits to the Sabarmati Ashram and the Mahatma Gandhi memorial. The Mahatma is a faint memory of moral integrity and a serious effort to develop Indian identity without denying traditional identities. But for Annu, this is just a visit to a museum, and completely unrelated to his own life, in which the question “main kaun hūn” (Who am I?) gains more and more importance. The motif, which transforms Annu into a Hindu activist is the fascination for “sattā”, (“power”) (Ibid. 274). This “power” helps him recover from the feeling of being powerless against his step father, who treats him badly. At the same time, Annu’s radicalization is a reactionary move in response to his being rejected by Nainā (Ibid. 274), who is reluctant because of Annu’s half-breed background. Annu’s identity as a child of a mixed marriage cannot but create a severe identity crisis in the young man. Becoming an activist is overcompensation of his psychological situation and finally leads to the denial of his Muslim father. He reinvents his own identity with a Hindu father (Ibid. 242), who in reality, is his stepfather. For Revā, clearly the alter ego of the author, the basic opposition is between “dharm” (righteous) and “adharm” (un-righteous) in the emphatic Gandhian sense, as she explains to her young son, when he asks his mother why Hindus and Muslims are different (Ibid. 217). Her emphasis is on the real religion of “imāndārī” (Ibid. 133) - on honesty and personal integrity, not on “bowing down” (Ibid. 133) and not on the fight for power, as her son Annu perceives it. However, the person who incorporates this existential understanding of religion, Revā, is killed and her body goes unidentified. Nobody cries for her, neither does anyone for Annu, whose ashes the “leader” suggests be thrown into the dustbin. Revā turns into an unidentified corpse, and society loses her memory; only the novel keeps record of it. The reference to “dharm” (“religion; ethics”) and “adharm” (“non-religion; nonethics”), transcending the stereotypical Hindu-Muslim opposition, allows Revā to evaluate religion as a positive source. Revā and Anvar’s mixed marriage symbolizes this “dharm” beyond traditional forms of religion. This religion appears to have a past, but no present and no future. The first one and a half pages of the novel describe the morning routine and the joking relationship of Nainā (Revā's sister) and her husband– then, all of a sudden her husband finds the news about an unidentified dead body – but they are not aware that this is Revā’s mortal remains. The desensitization towards violence is underscored through the petit bourgeois context of the morning talk and the news on a brutal murder, which hardly disturbs the family routine. The narrative brings out the extreme contrast between the hardly hidden violence in society and a terribly saturated social middle class life, totally ignorant of the substratum of brutality in society. The most powerful symptom of the transcendence of religious boundaries is Annu’s amulet (tāvīz), which lends the title to this novel. This small token of intercommunal well wishing, having gone lost during the abduction and murder of Revā in the last chapter of the book, lying on the floor, is the speaking symbol of the failure of the idea of transcending of borders. Intercommunal harmony is nothing more than a fast fading memory of a bygone dream of dharm transcending the traditional religious borders.


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“Miss Samuel: Ek Yahūdī Gāthā” The novel Tāvīz goes into the question of identity as a central question for Annu, but still follows to some extent the common pattern of an understanding of religious identity along the lines of the binary of communalism and secularism. Miss Samuel: Ek Yahūdī Gāthā goes, in a way, further than that. It was welcomed as “Hindi’s second novel on Indian Jews after 52 years”7. Rohekar herself compares this novel to her previous one, Tāvīz, by drawing attention to the Jewish problem of being mistaken for Muslims, “Communal riots scare the Jewish men to death as they know that they would be taken for Muslim because of their missing foreskin. My younger brother Jacob was once surrounded by a mob of rioters who had mistaken him for a Muslim, but he was saved by the influential Hindu school teacher. Both, Anant Siddiqui [i.e. Annu], the protagonist of my novel Tāvīz, and Bobby (Michael Samuel), the protagonist of my latest novel Miss Samuel: Ek Yahudi Gatha, get killed in this very way.”8 The new novel is focused on the question of Jewish identity and the threats that it is exposed to. The framework consists of the interactions of old ladies in an old people’s asylum in an Indian metropolitan town, reflecting on their lives. One of the ladies is Miss Samuel, whose father had died dreaming of an emigration to Israel, and whose brother (Bobby) was killed, mistaken for a Muslim, in a communal riot (Rohekar 2013, 86). The personal loneliness of Miss Samuel in the old age home, is a metaphor of Jewish identity in India in the 21 st century after more than half a century of grappling with the question of whether to stay in India or to emigrate. The practical consequences of a separate identity come out at marked places in the narration, as for example the episode on the search for a flat by Miss Samuel’s father (Ibid. 92ff): He didn’t have to be particularly industrious when he still was in service, but since his retirement had come close, he was at an advanced age confronted with issues he had never experienced before. It was as if the ground below his feet was being torn away, as if he was helplessly hanging in the air. Whenever he came home from some “Find your home” scheme office, he would say to his wife, “I don’t know, Miryam... well, you, who usually is the ‘Mira Ben’ [a Hindu name] for our neighbors - you are being properly checked nowadays. I went to the ‘Mangalam’ housing society today in order to get my application for membership registered. They were happy with me and asked for my name. I brought a slight smile on my lips, as in agreement with my position as government officer and let them note my surname and the initials. He immediately scribbled down our surname in Marathi. Then he asked – ‘Sir, what is your full name?’ I tried to put a natural expression on my face and said, “Samuel David, Under Secretary.” All of a sudden, his pen stopped writing. “Are you Christian?” “No, I’m Jewish.” “Eh, what kind of caste is this? Never heard of until today. Jewish!” Then his pen struck out my name. He made his face even more blunt than my own and he explained that he had made a mistake, he remembered right now that the last row of flats is already filled, and all of them were pure Hindus. Sam looked at the copper plate of Moses that was hanging on the western wall of the living room. He was standing there holding up the two stone slaps with the Ten Commandments, as he had received them from God. He was standing there on the slope of mount Sinai in the mysterious mist of dark clouds, having lead 600,000 Jews from Egypt to the promised land of the Lord, following the apparition in the burning bush... but Samuel David recognized himself in this departure [from Egypt], and how he lost his ground. While sitting there in his room, depressed and silent, staring at the stone slabs of

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Moses, he remembered that it had been quite humiliating to get the present flat as well. The contractor, a certain Manekshah, had referred him to this society. “It’s a society mixed up of different religious membership, and not a particularly heavy burden for your purse.” 10,000 as first installment, the other payments could be stretched over 15 years. Everything was fixed smoothly. He had come to this house some four or five years before retirement. Flat number seven on the third floor of building “B” in the Geetanjali Society had been allotted to him. He himself went to fetch the allotment slip. Later, much later he became aware that the numbers seven and eight in all the buildings were allotted to non-Hindus! What a clever arrangement! “Boy, this is a flat on quota”, Manekshah explained smiling someday. “It is the same as with government jobs that are given on quota basis to applicants from low castes... exactly the same.” In 1962-63 Samuel David, who had moved into Geetanjali Society, didn't know that he would soon find out, what ‘secularism’, ‘friendship’ and ‘brotherhood’ actually means. […] In the beginning, Samuel would take his family and go to congratulate others during the Diwali-festival, but nobody would come to them. “Mira Ben, that’s only because you are not celebrating these festivities, that’s why we don’t come.” “So what? Even we lighten oil lamps, we buy sweets and prepare them ourselves... only we don’t perform any religious service”, said Miryam. “Well that’s how it is... please don’t take it wrong.” “Ok, just leave it, but on our celebrations you should...” Cutting Miryam short, she said, “What do we know about them?” Samuel got up and switched on the light. He felt lost deep in his heart. Slowly but continually his enthusiasm and joy vanished away. Enlightening lamps, blowing up crackers and putting the red powder on the table on Holi had turned into a gesture without meaning. The revolving chain of his action had become rusty and it started to make strange noises. Danny’s chain was the first to get rusty. Danny could not take any humiliating word or even only a suspicion about him of a religious kind. He used to get up in arms on this. “How stupid you are, boy”, he taunted Vijay, who was in his undergraduate studies with him. “How have you managed to reach to BA-level without having heard anything on the Jews?! You just learned your exam questions and answers by heart without thinking and got it?” Vijay was reluctant, “How could I know, Danny? I have never heard of this caste. Besides, people in the colony said --- that ---” “What?” shouted Danny. “Well, that you are Maharashtrian Christians because you speak Marathi and the women from your household dress like them.” “Fine!” Danny looked at Vijay with contempt. In a way as an equivalent to the repeated question “main kaun hūn” in Tāvīz, Mis Samuel continually refers to her own state as “khoī sī” (“somehow lost”) (Ibid. 224). There is no hope for liberation – “there is no space for liberation in my religion”, states Miss Samuel9, underlining the separate identity of Judaism that is under threat of being swallowed up by Hinduism (Ibid. 212). On a private level, this process of appropriation is the taking over of the household of Miss Samuel’s father David by his second wife Jyotsnā after the death of her physical mother (Ibid. 131; 135ff). The death of Sakhūbāī’s parrot is the image of the silenced voice of the Indian Jewry. The pogrom, which led to the death of Bobby, is the subtext of all the stories that the old lady tells in her asylum – and the word that marks this event is “tamāśā” “spectacle”: “Spectacles change the nature of places”10. However, this “tamāśā” did not target Jews, but Muslims – while Bobby, among others in his articles in the “Times of India”11, made a special


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point of belonging to the Indian soil12, refusing the option of emigration to Israel: “Why shouldn’t my body that is made of this water and earth not thirst to finally be immersed into this again? Why this desire without limits for a country that nobody knows or has ever seen?”13 “India is his Israel”14, and for Miss Samuel “the space to be myself”15. Indian Jewish identity and literary fiction I would like to refer to a questionnaire to contemporary authors in the September 2009edition of the famous journal Hans, in which question number 7 was, “Why aren’t there many more contributions from Christians and authors with other religious identities in Hindi, leaving out authors with a Muslim identity?”16 To go into the responses is beyond the scope of this paper, but the different responses illustrate how difficult it is for postcolonial Indian enlightened intellectual discourse in general to perceive religion as a positive resource for resilience and cultural resistance and for self-reflexivity, which means, in other forms than that as a resource for political reactionary thinking and social conservatism. Archanā Varmā starts her response with this laconic sentence: “And finally once again this damn identity.” Gopāl Rāi in his book Hindī Upanyās kā Itihās (2002), in his chapter on “Sampradāyiktā kā Sandarbh” (The context of communalism), writes as his final conclusion: “In this context, the fact that has to be mentioned is that the romancers of Hindi are motivated by liberal, humanist and democratic values in relation to communalist thought and emotion.” The background of such a position is an implicit statement that there is a secularist position as such. A central question of my reading of this genre in Hindi literature has been: Is there something like a common progressivist position shared by all, independent of her or his inherited identity in terms of social, religious or gender conditioning? Is there a uniform literary perspective on communal violence among the authors beyond their social, cultural and religious milieu? Is it all just about, to quote Ashok Bhatia again, “sāmpradāyiktā, dharmāndhtā kā tīvra virodh” – opposition to communalism and religious blindness? 17 How far is the perception and the fictional rendering dependent on the author’s identity – religious, social, regional, gender? And if this dependency is there, how far is the reflexivity of an author related to her or his facility to completely transcend her or his background in the name of what in South Asia is usually labelled secularism? Or, to put it in other words, is there a multiplicity of “secularist” - in the South Asian meaning of the word – perspectives in fictional literature possible and likely, something like an identity-sensitive “secularism”? Ester David in her autobiographical book Book of Esther writes the following prayer, relating to her emigration from India to Israel: “It would wipe out my past. Give me a new life. Help me forget India. … I was running away from India.” (David 203, 371). After many years in Israel and France and after her return to her native town Ahmedabad in Gujarat, she writes, “If I wished to live like a Jew, I could live anywhere. I did not have to live in Israel to feel more Jewish than I felt in India. … Israel unnerved me.” (Ibid. 377). The other famous Jewish Hindi author is Mira Mahadevan, who is particularly known through one novel Apnā Ghar (1961) and through a free English translation of the same under the title Shulamith (1975). It describes the Bene Israel lifestyle and identity conflicts in early postcolonial India, when the emigration of the majority of Bene Israel to Israel had happened only recently or was still ongoing. Mahadevan has also written about a dozen short stories on various issues, demonstrating a strong Gandhian influence on her perception of social and communal conflicts in modern India. Mira Mahadevan, born as Miriam Jacob Mendrekar, and married to a South Indian Hindu, has lived in an atmosphere inspired by Gandhian thoughts, partly in the famous Sabarmati Ashram in Maharashtra, where Hindi has been promoted as the spoken language, which made her comfortable with the use of Hindi. There are a few Indian Jewish authors of fine literature in English. Ester David (born 1945) is perhaps the most famous among the still living in a quickly diminishing community, a returnee from emigration to Israel and later France. Book of Esther (2003) is a kind of her literary autobiography. Among the poets, Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004) is the most prominent.

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Ezekiel wrote some of the most interesting pieces of Indo-English poetry, sometimes directly related to his Jewish background, especially in his collection Latter-day Psalms (1983). Like Ester David, Sheela Rohekar started only in her later age to write about Jewish issues. Her novel in the aftermath of the history of the Jews in South Asia and their expectation of a future life in a multi-religious India, puts together bits and pieces of changing Jewish identity, from the rediscovery of the Jewishness of the Bene Israel in colonial India to modernization and overseas migration. These writers also focus on threats to their separate identity through emigration and middle class mainstreaming processes, and on the difficulty of maintaining Jewish identity, which at the same time is critical of Israeli politics and more or less of Zionism in general. Conclusion: Singing the Swansong Both the novels of Rohekar document the endangered and shrinking space for minority identities in India. While Tāvīz is a novel that wrestles with the issues of religious identity and violence in terms of Hindu communalism following very much the common post-colonial binary of secularism versus communalism, Miss Samuel tries to decipher religious identity as part of the construction of cultural and psychological belonging. Rohekar had considered another title for Miss Samuel for a while, “Apne Hone kī Jagah” (“The space to be oneself”) (Rohekar 2013, 223) – taking up the question on identity raised by Annu in Tāvīz, but her publisher convinced her to go for a title that would clearly indicate Jewish identity to the customer/reader. “Jewish? What caste is this?” 18 – the clerk asking this question in the novel, tends to identify “Jewish” with Muslim or alternatively with the IndoChristian community. The novel evolves on questions of Indian Jewish identity before and after the post-colonial emigration that led the Jewish community in India to the verge of extinction. It is narrated from the perspective of Jewish and other female inhabitants of a “vṛddhāśram” – an asylum for elderly people – and is a swan song for the dwindling Jewish community in India. The book consists of the narrations of memories of old women reflecting on their lives, and particularly of Miss Samuel. There is no ongoing plot, no finale – but something like a melancholic fading out of memories. The most dramatic episodes of interreligious interactions narrated in Miss Samuel are similar to the narrative of Tāvīz –in the former, a young Jewish man is killed; and in the latter a young man half-Hindu and half Muslim, is murdered in communal violence. Like Anant Siddiqui in Tāvīz, Bobby (i.e. Michael Samuel) is murdered during riots because he is being identified as a Muslim by the blood thirsty mob. The result of a discussion on Jewish identity leads to the statement that the identity of Jews should be marked as “Hindū Yahūdī” (“Hindu Jewish”) (Ibid. 56). Sīmā Samuel argues however that there is no God at all (Ibid. 129) – but this statement does not fit into the scope of possible ascriptions to anybody in India. Nobody can avoid being ascribed a fixed status in the Indian social context. Sīmā comes to the conclusion that it would have been better if she was Hindu.19 As the last of her tribe in the asylum, there is no space left over in the universe of Indian identities for herself as a Jew. Bibliography: Bhatia, Ashok. 2003. Samkālīn Hindī-Kahānī Ka Itihās. Delhi: Neha Publishers. David, Esther. 2003. Book of Esther. Penguin Global. Ezekiel, Nissim. 1983. Latter-day Psalms. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rāi, Gopāl. 2002. Hindī Upanyās kā Itihās. Delhi: Rajkamal. Jalīl, V. K. Abdul (ed.). 2006. Samkālīn Hindī Upanyāsa: Samay aur Saṃvednā. Delhi: Vani. Mahadevan, Mira. 1961. Apna Ghar. Akshar Prakashan. Panerū, B.R. 2011. Bhārat-Vibhājan aur Hiṃdī Kathā-Kāhitya. Nainital: Devbhumi Prakashan. Rohekar, Sheela. 2008. (2nd ed.; 1st ed. 2005). Tāvīz. Delhi: Vani.


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Rohekar, Sheela. 2013. Miss Samuel: Ek Yahūdī Gāthā. Delhi. Singh, Maina Chawla. 2009. Being Indian, Being Israeli: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Homeland. New Delhi: Manohar. Wessler, Heinz Werner, “‘Who am I?: On the narrativity of identity and violence in Sheila Rohekar’s novel ‘Tāvīz’,” Orientalia Suecana 60 (2011): 49-59 Notes Ravīndra Varmā (born 1936 in Jhansi) has published several short story collections. Among them are: Koī akelā nahīn hai (“Nobody is on his own”, 1994) and several novels like Kissā totā sirf totā (“The story of a parrot, a parrot only”, 1977), Javāharnagar (“The town named after Javāhar”, 1995), Ninyānve (“99”, 1998) and Main apnī Jhānsī nahīn dūngā (“I won’t give my Jhānsī away”, 2004). 2 Sheela Rohekar, Miss Samuel: Ek Yahudi Gatha (New Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith, 2013) 3 “sāṃpradāyiktā ke viṣhaile phalon kā prabhāv”, 201 4 Compare Wessler 2012 for a more detailed analysis of Tāvīz 5 Intercommunal marriage is not new as a motif in Hindi literature, and I would like to mention Krishna Sobti’s “Ār se bichuī” in particular in this context. 6 “iskī to kaṭī huī hai! … Musallā hai sālā! Bhencod yahān kyā kar rahā thā?” (p.245) 7 http://weeklypresspakistan.com/2013/03/7064 (Accessed 17th October 2015) 8 http://weeklypresspakistan.com/2013/03/7064 (Accessed 17th October 2015) 9 Mere dharm mein mokṣh ke lie koī jagah nahīn hai, p.214. 10 Tamāśe jagah badal dete haiṃ, p.209 11 See Rohekar 2013, 151ff 12 Miṭṭī, Ibid. 166 13 Merī kāyā jab isī miṭṭī pānī se banī hai phir bhī isī mein mil jāne ke lie kyon taras nahīn rahī? Jis deś ko na kabhī jānā dekhā, usī ke prati aisā athāh moh kyon?” (Ibid. 95) 14 Bhārat hī inkā izrāil hai, (Ibid.180) 15 Apne hone kī jagah, (Ibid. 223) 16 Hans 9 (2009): 36ff 17 Bhatia 2003, 212 18 “Yahūdī? Yah kaun-sī jāti hai?” (Ibid. 92). 19 Sīmā soctī hai ki yahūdī na hote Hindū hotī to acchā hotā (Ibid. 222) 1

Bnei Ephraim Community: Judaization, Social Hierarchy and Caste Reservation Anton Zykov, at Higher School of Economics, Russia Introduction Since the Ambedkar movement, conversion to another religion became one of the traditional ways for untouchables in contemporary India to leap out of the confines of the caste discrimination1. This, however, complicated the narrative of India’s caste politics, as according to the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950, the reservation system, created for the betterment of socio-economic status of the untouchables, was originally designed for Hindus, to ameliorate the condition of so-called ‘schedule castes’ and adivasis, referred to as ‘scheduled tribes’. Later amendments included Sikhs (in 1956) and Buddhists (in 1990) also within the ambit of the above mentioned provisions. With Mandal Commission report in 1990 greatly extending the reservation limits, other religious communities also claimed their right for reservation. The 2007 Ranganath Misra Commission Report as well as another National Commission for Minorities Report published a year after that “found that there was a strong case for according Scheduled Caste status to Dalit Muslims and Christians” 2, which was de facto implemented in certain states like Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu*. Thus, the only religious community that remained untouched by the reservation politics were Indian Jews** that numbered approximately 33,000 at the time of India's Independence 3. However, Jews – Malabari, Paradesi, Bnei Israel or Baghdadi – never claimed rights to reservation. This trend changed with the emergence of so called Judaizing movements *** in the country, largely inspired by the success of Ethiopian community of Beta Israel’s (also known as Falash Mura) migration to Israel that started in late 1970s. They used the common way of Judaizing, Baal teshuva or embracement of Jewish culture and observance of orthodox religious traditions, though which new ‘returnees’ seek incorporation into Judaism in general and Israeli society. The success of the “black Jews’” migration to Israel encouraged other groups in Africa as well as other countries to reinforce their claims of Jewish identity. In India, late 1970s marked the activities of Bnei Menashe, a community currently consisting of about 9,000 that is primarily comprised of three tribes: Kuki, Mizo, or Chin, most of whom reside in the states of Mizoram and Manipur in the Indian north-east and fall under the constitutional category of ‘scheduled tribes’4. They claimed that their ancestral roots could be traced to Manasseh, son of Joseph, one of Jewish patriarchs5, whose people, a part of ‘the ten lost tribes’ was expelled from Israel in 721 B.C.E and then though Assyria, Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet reached China, from where they had to flee in 100 C.E. and eventually settled in Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Burma, from where they ended up at their current destination6. Although in 1979 Bnei Menahse’s Jewish identity was studied and eventually supported by Israeli organisation Amishav (Shavei Israel) led by rabbi Eliyahu Avichail7, who was a driving force behind arranging giyur or formal convention ceremonies, and later funding the aliyah. However, general opinion remained sceptical about the possibility of their acknowledgement as Jews8 until April 2005 when chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Amar took a decision to accept the claim of Indian group Bnei Menashe for their Jewish descent9, which opened their way to make aliyah to Israel. The Indian government resisted this move and restricted Bnei Menashe’s migration 10 for seven years11, but eventually acknowledged their claim for Jewishness and allowed their departure to Israel in 2012. The example of successful claims for Jewishness by Bnei Menashe gave inspiration to Bnei Ephraim, the community of untouchables in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh that claims kinship ties with the Bnei Menashe, as Ephraim, according to Judaic tradition was Manasseh’s

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brother, also son of Joseph. The Bnei Ephraim, numbering just around 40 families12, are primarily concentrated in the village of Kothareddypalem near the town of Chebrol. Being members of Madiga dalit caste, they are a subject of reservation policies of the state government. Although Israeli rabbinate shows no sign of recognising Bnei Ephraim as Jews, their ‘rediscovery’ of Jewish identity possesses a dilemma before Indian authorities: if, following the Bnei Menashe case, Israel agrees with the Judaic descent of Bnei Ephraim, and should India accept their right to migration, this will put in question the existing caste politics that do not recognise Indian Jews as a subject of reservation. This essay discusses the emergence and self-identification of the Bnei Ephraim, as well as the influence of their (re)discovered Jewishness on their socio-economic and hierarchical status among the local community in connection with the governments’ politics of reservation, which is applied to them as a ‘scheduled caste’. In other words, the paper will look at the history of Bnei Ephraim, an untouchable community claiming the status and rights that characterize other Jewish communities of India, but at the same time being a subject of reservation caste politics. Bnei Ephraim: Emergence and Self-identification Bnei Ephraim community, by and large, belongs to Madiga caste, one of the two major dalit caste clusters of linked endogamous groups of this region. Their main traditional occupations have been skinning of dead animals, leather dressing, making of leather ropes, making leather buckets for hauling water from wells, and other leather articles used in husbandry 13 as well as agricultural labour, such as making chappal or open sandals and taking care of the village cattle owned by the upper castes14. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Briggs wrote about Madigas as those who “live on the outskirts of the village, [are] described as coarse and filthy, as an eaters of unclean food, and as a user of obscene language, who work in leather, and serve as a menial and as a scavenger” 15. According to Briggs, “Madigas are practically serfs. Most of them are field labourers” 16. Most of my correspondents (both elders as well as middle-aged) in Kothareddypalem village confirm this professional description 17. According to Egorova and Perwez, “Madigas constitute 46.94 per cent of the total scheduled caste population of the state [Andhra Pradesh - A.Z.]”18 or 6 million in absolute figures19. The conversion of Telugu untouchable castes from Hinduism to Christianity started in late 19th century and by “1902, ten per cent of the Madigas were returned as Christians”20. The exact percentage of Christians, however started dropping after India’s Independence: while in 1951 its share in the state’s population was 3.94 per cent (more than 12 million) and reached its peak in 1971 (4.19 per cent or more than 18 million), by 1981 it plunged to 2.68 per cent (around 14 million)21. Senftleben suggests that the major reason for this “was that many Christians of Scheduled Caste origin have declared themselves as Scheduled Caste members, which they can be only if they do not belong to the Christian community… [whereas] the government does not continue to give the benefits and reservations, which are provided for the Scheduled Castes, to those Scheduled Caste members who embraced Christianity”22. However, in 1970, Andhra Pradesh government adopted the Anantharaman Commission recommendations and introduced – though just 1 per cent – reservations for dalit converts to Christianity under ‘Group C’ of the scheduled castes category 23. Interestingly, although the leadership and core of Bnei Ephraim initial followers are Christians (as Egorova and Perwez note: “Back in the 19th century the ancestors of the Bene Ephraim were converted to Christianity by an American Baptist mission” 24), some of the Bnei Ephraim families who joined the movement later, when interviewed, named Hinduism as their former religion25. Besides, conversion to Christianity – both in the view of upper castes such as Reddy and Kamma, and in the view of the Dalits – did not help stop the practice of untouchability against dalits26. Although conversion to Christianity for Madigas as untouchables “meant certainly... improvement in social and economic status” 27, in fact, Christianisation has

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institutionalised caste divisions. Senftleben notes that “it is a fact that different denominations or different churches of the same denomination (there are, for instance, three different Lutheran Churches in Andhra Pradesh - the Andhra Evangelical Lutheran Church that counts about 25 per cent Madigas, while the South Andhra Lutheran Church mostly, which consists of Malas. A merger of these two Lutheran churches in Andhra Pradesh is unlikely, because the Malas of the SALC do not want their property to fall into the hands of Madiga Christians) do not join because they fear problems on the basis of caste origin. Especially Malas and Madigas have a deep-rooted hatred against each other” 28. Untouchability characterised by polluted hierarchical status of its victims; absence of intermarriages; and social aspects of subordination (prohibition on inter-dining, and the use of water sources, as well restricted access to sacred spaces) 29 was fully practiced towards Madigas. In his comprehensive account for South Indian castes, Thurston recalls that “at a factory, where at [he] stayed... there were three wells, viz.: - for Malas, for Madigas, and for the rest of the workers, except Brahmans. And the well-water for the Malas was better than that for the Madigas”30. In the first half of the 20th century, Hassan mentions that Madigas were treated as “the lowest in the Hindu social system …while no caste except the Dakalwads, their own subdivision, will eat food cooked by them. They live on the outskirts of villages, in thatched one-storied houses, with only one entrance door. Their habits are very dirty, and their quarters extremely filthy”31. Most of my Bnei Ephraim correspondents retain a memory of caste discrimination that can be summarized in four major patterns: separate sitting (often on the floor in the remote corner of a classroom) in government school where other students and even teachers avoided any communication with untouchable pupils; refusal to share food and water in plates or vessels with untouchable workers who did seasonal labour for upper castes (the food was instead thrown at them from a distance and water poured in their hands or on their heads); prohibition to enter places of worship (churches and temples equally) as well as village wells belonging to upper caste; generally restricted access to the upper caste village areas, being confined to the secluded areas on the outskirts of settlements (some untouchables had to wear palm leafs attached to their waist to whip their steps after them) 32. Thus, Bnei Ephraim, as members of the Madiga caste retain a strong memory of untouchability that has been practiced towards them in various forms and is sometimes still experienced by them. The discrimination, in a less vivid forms, continued till recently. Yacob Yacobi, 38, the second son of Shmuel circumcised by rabbi Avichail in 1992, who did his schooling in Vijaywada during the 1980s also states that the upper castes “never recognised me... and in school they never talked to me... even teachers, they wanted to keep me away” 33. The Judaizing idea among Bnei Ephraim emerged in the early 1980s. According to Shmuel Yacobi, the history of Jewish descent was disclosed to him by his father, who served in in the British Army and was sent to Palestine during the Raj 34. Egorova and Perwez also reproduce this narrative, stating however, that “a more likely source of ‘external’ influence may have come from another Indian community that embraced the Lost Tribe tradition” 35, i.e. Bnei Menashe. In Shmuel’s book, the definition of ‘Bnei Ephraim’ encompasses nearly all Telugu untouchables: “There are about 10 million members in Bnei Ephraim... Some of these 10 million call themselves as Christians, and few others... Buddhists or Hindus... and about 90 per cent call themselves as scheduled caste Malas and Madigas”36. Judaization and Untouchability The new Jewish status of Bnei Ephraim helped them elevate their social status in the eyes of their neighbours. An Important role in this process is played by the rise of community leadership’s authority in the village through re-establishment of its place in the village hierarchy. One of the ways to do so is to break the traditional patterns of behaviour and even change their living area. The house loan taken by Sadok Yacobi helped him in 1991 build his new home which now serves as a synagogue in Kothareddypalem. The synagogue is located

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in the central part of the village, which contradicts the traditional lower caste apartheid towards Madigas. Egorova and Perwez note that “the Yacobi brothers managed to build the synagogue in the central part of the village, on a site surrounded by land belonging to caste Hindus... [Escaping] the untouchable quarters, which are traditionally situated on the outskirts of the main village”. Thus, according to the scholars “the synagogue... may be seen as a symbol not just of the new religious identity of the Bnei Ephraim, but also of their claim to a new status”37. During my fieldwork, an observation was made that after the shabbath prayers at the synagogue, Sadok Yacobi, who led the service, was addressed for ritual blessings by some of the Bnei Ephraim. For instance, a woman asked him to bless her baby child; and a young man, who had suffered an injury in a recent bike accident, asked for a healing prayer. More interestingly, Sadok’s authority as pastor and transmitter of favour, has spread not only among Bnei Ephraim and other Madigas, but even amongst upper caste villagers. In our conversations, he mentioned that several people in need, such as pregnant women or the sick, come to his synagogue for blessings: “when they [upper caste village people – A.Z.] come [to the synagogue – A.Z.], I ask them to sit... I give them [the prayer] Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad, and then I ask them to tie [the tefillin]... People used to come [back – A.Z.] and say: “We are now happy, we are all right”38. Apparently, Sadok’s blessings are also believed to bring fertility to families, disregarding their caste background: “they [childless villagers – A.Z.] come to me and say: ‘We have been to many religions, many temples and [have] no children... and we came to you because you can also say something so we can follow and can pray’... I say: ‘I will introduce you to God, whom you did not know until now... He is the man who gave birth to you all, that’s why we don’t bother about your religious beliefs, the God of Hebrews..., [so] you pray and see, and we also pray, the whole congregation will pray for you’” 39. The upper castes in village seem to be less problematic with coming to Sadok’s synagogue, asking for spiritual services, rather than entering Madiga Christian churches or other holy places, although for some Bnei Ephraims, religious beliefs are still believed to be some sort of Christian cult of sect40. The acceptance of Judaism for Bnei Ephraim not only helped them elevate their social status in Kothareddypalem, but also attracted the interest of upper castes, particularly Reddy and Kama, that dominate the socio-economic and political scene in Andhra Pradesh *. Shiv Ram Reddy, 49, a lawyer at the High Court of Hyderabad heard about the movement through a newspaper article in 1999 and went to stay with Sadok and Shmuel, celebrating Shabbat and other holidays with Madiga community members: “... last Rosh haShana [Jewish New Year – A.Z.] I was there, some people from Reddy community also visited [the Bnei Ephraim with me – A.Z.]. There we had food and water also”41. Now he considers himself as a part of Bnei Ephraim and recently had a DNA test conducted to prove his Middle Eastern ancestry. Answering a direct question about caste that may be an issue as far as his incorporation in the Bnei Ephraim community is concerned, Shiv Ram Reddy states that it is Judaism that makes the caste question irrelevant for him: “... for us the haShem [one of God's names in Judaism – A.Z.] is the only thing that measures the power, we don’t consider the question of caste. The caste consciousness is totally vanished... Judaism is a catalyst in developing society.”42Christianity, unlike Judaism, according to Reddy, practices caste and untouchability. Reddy goes even further accepting the potential possibility of intermarriages between Bnei Ephraim Madigas and upper castes within the Jewish community (he himself as well as his son are circumcised and consider themselves as Jewish - he overtly claims his Semite rather than Dravidian origin), a possibility categorically denied by the majority of Bnei Ephraim themselves. Another member of an upper caste, a Kamma, named Bala Raju, 37, who runs a business of selling pharma products and food supplements in Guntur, recently took on the name ‘Israel.’ He also got circumcised and personally attends the Bnei Ephraim synagogue in Kothareddypalem. Israel also come to know about Bnei Ephraim through the media sources


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and then addressed Sadok Yacobi, through whom he got engaged with the community43. The religious link between him and Bnei Ephraim has also evolved in economic relations, as currently he is helping Sadok acquire a new loan for his village house that serves as the Bnei Ephraim synagogue in Kothareddypalem. According to Sadok, he goes to Israel’s house every Sunday to teach Hebrew to his three children 44. In addition to involving upper castes in the movement, Bnei Ephraim community also attracted members of untouchable Mala caste, that otherwise has traditionally been rival to the Madigas45. Joshua Tomothy, a Mala Bnei Ephraim from Guntur, claims that the establishment of the community has even opened the way for intermarriages between the two competing untouchable castes. According to him, the Bnei Ephraim following among Malas in Krishna, Guntur and Vijaywada equals to about 50 families46. Bnei Ephraim managed to draw international attention to their religious and, consequently, socio-economic issues. American Rabbi Marvin Tokayer visited Kothareddypalem in 2007 and made a financial contribution. Few years ago, an Israeli TV channel made a documentary on the community; and in 2012 a performer Irene Orleansky visited the community with the ‘purpose of recording a CD of music of the Hebrew tribes’ 47. Bnei Ephraim attracted significant scholarly attention with Dr Yulia Egorova and Shahid Perwez of SOAS/Durham conducting several months of fieldwork with the community. On December 30, 2012 Shmuel Yacobi and his sons managed to organise an international conference on Bnei Ephraim in Vijaywada. One of his sons, Dan Yacobi, 36, through Rabbi Tokayer’s sponsorship was admitted to study in yeshiva in New York for a year, and thereafter in 1999 he, travelled to Israel to continue his yeshiva studies for another two years48. Yeshua Yacobi, Shmuel’s eldest son even managed to do aliah and now resides in Ramat Gan, where he married a woman of Ukranian origin49. Another community member Kyla Coniah (her previous Hindu name - Samyuktha Kooniah) moved to Canada, where she, according to our correspondence, completed a PhD comparing the rituals of her native Kamakur Village with Jewish customs and concluding that “most of us [untouchables – A.Z.] in Andhra Pradesh are of true Jewish blood – to prove that we have our surnames, which have been handed down to us from generations after generations for more than 2500 years” 50. In 2010, she was in correspondence with Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel Yona Metzger 51. Finally, Judaization helped at least some members of Bnei Ephraim acquire an identity that helped them overcome the stigma that has been attached with their caste for centuries. Charsley, who particularly looks at the case of Madigas, speaks of them as victims “of an iniquitous social order, exclusively victims with absolutely nothing of which they could be proud of.” He opines that Judaization came as an important intervention in their lives as, “the castes so reduced were able to distinguish their identities with pride... presenting [untouchables] with an embraceable identity.52” Most of my correspondents among Bnei Ephraim also accepted the possibility of matrimonial relations53 with the members of the other Judaizing Indian movement of Bnei Menashe, the possibility and could be hardly possible without embracing a common religious identity. Francisco writes that “the ‘Judaization’ of the Bene Ephraim has been described as Jewish liberation theology, as its objective appears to be to challenge the position of this community in the Indian caste system.” 54By accepting the Jewish identity, regarded as a powerful one, the Bnei Ephraim were able to shed off the weak identity offered by the ‘scheduled caste’ designation. As Egorova and Perwez note, “Shmuel’s research into the Israelite part of his community was partly motivated by his desire to free Bnei Ephraim from caste inequality”55. Besides, similarly to other Judaizing movements elsewhere, “the historical experience of suffering of the Jewish people seemed to provide [Bnei Ephraim - A.Z.] a new model for explaining—and thereby making more tolerable—their own conditions of discrimination”56. Thus, accepting Judaism has helped the community to acquire ‘embraceable identity’, the job that the ‘scheduled caste’ definition was designed to do through positive discrimination. And if this is the goal of state caste politics towards untouchables in India, the Bnei Ephraim way of achieving this goal should be logically recognised at a legal level.

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Conclusion As we have seen, Bnei Ephraim’s (re)discovered Jewish status has helped them gain a new sense of communal self-identification, which has increased their social and hierarchical status amongst the local population. Unlike their former Christian and Hindu religious identity, the Jewish one helped them to acquire recognition among upper castes and break certain restrictions linked with their untouchable origin, such as inter-dining, sharing of water, common access to prayer places et cetera. As we have mentioned in the beginning, the Indian authorities’ de facto recognition of Bnei Menashe as Jews created a paradox in country’s caste politics, since the Mizo, Kuki and Chin tribal group, as members of the ‘scheduled tribes’ de jure considered as adivasis, continue to be entitled for the reservation, but at the same time acquire a right of immigration to Israel acknowledged by the Indian government with regard to ‘traditional’ Jewish groups in the country. It must be kept in mind that these ‘conventional’ Indian Jewish groups never enjoyed any form of reservation. The possible acknowledgement of Bnei Ephraim, who are covered by reservations as members of the Madiga dalit caste, as Jews will lead to even larger controversy in the nation’s caste politics, since unlike ‘scheduled tribes’ the ‘scheduled caste’ category’s definition is legally linked to Hinduism, making untouchability a ‘Hindu phenomenon’57. On the one hand, as the essay demonstrates, the changed religious narrative of Bnei Ephraim contributed to uplifting their social and hierarchical status amongst the local population, which correlates with the very purpose of the reservation policies aimed at “raising the status of hitherto underprivileged peoples so that they can compete as equals and indeed be able to fight effectively for right guaranteed in the Constitution”58. Thus, the Jewish status of Bnei Ephraim should be recognised and supported within the framework of the Indian government’s politics of caste. At the same time this recognition should give them the right of aliyah to Israel that the Indian government has traditionally given to its historic Jewish communities and recently granted to Bnei Menashe. On the other hand, the recognition of a group belonging to ‘scheduled castes’ as Jews will contradict the constitutional law itself that does not include Jews in the definition of ‘scheduled castes’. Thus, the religious rights claimed by Bnei Ephraim create dilemma in the country’s caste politics creating the clash between the spirit of India’s constitution and its word.


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Bibliography Briggs, George. The Religious Life of India: the Chamars. (London: OUP, 1920) Bruder, Edith and Tudor Parfitt, eds. African Zion: Studies in Black Judaism. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012) Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications. (New Delhi: OUP, 2012) Egorova, Yulia. Jews and India: Perceptions and Image. (New York: Routledge, 2006). Fernandes, Edna, The last Jews of Kerala: The Two Thousand Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008) Galanter, Marc, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984 Gupta Dipankar. Interrogating Caste. Understanding Hierarchy and Difference in Indian Society. (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000) Hassan, Siraj. The Castes and Tribes of H. E. H. the Nizam’s Dominions. Vol I. (Bombay: Times Press, 1920) Halkin, Hillel, Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel. (New York: Houghton Mifflin; 2002) Katz, Nathan, ed., Studies of Indian Jewish Identity. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2011) Katz, Nathan and Ellen Goldberg, Kashrut, Caste and Kabbalah: The Religious Life of the Jews of Cochin. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005) Mahar, Michael, ed., The Untouchables in Contemporary India. (New Delhi: Rawat, 2009) Mandelbaum, David. Society in India. (New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 2011) Mendelsohn, Oliver and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables. (Cambridge: CUP, 1998) Parfitt, Tudor and Semi Emanuela. Judaising Movements: Studies in the Margins of Judaism. (London: Routledge, 2002) Roland, Joan. The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era. (Transaction Publishers, 1998) Senftleben, Martin. Influences of Hinduism on Christianity in Andhra Pradesh. Book based on a PhD thesis at Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati (manuscript) http://www.drmartinus.de/bio/de/thesis1.pdf Singh, Maina. Being Indian, Being Israeli. Migration, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Homeland. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2009) Singh, Tulja, The Madiga: a Study of Social Structure and Change. (Lucknow: Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, 1969) Slapak, Orpa, ed., The Jews of India: a Story of Three Communities. (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1995) Thurston, Edgar and Y.K. Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol IV (Madras: Government Press, 1909) Yacobi, Shmuel. The Cultural Hermeneutics: an Introduction to the Cultural Transactions of the Hebrew Bible among the Ancient Nations of the Talmudic Telugu Empire of India. (Vijayawada: Hebrew Open University, 2002) Zelliot, Eleanor, ed., From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010) Articles and Reports “Andhra Pradesh Scheduled Caste (Rationalisation of Reservations) Act.” (Hyderabad: Dandora, 2000) “Andhra Pradesh. Data highlights: the Scheduled Castes.” (Census of India 2001) http://censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/SCST/dh_sc_andhra.pdf

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“Andhra Pradesh: A Case Study on the Impact of Reservation Implemented in Andhra Pradesh on the Educational Progress of Backward Classes (Interim Report).” (Oversight Committee on the Implementation of the New Reservation Policy in Higher Educational Institutions, Planning Commission of India) http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/resedu/rpresedu_a10.pdf Charsley, Simon, “Interpreting Untouchability: the Performance of Caste in Andhra Pradesh,” Asian Folklore Studies 63 (2004) Coniah, Kyla. “Baht Judah.” - Manuscript Deshpande, Satish and Geetika Bapna, Dalits in the Muslim and Christian Communities: a Status Report on Current Social Scientific Knowledge. (National Commission for Minorities, Government of India) http://ncm.nic.in/pdf/report%20dalit%20%20reservation.pdf Egorova Yulia and Perwez Shahid, “Telugu Jews: are the Dalits of coastal Andhra going casteawry?” The South Asianist 1, no. 1 (2012) Egorova Yulia and Perwez Shahid. “Old Memories, New Histories: (Re) discovering of the Past of Jewish Dalits,” History and Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2012) Egorova Yulia and Perwez Shahid, “The Children of Ephraim: Being Jewish in Andhra Pradesh,” Anthropology Today 26, no. 6 (2010) Epstein, Stephen. “A Long-Lost Tribe is Ready to Come Home.” Bnei Menashe Official Website - http://www.bneimenashe.com/history.html Elazar, Daniel. “The Jewish Community of India.” Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs http://jcpa.org/dje/articles2/india.htm Maity Bh., Sitalaximi T, R Trivedi and V Kashyap V, “Tracking the genetic imprints of lost Jewish tribes among the gene pool of Kuki-Chin-Mizo population of India,” Genome Biology 6 (2004): 1 Orleansky, Irene, “Bnei Ephraim: the Telugu Jews of South India,” Asian Jewish Life 11 (2013) Prabhakar, M.E, “Andhra Christians – Some Demographic and Ecclesial Issues,” Religion and Society XXXVII, no. 1 (1990) “Ranganath Misra Commission Report,” National Commission for Minorities, Government of India - http://www.sabrang.com/cc/archive/2010/apr10/ “Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India,” Prime Minister’s High Level Committee Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, November, 2006 http://minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/upload_files/moma/files/pdfs/sachar_comm.pdf Srinivasulu, K. Caste, Class and Social Articulation in Andhra Pradesh: Mapping Differential Regional Trajectories (Overseas Development Institute, September 2002) News Articles “Bnei Menashe Move To Israel: Indian Jews From 'Lost Tribe' Arrive in Holy Land,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/24/bnei-menashe-move-to-israel-indianjews-from-lost-tribe-arrive-in-holy-land-photos_n_2359086.html “Exodus of Indian Jews from north-east to Israel,” http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/nov/21jews.htm “Immigration of ‘lost tribe’ to resume after 5 years,” http://www.timesofisrael.com/bneimenashe-immigration-to-resume-after-five-years/ “Indian Jews from 'lost tribe' of Bnei Menashe arrive in Israel,” http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/indian-jews-from-losttribe-of-bnei-menashe-arrive-in-israel-1.489676 “Israel halts Indian conversions,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4422510.stm “Israel takes in more Bnei Menashe ‘lost tribe’ members,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldmiddle-east-20841382 Members of Bnei Menashe to make aliyah // http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L3831308,00.html


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“More

Than 200 Bnei Menashe Arriving in Israel,” http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/123481 Primack, Karen, “Meeting the Jews of Andhra Pradesh,” http://www.kulanu.org/india/andhrapradesh.php “Rabbi backs India’s ‘lost Jews’” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4400957.stm “The Indian ‘Lost Tribe’ Repatriation Resumes” (Возобновляется репатриация «потерянного колена» родом из Индии) //http://booknik.ru/news/blog/bne-menashe/ Websites http://www.bneimenashe.com/ - Bnei Menashe Official Website http://www.elijah-project.com/ - Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail (President, Shavei Israel) http://www.simoncharsley.co.uk/ - Simon Charsley (University of Glasgow) http://www.aponline.gov.in/apportal/departments/departments.asp?dep=03&org=111 Andhra Pradesh Commission for Backward Classes Notes

–

Eleanor Zelliot (ed.) From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 126 2 Satish Deshpande and Geetika Bapna. Dalits in the Muslim and Christian Communities: a Status Report on Current Social Scientific Knowledge. (National Commission for Minorities, Government of India): xii * According to the 2006 Sanchar Committee Report, Christians account for 9 per cent of the ‘scheduled caste.’ Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India (Prime Minister’s High Level Committee Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, November, 2006):7 ** Notwithstanding that the Report of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities (known as the Ranganath Misra Commission Report) recommends reservation for Parsis and Jains, this essay does not consider Parsis due to their very small (just around 70,000 according to the latest published Census data) and yet dwindling numbers. More generally, the explanation II, Article 25 of the Indian Constitution states that “the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jain or Buddhist religion.” (http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/631708/, accessed April 10, 2015) 3 Elazar, Daniel. The Jewish Community of India. // Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs http://jcpa.org/dje/articles2/india.htm; Slapak, Orpa (ed.) The Jews of India: a Story of Three Communities. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1995, pp.22, 34, 43, *** These movements have to be distinguished in nature from simple conversion to Judaism that happened in India before with the servants of White Cochin Jews, who came to be known as meshuhararim or "the manumitted" (Mandelbaum, David. Society in India. New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 2011, p.562) 4 The Constitution of India (Scheduled) Order. // http://lawmin.nic.in/ld/subord/rule9a.htm The movement emerged in the early 1950s but became most active after two decades. 5 This idea, according to the conventional legend, came in dream sometime in the early 1950s to a Shinlung farmer named Chala (Tchalah). http://www.elijahproject.com/RabbiAvichail.html 6 Stephen Epstein, “A Long-Lost Tribe is Ready to Come Home,” Bnei Menashe. http://www.bneimenashe.com/history.html 7 Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail is also known for his investigation of Israeli descent of the Pathans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, several African tribes in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and other counties and Latin America (Peru and Mexico). http://www.elijah-project.com/RabbiAvichail.html 8 Apart from general criticism by Israeli officials, Indian biologists undertook a genetic study that showed absence of the “Cohen Modal Haplotype, the genetic signature of Cohanim origin” 1

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See Maity Bh., Sitalaximi T, et al. “Tracking the genetic imprints of lost Jewish tribes among the gene pool of Kuki-Chin-Mizo population of India,” Genome Biology 6 (2004): 1, abstract. 9 “Rabbi backs India’s ‘lost Jews’.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4400957.stm 10 “Israel halts Indian conversions.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4422510.stm 11 The Israeli government also played a role in postponing Bnei Menashe’s migration by complicating the migration rules. (“Immigration of ‘lost tribe’ to resume after 5 years.” http://www.timesofisrael.com/bnei-menashe-immigration-to-resume-after-five-years/) 12 Egorova Yulia and Perwez Shahid, “Old Memories, New Histories: (Re) discovering of the Past of Jewish Dalits,” History and Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2012): 2. Shmuel Yacobi, one of the movement founders, in his book referred to 125 families in Krishna, Guntur and Prakashan districts (Shmuel Yacobi, The Cultural Hermeneutics: an Introduction to the Cultural Transactions of the Hebrew Bible Among the Ancient Nations of the Talmudic Telugu Empire of India. (Vijayawada: Hebrew Open University, 2002), 133. Siraj Hassan, The Castes and Tribes of H. E. H. the Nizam’s Dominions. Vol. I. (Bombay: Times Press, 1920), 420 14 Egorova Yulia and Perwez Shahid. “Telugu Jews: are the Dalits of coastal Andhra going caste-awry?” The South Asianist 1, no. 1 (2012): 9 15 George Briggs, The Religious Life of India: the Chamars. (London: OUP, 1920), 31-2 16 Ibid. 32 17 Interviews with Ruben Kushi, Nayomi Kaftori, Itshak Korahi, November 30, 2012 18 Egorova Yulia, “Telugu Jews,” 9 19 “Andhra Pradesh. Data highlights: the Scheduled Castes,” Census of India 2001. Accessed 10th April, 2015, http://censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/SCST/dh_sc_andhra.pdf 20 Briggs. The Religious Life, 32 21 M.E. Prabhakar, “Andhra Christians – Some Demographic and Ecclesial Issues,” Religion and Society XXXVII, no. 1 (1990): 5 cit. in Senftleben, Influences of Hinduism on Christianity, 86 22 Ibid. 87f. Prabhakar demonstrated this with the example of Guntur district, where the number of Christians decreased by nearly 13%, while the total Scheduled Caste population increased from 4.8 per cent to 9.22 per cent (Prabhakar, Andhra Christians, 6). 23 “Andhra Pradesh: A Case Study on the Impact of Reservation Implemented in Andhra Pradesh on the Educational Progress of Backward Classes (Interim Report)” Oversight Committee on the Implementation of the New Reservation Policy in Higher Educational Institutions, Planning Commission of India, Annexure X, 330. Accessed 20 th April 2015, http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/resedu/rpresedu_a10.pdf 24 Egorova Yulia and Perwez Shahid, “The Children of Ephraim: Being Jewish in Andhra Pradesh,” Anthropology Today 26, no. 6 (2010): 14 25 Interview with Ruben Kushi and Nayomi Kaftoti, November 30, 2012 26 Interviews with Sadok Yacobi and Shiv Ram Reddy, November 29 and December 1, 2012 27 Senftleben, Martin. Influences of Hinduism on Christianity in Andhra Pradesh. Book based on a PhD thesis at Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati (manuscript), p.101 http://www.drmartinus.de/bio/de/thesis1.pdf 28 Ibid. 29 Mendelsohn, Oliver and Vicziany, Marika. The Untouchables. Cambridge: CUP, 1998, pp.143 30 Thurston, Edgar and Rangachari, Y.K. Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Volume IV. Madras: Government Press, 1909, p.294 31 Hassan. The Castes and Tribes, p.420 32 Interviews with Daniel Korahi, Moshe Kedari, Rivka Sabotiya, Ruben Kushi, Yacob Yacobi. November 29-30, 2012 33 Interview with Yacob Yacobi. November 30, 2012 34 Interview with Shmuel Yacobi. November 30, 2012 13


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Perwez Egorova, Old Memories, New Histories, 5 Yacobi. The Cultural Hermeneutics, 133 37 Perwez Egorova. Old Memories, New Histories, 8 38 Interview with Sadok Yacobi. November 30, 2012. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. * Reddys and Kammas are referred in this paper as ‘upper caste’ mainly because this is the way these castes are defined by the Madigas. To be more correct, as Srinivasulu puts it, historically belonging to shudra castes, “The Reddys, Kammas... have emerged into a dominant position in the production process and have successfully translated this into political and cultural domains”. (K. Srinivasulu, Caste, Class and Social Articulation in Andhra Pradesh: Mapping Differential Regional Trajectories. (Overseas Development Institute, September 2002), 31) 41 Interview with Shiv Ram Reddy. December 1, 2012. 35 36

Ibid. Interview with Bala Raju Kamma (Israel). November 30, 2012. 44 Interviews with Sadok Yacobi. November 30, 2012. 45 Prabhakar, Andhra Christians, 16-7 46 Interview with Joshua Timothy. November 30, 2012 47 Irene Orleansky, “Bnei Ephraim: the Telugu Jews of South India,” Asian Jewish Life 11 (2013) 48 Interview with Dan Yacobi. November 30, 2012 49 Telephone conversation with Yeshua Yacobi. November 30, 2012 50 Kyla Coniah. Baht Judah – manuscript 51 Letter from Yona Metzger to Kyla Coniah. May 16, 2010. 52 Charsley, “Interpreting Untouchability,” 269 53 Interviews with Daniel Korahi, Moshe Kedari, Rivka Sabotiya, Ruben Kushi, Yacob Yacobi. November 29-30, 2012 54 Cited in Egorova, “Children of Ephraim,” 15 55 Egorova Yulia, Perwez Shahid. Telugu Jews: are the Dalits of coastal Andhra going casteawry? // The South Asianist, January 2012, vol.1, No 1, p.11 56 Egorova Yulia, Perwez Shahid. Old Memories, New Histories: (Re)discovering of the Past of Jewish Dalits // History and Anthropology, March 2012, vol.23, No 1, p.3 57 Lelah Dushkin, “Scheduled Caste Politics,” in The Untouchables in Contemporary India, ed. Mahar, Michael (New Delhi: Rawat, 2009), 167 58 Gupta Dipankar, Interrogating Caste. Understanding Hierarchy and Difference in Indian Society. (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000), 110 42 43

The Everyday Practice of Acceptance: The Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta’ Cosmopolitan Landscape (1930s – 1970s) By Jael Silliman We grew up like family. We lived in each other’s houses; we slept in each other’s homes. There were no fences and no boundaries, neither physical nor mental. Just as our lawns flowed into one another’s gardens, so too did our lives. We did not know the difference between being Jewish or Bengali. Whatever difference there appeared to be in our food habits or clothes (the Bengali moms wore saris while the Jewish moms wore Jalabas), we relished it as a part of our colorful lives. There was nothing that we did not know about each other’s lives. —Iti, born 1941 I.

Introduction:

The above quotation is from one of 34 interviews I conducted to understand the ways in which the diverse communities of Calcutta related to and interacted with the Baghdadi Jewish community. As Iti, a Bengali woman who grew up among Jews illustrates, the story of Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta ruptures the all too common narrative of Jews as “unwelcome outsiders.” In colonial Calcutta, where they lived for almost 200 years, they were not only accepted but also deeply valued and appreciated by others in this enclave. Most of those I interviewed regretted that the Jewish community had left the City; as Reena, born 1935, said: “…They were a lovely community and we miss them. Calcutta is not the same without them here.” Whereas many historians have looked at the forces leading to the rise of anti-Semitism across the globe, a glimpse into “Anglicized Calcutta” 1 provides some insight –into the conditions that enabled integration into the colonial project; and into accommodation, acceptance and deep bonds among minorities in this colonial enclave. In this context, my use of the term integration refers to the economic, political, social and cultural incorporation of the Baghdadi Jewish community along with others living in the “Anglicized enclave” into the colonial enterprise. The Baghdadi Jews aligned with British rule by assimilating Western values and life-styles in a colonial urban setting. This integration was a form of client cosmopolitanism fully acceptable to the British. The other “enclaved” Calcutta communities— including other ethno-religious minorities and also the more Anglicized sections of the Hindu majority—did the same. Among those who assimilated into British rule, there was not only a formal acceptance of one another, but also deep attachments—while maintaining their core cultural identities. Today the Calcutta Jewish community barely exists 2 and those acquainted with them are ageing, making even the memory of the community tenuous. This paper seeks to document and analyze the memories of Jewish Calcutta through first-person accounts of those who knew the Jewish community in the period between 1930s and the 1970’s. 3 During the sojourn of the Jews in Calcutta (1798 – 1960s), Calcutta was a major port City and, up until 1911, the capital of British India. This paper does not interrogate colonialism, but one is mindful of both the extractive and oppressive nature of the colonial state in Bengal. The ethnographic division and classification of the Indian population, based upon concepts of innate human difference, had important political functions: they were used by British colonial authorities to maintain military authority and police selected communities. The divisive classification inculcated by the colonial state, however, was selectively employed. In the case of colonial elites that were engaged in economic and other dimensions of the British colonial project, incorporation better served the interests of the colonial apparatus. These strata from the various ethnically diverse communities of Calcutta had a common objective: to maximize their own gains vis-à-vis the colonial state. Significant attention has been given to excavating colonial archives in order to trace ethnographic division and

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classification.4 Providing yet another piece of the colonial story, this paper accesses the recollections and collective memories of Jewish Calcutta to trace colonial relations with favored subjects. I examine the microcosm of Anglicized Calcutta to probe the factors that enabled diverse communities to flourish in this hothouse environment. Enabling conditions for this to occur included: a shared worldview, ethnically diverse neighborhoods, community based social engagement and friendships and places for the various groups to come together to maintain their identity, as well as social and cultural spaces which facilitated interactions across communities. An understanding of these features of colonial culture may provide some insights as many Western countries grapple with the politics and practice of “multiculturalism.” I suggest that accommodation and acceptance of different religious and ethnic identities in Anglicized colonial Calcutta occurred from neighborhood and inter-community day-to-day interactions and continued throughout the political, economic, social and cultural structures of the city. Despite hierarchies of colonialism, where the “British looked down on everyone” (Marcelle, b.1929) as one of my interviewees candidly expressed, there was a great deal of accommodation, mutual interchange and deep attachments among the various communities comprising Anglicized Calcutta. Education and the sharing of cultural spaces enabled the formation of a shared worldview in 19th century Anglicized Calcutta. This paper underlines the need for distinct communities, while retaining their core identities, to assimilate to be part of a stream of society from which opportunities flow. Defining Anglicized Calcutta: I define Anglicized Calcutta as the enclaves where diverse communities, who came to Calcutta for trade, thrived both alongside the local population and as part of the colonial project. This “contact zone” was quite distinct from the hinterland and even other parts of the city that were more homogeneous. It has been described as the grey part of the city – the area between the colonial state apparatus (white) and broader, residential “native” communities (black) – where the business of colonialism was transacted. Over a period of time the white area (predominantly European) also became a mixed area with many Anglo Indians, Jews, Armenians and Parsis moving from the grey to the white part of town. The diverse communities that lived in these spaces were proud of their own religions, culture and traditions, and respected one another. While sharing the traditions and cultural celebrations of other communities, they maintained some boundaries to retain their distinct identities. To succeed in their commercial enterprises and to be part of the ruling social sphere, there was considerable assimilation into the imposed culture of British India among colonial elites. In the l920s and l930s, the Calcutta Baghdadis tried to get the Government to consider them as Europeans, for educational purposes, for exemption from the Indian Arms Act, and for electoral purposes. They wanted to be treated like Jews elsewhere in the British Empire, not like Indians. During an almost two hundred year history in Calcutta, the Baghdadi Jews who were Middle Eastern and Judeo-Arabic in their identity, came to adopt a Judeo-British one. This assimilation pervaded all aspects of their life except for their religious traditions and practices and their food choices. While they ate Indian and Western food, they, like any other minority and the majority community, were partial to their own cuisine. Those who lived in this Anglicized enclave absorbed British culture, language and practices creating a distinct variant of English India, the Indian English gentleman, as well as the Indian English group of dialects. The Baghdadi Jews of Colonial Calcutta: The Baghdadi Jewish community came to Calcutta (Kolkata today) on the wings of empire. Shalome Ha-Cohen, a wealthy Jewish trader from Aleppo, Syria, anticipated the commercial opportunities that colonialism would bring and journeyed from Surat to Calcutta in 1798. As

The Everyday Practice of Acceptance: The Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta’ Cosmopolitan Landscape

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he rapidly became commercially successful, others from his family joined him. Soon other Jews, primarily from Baghdad but including other countries of the Middle East, came to Calcutta and other port cities in Asia to trade, settle and make their fortunes. 5 Members of this enterprising commercial community – including very wealthy families like the Sassoons, Kadoories, Bellilios, Gubbays, Meyers and the B. N. Elias family made an indelible impression on the material and commercial landscape, from Bombay to Shanghai. Through the sojourn of the “Baghdadi” Jewish community in Calcutta, there was a continuous stream of Middle Eastern Jews coming to the city seeking economic opportunities. While many were economically successful, and some made large fortunes, over forty percent of the community was poor. However, the poor were never entirely impoverished, as Jewish charities made many provisions for its more economically vulnerable members. 6 The community reached its peak in the late 1940s with about 4000 to 5000 (accounts vary) Baghdadi Jews in a city of almost 3 million people.7 Though miniscule, the Baghdadi Jewish community made a disproportionate impact on the city. As these narratives attest, Jews were very well integrated into the social, economic, political and cultural fabric of Calcutta. Their business acumen and large real estate holdings 8 made them visible and well respected. The flamboyant lifestyle of the very wealthy families made an impression, as did their large synagogues, the Maghen David being the largest and probably the most opulent synagogue in Asia. The Jewish Girls’ School, among the early schools for girls in the City, was also well respected. Its students excelled in academic, sporting and extra-curricular activities.9 Many Jews held high office in a range of professions and served in the civic sphere as sheriffs and in legislative positions. A few headed important civic bodies. Many Jewish women were teachers and taught in the leading schools across the city. There were even a few Jewish women in theater and Indian cinema, the most famous being Pramila (Esther Victoria Abraham), who was also the first Miss India (1947)10. Acting in Indian film and taking on Indian names was, however, frowned upon by the Jewish community. Since many theater and cinema stars took Indian names, Jewish community members feared this kind of assimilation into Indian culture could threaten the identity of the community. II.

From the Outside In:

While the roles that the Jewish community played in Calcutta’s mercantile development and social and cultural life have been documented, there is no literature on how the community was perceived by others in Calcutta. This research focuses on these impressions across Calcutta’s communities, excluding the impressions of Britishers and Europeans. 11 Since its inception, Calcutta was a cosmopolitan port city with a large Muslim community, a fairly substantial Anglo-Indian presence (mixed race who lived in India), Armenians, Chinese, Goans, Parsis and Jews. Of all these “minority” communities, the Jews were by far the smallest in number. Most Calcutta Jews emigrated to UK, Canada, US, Australia and Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, entirely depleting the community and paving the way for those remaining, to leave. By the 1960s it had become increasingly hard to sustain Jewish community life.12 By the early 1970s the number of Jews had dwindled to about 700 people – these were primarily those who felt too old to emigrate and start their lives anew. Now, in 2015, there are just twenty-odd Jews in the City. While many Calcutta Jews up until the 1990s continued to return to the city to spend time with friends, enjoy the races and the food they loved, these visits have waned, as those who left in the 1950s-60s have grown too old to travel easily. Now it is the children and grand-children who have grown up on tales of Calcutta, who come to witness what remains - a pilgrimage of sorts to the city that treated their forebears so well. This research, coming almost sixty years since the bulk of the Jewish community emigrated, captures the impressions of those who knew members of Calcutta’s Jewish community. Their responses, insights and stories lead me to reflect upon those particular

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urban features of the city and its cultural milieu that were amenable to fostering intercommunity acceptance, accommodation and respect. 13 III.

Study Goals and Methods:

I intended to conduct 30 interviews with a cross-section of people to document their relationships with Calcutta Jews. I sought members from both the majority and the many minority communities, and wanted to interview a range in terms of class and professional perspectives to capture differences in perceptions across social strata. However, I found it much harder than I anticipated to identify people across social strata. I also had not anticipated that the Armenian, Parsi and Chinese communities had dwindled so precipitously. I thus could only interview two Parsis and nobody from the Armenian or Chinese community I was unable to identify domestic workers who had been employed by Jewish community members, nor was I able to identify their business associates. The majority of Jewish businessmen sold their businesses 60 years ago, so it was the parents of this generation of owners that would have closely known their Jewish counterparts. Of necessity, the age range of people I interviewed was about 60 years and above, with just one being in her forties.14 Those who knew the community when it was intact (in the 30s, 40s and 50s) were all children, or in their teens or in their early twenties when the community left. As they knew the community and its members at its tail end they were less well informed about their heritage, business practices, and contributions to the city. There were other research challenges: most of the people I was able to identify who remembered Jewish Calcutta were from affluent and/or intellectually elite classes. They were all Western educated, fluent in English and had grown up in the white or grey area of the city. In Calcutta, friendships are very neighborhood and community driven. Schools are also a space where close friendships are established. Thus the majority of those I interviewed knew Jews through school (mostly Anglican or Catholic), or as neighbors. Since it was mostly middle-to-upper class and elite Jewish boys who went to Anglican schools, and elite and upper class Jewish girls who attended Loreto House and Calcutta Girls School, the interviews revealed more about middle-to-upper class and wealthy Jewish families.15The respondents mostly lived in the Bowbazaar/Dharamtallah area or the “sahibpara” which stretched from the Northern end of Chowringhee to Lower Circular Road. These areas had a culture distinct from the rest of the city. As one elderly gentleman quipped, recalling his mother’s words: “The real Calcutta is located south of Lower Circular Road.”(A. Ray, b.1930) Despite this description separating the Anglicized part of Calcutta from the “real” remainder of the city that was indigenous, the Anglicized sector was rich, diverse and colorful and made a deep and lasting impression on the city’s persona. While independence and democratic politics after 1947, threatened to swamp “sahibpara” (because numbers count and the various enclaves were small in number), the ethnic enclaves had a large effect on the civic imagination as well as on the built landscape.16 My interviews were all conducted from August 2014 to March 2015, except one that was conducted in 2012.17 As far as I understand, the majority of people in Calcutta did not know Jews and probably saw them as Europeans, even though the British never thought of them as such and never granted them that status. As one of my respondents noted, (S. Ray, b.1937) for us Indians, “there were many shades of European.” From this vantage, Jews and Armenians were seen as one more shade of European, neither British nor Indian. Although the majority of respondents were from the Bowbazaar/Dharamtallah area, one respondent grew up in Agarpara. Her father worked for National Tobacco, a B.N. Elias Company. Another was the wife of a professional there. The B.N. Elias Company had their jute mill and tobacco factories in Agarpara and their employees lived in a company compound there. I also have had, over time, casual conversations with other non-Jews who lived in Agarpara who shared similar perspectives about this close-knit community. Though Agarpara was north of the environs I defined as Anglicized Calcutta, the middle and senior staff there,


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Jewish and Indian, were Anglicized and functioned as an extension of the cosmopolitan city. Both interviewees who lived there, provided in-depth insights into the lives of the working class and poorer Jews employed in the factories and jute mills. 18 My research assistant, Upasana Dutta, interviewed the caretakers of the synagogue. 19 As they were not from the same social strata as the other respondents, and I did not have sufficient respondents from their economic and class background, I did not draw on their interviews for this research project.20 However, the Muslim caretakers who have been looking after the synagogue for over four generations spoke of their very positive and sometimes close and affectionate interactions and bonds with community members. 21 In the words of seventy year old Mr. Ahmed Khalil Khan: I remember Jacob Saab. He loved me very much. He used to come here morning and evening [to the synagogue]…I was twelve years old then (1957). He used to buy me tickets to the cinema…Elias Twena and I were playmates since childhood. Whenever I visited his mother would give me fruits to eat. She is still alive…. I last saw her two years back. I have become old and infirm and cannot visit her anymore…Sara Levey… she passed away. She used to love me so well. My primary research instrument was an in-depth one-on-one interview.22 I posed a structured series of questions to my respondents dealing with their familiarity with Jews, how they knew them, the kind of social interactions they had. I probed whether these interactions were socially approved, and discussed the nature of their interactions and relationships with others from the minority and the majority communities. 23 Their most poignant memories, biases, knowledge about the community and impressions of the reasons for the Jews leaving the City were noted and they were encouraged to share any aspect of their relationship with the Calcutta Jewish community. I was concerned that since I am Jewish and from the Calcutta Jewish community, that respondents might be reluctant to articulate critical perspectives so I had a question specifically focused on negative perceptions of Calcutta Jews. In response to this question, most noted that they mostly knew Jews as friends, and not knowing many Jews beyond those they were close to, there was no basis for forming prejudicial attitudes towards them. Dislike of an individual from the community, moreover, did not translate into a generalization about the community. I entered this research with some advantage: many I eventually interviewed knew me or knew of my family and were thus open to being interviewed, enjoyed speaking about their memories and trusted me with sharing intimate stories. As I grew up in Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s, their stories tallied with my own experiences. I too, back then, felt very accepted in my social milieu: my class in Loreto House was very diverse with students from almost all of Calcutta’s ethnic communities. We forged close friendships that we still cherish regardless of ethnicity. My parents were also very integrated into the economic and social life of Anglicized Calcutta, and had close ties across Calcutta’s varied communities. We were proud of our Jewish identity, and invited our diverse friends regularly to our home for Friday night prayers and dinner. I too participated in their festive celebrations. While I was deeply aware that the Jewish community felt very well accepted (and often favored) in colonial Calcutta,24 I had not realized, till this study, how strongly their feelings were reciprocated. Today many cosmopolitan Calcuttans only vaguely know of the once vital Jewish presence in the city. While there is a widespread interest and curiosity to learn more about “Jewish Calcutta,” there are few opportunities to interact with Calcutta Jews or their institutions. The quote captures contemporary Kolkata’s lack of familiarity with the Jewish community: I do know about the Jewish community presence in Calcutta, but mostly that it is dwindling. I have come across multiple articles about how drastically the presence has fallen. The young people have migrated to Israel, to UK. I knew about Nahoum’s being

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Jewish-owned. Other than that, I suppose I was not very aware of any other Jewish factor in the cityscape.—Rahul, born 1945.25 IV. i.

Jewish Assimilation in Colonial Calcutta Shared perspectives:

The Jews of Calcutta are remembered with a great deal of warmth by the people I interviewed, who whether from majority or other minority communities, also described feeling assimilated in the Anglicized ethos of colonial Calcutta. They were nostalgic about Calcutta’s cosmopolitan past and wished those days had not ended. Some recalled those times as Calcutta’s glory days. Utpal, A Bengali gentleman in his late sixties, recalls that the “glory days” were characterized by rich cultural exchange: I was very fortunate to have been brought up in a city where the minority communities all made a special contribution to the city…. We did not discriminate [among the different communities]. That is what made Calcutta what it was. The Jewish community here reached out to others and so were accepted. They jelled here. Om, a Punjabi lady, now in her late eighties, recalls this cosmopolitan Calcutta fondly and laments its loss: Calcutta has become too insular, like Delhi, which is just Punjabi. That friendliness that we had across communities has gone. That was a lovely feeling. It made people have a broader outlook. We learned other people’s customs. Our outlook on life was better. Calcutta was a beautiful city where like Tagore said “the world was not divided by fragments of narrow domestic walls, where words come from the depths of truth…” The beauty was all the flowers coming together. Respondents also underlined that in the past, the notion of there being “minority” and majority communities was an alien concept. Reena, an 80 year old Brahmo Samaji woman, expresses what I heard from almost all I interviewed: We had Muslim girls in our group and Jewish and Parsi and Punjabis. It was a different life. Nobody talked about all this. And we did not even know the meaning of minorities. It was not like now…..We did not think of minority communities in those days. The mind set was so different. This name was not even there. They commented that the current focus on minority politics may be linked to a rise in tension between these communities in India. Minority-majority distinction breeds comparison: while majority communities often feel minorities are being favored, the minorities feel they need more protection. Respondents stressed this “communalizing” of identities has caused undue politicization among communities, with negative repercussions. In those days the respondents said there was less sectarianism. It was just an accepted fact of life that there were many different kinds of people living in the city—in other words no attention was paid to the differences among communities and their differences were not politicized. What held these very diverse communities together across ethnic, religious and racial differences was a shared worldview. Mr. S. Ray, a prominent Calcutta intellectual in his late seventies, captures the cohesiveness of this stratum of Calcutta: Jews were quite integrated into the upper class, western, Anglicized community of Calcutta. Once you were in that cosmopolitan culture it did not matter from which community you came. We all shared the same Anglicized culture and outlook. It was only in our homes we may have been different but that was not public. Respondents emphasized that the Jewish community never faced anti-Semitic prejudice—a feeling Calcutta Jews have always appreciated.26Several respondents described light teasing


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in the Christian schools but none described this banter as hateful. Most were aware that the anti-Semitic stereotyping of Jews was a product of European and Christian prejudice. They were quick to add that notions of Jews being reviled as misers had no place in cosmopolitan Calcutta where Jews were well respected and very accepted. In fact, among respondents interviewed for this study, Jews were rarely described as being money conscious. In fact, only Iti, who grew up among working class Jews in the B.N. Elias compound said the Jews she knew were very money conscious and never gave big presents. She also said that they were warm and generous in their homes and treated friends as family. Many spoke of how the Jewish table was always well laden and how they particularly enjoyed preparing and sharing food with their guests. Iti reflected that she might have perceived her Jewish neighbors and friends as money conscious because those she remembers were not as financially well- to-do as her family. Her father was the company manager and was much better educated and paid than the Jewish workers there. Five other respondents made specific mention that the Jews they knew were not at all miserly—in fact, these respondents noted that they were known for their generosity of spirit and openhandedness. In fact, each of these five respondents explicitly challenged this characterization of Jews that they believe was manufactured as a product of anti-Semitism. Katayun, a Parsi woman in her seventies who grew up among Jews and had school-friends who were Jews, spoke to me of understanding the impact of anti-Semitic stereotypes when sharing a school essay on Shylock. “When I read my essay about Shylock,” she explained, “the Jewish girl in my class cried—she felt I had said something bad about Jews.” Katayun recalled feeling bad as she had no intention of insulting her classmate: I was just giving details about Shylock. I tried to bring out that his point of view was also valid. He had a grudge and he expressed it. He was not a hypocrite. He said what he had to say but it was Shakespeare’s attitude towards the Jews that cast him as a miser and the bad character. Roma, a Punjabi lady in her eighties also noted that the notion of the Jew as a miser was just the opposite of what she saw and knew. She says: …they are meant to be tight fisted but the Jews here were extremely open handed, they paid their servants well, they spent their money, they went to the races, dressed well and entertained lavishly. Mr. S. Ray, who was educated in England, recalled becoming aware of negative stereotypes about Jews only upon leaving Calcutta: “I became aware of the negative connotations of Jews when I studied in England,” he recalled. Especially among the upper class, there was a great deal of social mixing. Mr. S. Ray notes: My grandma used to talk about Lady Ezra’s purdah parties – exclusively for women. Calcutta society used to go there for tea and gossip- Bengali, Jewish, and English women all used to gather in her garden. There were, however, some unwritten laws and social expectations about where community mixing should end – namely, when it came to marriage. Most communities were not open to inter-marriage and these boundaries between communities were maintained. Dolores, a woman of mixed-race background who is 60, describes the underlying logic behind these unspoken prohibitions and elaborates: I think there was a sense that Indian, Armenian, Jewish, Anglo-Indian and these categories did not mix in terms of marriage. It was never said outright but we understood that. It was more problematic marrying a Muslim and slightly less problematic to marry a Hindu. But generally I think among our communities it was more problematic to marry an “Indian” than a “non Indian.” “Non Indian” would be Jew, Armenian and Anglo-Indian. Parsi would also be considered Indian.

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Naseem, from a wealthy Muslim family recalls: I had an uncle who had a Jewish mistress—who I think he married. She was a Baghdadi Jew…My family knew about her...She did not have a family here… [Her] boys have not tried to impinge on family assets after my uncle died. They took their mother’s surname. Many Bengali gentlemen had Jewish mistresses especially the Bhadralok [elite landholding] types…In those days most men had mistresses. Their wives stayed home—many of them were married when they were as young as 13. The men would go to their mistresses—they were in the background but this reality also accepted by the families. It was quite laissez-faire – the times were quite liberal and women had to put up with what the men did. While intimate relationships between men and women from different communities were not uncommon, these relationships—even though far from clandestine—in most cases stopped before marriage. There were some cases of inter-marriage among the wealthy in the early twentieth century, but this was less common among middle-class members of all communities who were generally more conservative on these matters. From the 1930s up until the 1960s, almost everyone I interviewed described intermarriage between communities as exceptional. Jews were as conservative as others when it came to marriage outside the community. X (name withheld) an Anglo Indian in her late-seventies recalls: The Jewish girls and boys were not easy to mix with because if you fell in love they would not get married to a non-Jew. It was the same with Anglo Indians. In the fifties it was not okay for Anglo Indians to marry out of the community. Before the 50s it was hard for Anglo Indians to marry out. We were conservative too. All communities were. There was, however, a significant shift in the 1960s and 1970s, probably due to modernity, and intermarriage became more common among young people from various communities. ii.

Distinction amidst Diversity:

The culture of tolerance in Calcutta did not obliterate differences between communities. Instead, all of the respondents I interviewed described being proud of their identities. Most of the respondents from minority communities mentioned having and participating in their own clubs where intra-community social gatherings were held. For example, while the Judean Club had a Purim ball, this was an occasion for Western dancing, and mostly Jews were in attendance. When there were barely any Jewish people left in the sixties and seventies, the Purim ball at the Judean Club was attended by people from other communities as it was just an occasion for a party. Similarly, this would have been the case for the Grail or Dalhousie Club holding a Christmas party, that most Anglo Indian community members would attend. It, too, would be a Western style dance party that did not have religious overtones. 27These intra-community gatherings were held in addition to gatherings that were much more mixed. Marcelle, an Anglo Indian now in her late eighties, explains: We used to have a roaring good time. Picnics at the Botanical gardens – the Anglo Indians would have their picnics, the Goans theirs, and the Jews and Parsis would all have their own. We also had our own clubs. Later we got to know each other. Then, in addition, we would all go to the zoo. We would cycle there and say ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye’ to all our friends. The wealthier strata of all of these communities also occupied other shared spaces, including the races, mixed clubs and business functions, where social interactions among diverse communities were regular. Om remembers the races as a place where she met not only Jews but also people from a range of communities:


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Going to the races was a great luxury in those days. The Jews loved the races. All the Gubbays would have their own boxes. They would book stands for the season. That was how we got to know everybody...That is where we met many Jews. Sanoo Gandhi, a Parsi gentleman in his eighties speaks of how Jews, Armenians and Parsis all loved the races and how it was a place for members of all communities to gather. While sharing aspects of a cosmopolitan Calcutta culture, most respondents described being able to differentiate communities by their speech patterns and last name, and sometimes by their attire and mannerisms. For instance, Jo, now in her late sixties of AngloFrench descent, articulated a common sentiment, “I could tell that we were all different. I had read about the different communities that we lived with. We were different but not different enough that it mattered.” Marcelle made light of how these differences were perceived: Here comes a Jew – aloomakala. Here comes a Parsi – dhansaak. Here comes an Anglo Indian – pork vindaloo. Here comes an Armenian – they liked cuckoo pilao. Calcutta belonged to all of us. Naresh, a Sindhi in his seventies who lived in Queen’s Mansions spoke of how if any child in their apartment block succeeded in school, sports or any activity, the entire building took pride in the achievement, “Seriously, all the people in the mansions did not bother about what community each family was from. We were secular in nature and accepted one another.” Other respondents described confusing Jews and Armenians. Sometimes people confused Jews with Parsis. Generally, Jews were bracketed with Anglo-Indians and Europeans culturally, while Parsis in the 1940s and 1950s were considered more “Indian” as their mothers wore saris and they spoke Gujarati at home. For many, there was little knowledge about the religion or customary practices of other communities, with the exception of Christianity—a religion with which almost all interviewees described some familiarity based on the schools they attended. A few respondents had studied scripture and were proud that they could relate to the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. Many Hindus described incorporating Christian prayers in their own religious practice. Although Christianity proliferated through Protestant and Catholic schools, religion, for the most part, was a private matter. For instance, Farhi, an Iranian Muslim woman born in the 1940s, recalls that since religious tradition was not a defining feature of her own life, she did not notice religious distinction between herself and her Jewish classmates and friends: We never went much to masjid or temple and did not know much about their religion though we knew they were Jewish…We were Muslims, just two of us in our class of 20, and nobody thought of it. X expressed the feeling that difference is magnified today more than it used to be—a common feeling among those interviewed: From my point of view I did not hold prejudices towards any person or community. Generally at the racecourse or sporting events I attended, prejudice was not at all evident. It may have been an undercurrent… but prejudice is much more today and so are people more caste conscious now. We never asked a person what caste or what community they belonged to. Farhi, describes negotiating difference with respect, “We never called them Jews. We called them Jewish… We did not bother what community a girl came from. We liked them for who they were, not what they were.” Many of the people I interviewed also spoke of the special care taken to accommodate one another’s traditions and customs. Kishore, who came from an orthodox vegetarian home,

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described the preparations a Jewish friend’s mother made to ensure that the food he was served in her son’s party would be completely vegetarian: When I was invited to his house [for a party] he told his mother I was vegetarian. She bought a new saucepan to cook my food. My aunt who took me to the party was so touched and amazed that my food would be cooked separately. Others described understanding with respect why their Kosher Jewish friends would not eat in their homes. Respecting one another’s religious traditions and customs was the norm in colonial Calcutta. iii.

Sharing Festivals and Cultural Spaces:

Whereas religion was a strictly private matter, the associated festivals and celebrations were often shared especially among diverse communities. This was somewhat less so in the dominant Hindu culture where caste prohibitions that were adhered to in religious functions, made it difficult for even Hindus who were not caste members to participate in these events. Hindus and respondents from the other communities who were invited to join Sabbath dinner, a Bar Mitzvah or religious festival, remembered these experiences vividly and cherished them as a mark of closeness. Katayun, for instance, recalled: Friday night dinner with the Jewish family next door was very memorable. We were there for the prayers and it was nice to be introduced to a new system .In our home, we did not have the father of the family saying a prayer and passing wine around. It was a ritual and children adore rituals even though we do not understand the deeper significance. But being included in this ritual was something special. It was not only their ritual – we were part of it. The Friday night Sabbath service in Jewish homes would start with songs of praise to the Lord, followed by a blessing on the wine and bread. Then the dinner would commence with many traditional Baghdadi food items such as aloomakalas and mahashas.28 Although Calcuttans shared traditions associated with various religions, they did not partake in the religious aspects of them. Jews in turn also attended the festivals and ceremonies celebrated by their friends and colleagues. Iti recalls: They [Jewish friends and neighbors] would come for Durga Puja. We put up a big event on the first day of Pujas. The company [B.N. Elias] gave a party for the occasion. The kids would play local parts and the parents would attend the functions. They did not attend the puja. But we all enjoyed the evening functions. Iti explains that while attendance at one another’s festivals was reciprocal, a line was consistently maintained between enjoying and participating in a celebration and sharing religious aspects and their observance. We also went to maftirs, but not to the synagogue. We went to the lunch afterwards. We would look forward to the huge lunch and the Friday dinners that we were often invited to attend. We participated in each other’s functions. In that way, it was an idyllic world [speaking of the B.N. Elias company quarters]. Thus whereas everyone celebrated and partied at Christmas, enjoyed a Christmas lunch and sometimes even incorporated this tradition, they did not go to a church unless it was to enjoy the choral music. Similarly, it was common for all to enjoy the biryani during Eid time, but not the spiritual dimension of it. Anuradha, a sixty year-old woman from the Brahmo Samaj faith explains: We were aware of difference; we knew that inter-mixing was fine but there were limits especially around religious observances where one did not intrude. We did not go to


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Jewish homes for festivals. But we also would not go to Christian homes for festivals unless invited. We had the best Christmas in our own home. All the best food would come home. Respondents commonly described with great pleasure the incorporation of cuisine from other communities. Dolores, for instance, described how diversity was part of everyday life in her Anglo Indian aunt’s home: In my aunt’s house whenever we had celebrations, a standard offer was Jewish aloomakala, yakni pilaf—a rich Muslim dish that my father would bring home, and fried fish – it would always be an eclectic meal. It was part of everyday life for us. To varying degrees, Jews also participated in assimilating the diverse cultures around them. Mr. S. Ray speaks of a Jewish friend of his who was so well acculturated that he mixed with the Bengali community more than his own: Ellis was very integrated into Bengali society and during the months leading up to the Bangladesh war all his Bengali friends from East Bengal would come to say hello and called him Ilias Abraham or Abraham Sahb . . . Ellis told me once that he used to go to bar mitzvahs and now only goes to rice ceremonies. He became very Bengali-fied. Other Jews we knew considered themselves European. iv.

Deep Friendships:

This shared social milieu was far from superficial. Warm friendships across communities were the norm across the social spectrum. Many recalled their closest and even best friends being Jewish, or from communities other than their own. Close friends were considered family. Abeda, in her late thirties, from the Muslim community, recalls her father’s closest friend being Jewish: They (the Jews) were not at all outsiders. Yes, they looked different, but not to me. I probably opened my eyes and first saw Uncle Dave. I really thought Uncle Dave was my relative. They were part of my family. When my sister did well in her M. Phil exams he would send a fish to our house….We just wished it were cake, not fish! (Dave owned the famous Nahoum bakery) If our exam results were good the next Sunday’s catch (he also loved to fish) would come to the house. He treated us like his own. Since I was the youngest, I was more like a grand-daughter. She recalls the commonalities between the communities, that they shared customs but were also mindful of different practices and beliefs: It was totally fine in my family for us, Jews and Muslims, to mix. We thought that Jews and Muslims were the same because we followed so many of the same customs. Sometimes they wanted chicken biryani and so we would go to their home to cook it. We would follow what pots and pans we had to use not to mix up milk and meat. This sharing she recalled, was reciprocal: We had Jewish food during the festivals. Every year we get our share of halek and mussa, and dried fruits and suji halva with puri for Shavuoat. There were no unwritten rules about our mixing except that we had to have kosher food. We were always free to go to each other’s homes. Five days a week my father would go there. Abeda’s experience of feeling part of a shared inter-religious and cultural family was not uncommon. Iti, growing up in Agarpara, explained: We grew up like family… It was one big house and people moved in and out freely. We walked in if they were eating and we sat at each other’s tables. My ma would go

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across and cook a special item. We all pooled and cooked. Nobody felt I was a Bengali and they were Iraqi. Many of those interviewed spoke of the parents of their friends, as Uncle and Aunty. Katayun and others described feeling welcome as yet another child of the family, especially since Jewish families tended to be large: The Jewish mothers in the homes we went to were like the proverbial mother, always welcoming us with love and affection. She also spoke of how the Jewish children made themselves at home in her place: My ma told me that the Nahoum family children would come to the house to play with my cousins who were much older than me. They would walk into the bedroom and climb on the bed. My ma would insist that they wash their feet before doing so. There was a lot of friendship and familiarity and exchange and togetherness among us. There was no distinction between us. They were accepted and we felt accepted in their homes. Iti also spoke about feeling unconditionally loved by her Jewish neighbors. I grew up with so much love—trusting and loving everyone unconditionally. It was an idyllic and different world and my cousins could not understand why we never wanted to come away to the city for long breaks. Mr. John, a Syrian Christian now in his nineties, talks about the reciprocity in the relationships between communities. We were friends and colleagues [with Jews] and exposed to each other, [we] visited their families on festive occasions in particular. When there was someone sick we mutually took care of each other. Clearly the nature of the friendships that people shared across communities was one of intimacy, affection, trust and dependence. v.

Class and identity:

Several respondents were very attuned to differences, not only among Jews based on class, but also among Jewish communities in Calcutta—Cochini, Bene Israeli, and European Jews— and some respondents were aware of differences between them. Among the respondents who belonged to wealthy social circles, many knew both Baghdadi and European Jews socially and through and business. Iti noted class-based differences between Jews. Jewish company owners, for example, she described mixed socially with their business counterparts more frequently than with members of the Jewish community from a different social strata. They simultaneously, however, contributed to Jewish institutions and charities and ensured the wellbeing of community members in need. In Iti’s words: At Agarpara the very rich Jews like the Elias, Jacobs and Gubbays considered themselves European. They did not mix with families of Jews they employed in the lower rungs of the factory, but they did mix with upper class Bengalis. They would come for weddings and tefilim. A few were a bit snooty. There was class distinction between Jews. Class trumped religion. Iti also noted perceiving working class Jews in the factory compound as much more MiddleEastern than Anglicized or “city” Jews. She affectionately alluded to the “country” (Agarpara) versus the “City Jews”, and recalled that Agarpara felt like a village where everyone was family and looked out for one another. She recalls that the mothers of many of her friends who lived in the compounds were not well educated. They were also much more Arabic in


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their orientation and followed mostly Arabic customs. In particular, she noted that they were very superstitious, and was able to describe many of their superstitions and associated customs. Many of these had to do with warding off the evil spirit with special prayers. Despite these distinctions in cultural orientation among Jews, Iti, like her city counterparts, recalled that in Agarpara there was no distinction drawn between those who were Jewish and those who were not.29 Many respondents have remained friends with their Jewish friends who emigrated. The wealthier among them have also traveled to visit one another and often stayed in each other’s homes. Roma states: They were good friends so we kept in touch. You don’t make those kinds of friends when you grow older. We stayed in London in their homes and they in ours. I never stayed in a hotel. When you stay with one family all the others entertain you. These relationships thus transcended convenience and geographic proximity. vi.

Rationale for Emigration:

All those interviewed emphasized that the Jews left for better economic prospects, as did many others from Calcutta’s cosmopolitan community. In Roma’s words: They value money and they thought the money wheel was going to sink. So many Jews left China too. Same reason. Businesses were shrinking and money was getting tight so they decided not to live here. Wherever they went they were successful. They were hard-working and they made it. Jo recognized that the Jewish community left despite their love for the city: They loved India but there was a recognition that there were more opportunities readily available to Jews and Anglo Indians in more Anglicized countries like Canada and New Zealand. In India, the plum jobs would necessarily go to Indians. When the British left India, there was a central government thrust towards a socialist economy. The government issued regulations controlling the export of foreign exchange and restricting the import of nonessential commodities. This hurt small entrepreneurs as well as wealthy Baghdadis who had been importing and exporting luxury items. By the 1950s and 1960s many British businesses ad expatriates had left Calcutta. In Bengal, there was a strong labor union movement and the Naxalite movement that call for armed agrarian revolution. The Left Front Government came to power in 1977.These political developments were a reason for concern for people in the business and trading communities. As Anuradha explains, those turbulent times drove business and enterprises from the city: I think they [the Jews] left with the Left Front. When there was the nationalization of businesses, people panicked, the British ex-pats left and the companies too. Everyone who could leave, including Bengalis, left. Since the Jews were such a small community their exit was very visible. But members of other communities were leaving too. Some moved to look for opportunities in other cities of India. Others sought opportunities abroad. Otto, an Anglo Indian in his sixties who has settled in Canada, perceived that the departure of some members of the community prompted more widespread migration as it became increasingly hard to sustain community life: They thought they would not have a good future for their children. They felt their lives here were getting squeezed. It was hard to follow the faith when so few were left. They felt that there were no Jews left. Farhi said:

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The younger generation went away to better their prospects. Paddy went away after medical college. Jane, her sister, went after. The older ones stayed and died here…There was the Naxal problem too, as there were a lot of financial strictures. They [the Jewish businesses] started selling off too. A lot of the Iranian community were also leaving. Some went to Pakistan and some went to Iran. The Armenians went away to UK, Canada and Australia. Some of the Bengalis went away to study…The Jews were not the only ones leaving. Several respondents were surprised at the speed at which the community left. Minati remembered how a whole contingent of Jewish children left Agarpara for Israel in the fifties. She recalled how sad she was to see them all leave, wondering if they would ever come back. Katayun, who was a young girl at this time remembers her surprise when her friends departed: When I was a pre-teen, that was the time when so many Jewish families were leaving. By the time I was a teenager I felt their departure, and even wondered, where have all the Jews gone? I also asked myself, are they all going to leave? Will they be no more Jews left in Calcutta? Interviewees consistently described regret that Jews and others had left, but there was no rancor in these sentiments. The respondents accepted and respected the decision of those who left the city as a rational choice. Sanoo Gandhi, now in his eighties, looks back and says: “Maybe I made a mistake by staying on.” Perhaps Sanoo thought he would have lived a better life abroad, and Mr. John affirms that his friends have done very well for themselves. V.

Conclusion:

This set of interviews captures the key features of Anglicized Calcutta that cemented relationships among the many communities that comprised the grey and white enclaves of the colonial port city from the 1930’s – 1970’s. The logic of colonialism required distinct communities to subordinate their ethnic and religious distinctions to become part of the economic, political, social and cultural structures that supported the British imperial project. These expedient demands for assimilation, however, were not totalizing and left space for communities to maintain their own distinctive identities. Through personal narratives, this paper explores the conditions, ethos and attitudes that facilitated accommodation and acceptance among distinct communities. It reveals how diversity was incorporated, embraced and negotiated on a daily basis through organic, not mandated, mutual commitment. This process was facilitated by the presence of homogenous and integrated community institutions and a shared neighborhood geography where diverse communities forged intimate bonds by living among one another. This ethos of acceptance and accommodation, moreover, was built on the scaffolding of shared Anglicized values, culture and a common language. The common educational background and shared life-style that existed among the upper and middle classes engaged in the colonial project bridged the ethnic, religious and cultural differences between communities. While respondents often spoke a different language in their respective homes, they were fluent in English; as the schools they attended were English medium and English was the language of the workspace for professionals. The English medium schools fostered a shared understanding and worldview that welded members from different ethnic communities, generation after generation. For colonial clients who existed outside of colonial divide and rule mandates, living in mixed neighborhoods enabled strong bonds to be forged across communities. In Anglicized Calcutta most socializing was neighborhood based. Katayun explained how, as a child, geographic community rather than identity defined her social milieu:


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We were not allowed to go to the Parsi club when we were young because my parents were not members. We did not have transport. You see, in those days we did not have a car and it meant going all the way to the maidan which we thought was too far. We were so sheltered we were not allowed to go anywhere. We could go to Jewish homes because that was in the neighborhood. We had a few Parsi friends from school whose homes we went to and we had the same freedom there as we did with our Jewish neighbors. Mixed neighborhoods enabled people to forge cross-community, multi-generational friendships. Katayun recalls how her Jewish neighbor Esther Aaron was practically a part of her household: Esther Aaron was my sister’s age. She would have been 10 years my senior…She was almost a daily visitor to our place and whenever she came she lent a helping hand – if we were making the beds she would help us as she did with other household chores. In Calcutta it was common for a family table to serve foods from various communities at the same meal and to celebrate one another’s festivals in an environment where inclusive celebration was prized and religious aspects may even be bypassed. Amidst this culture of respect and mutual acceptance, however, difference was not obliterated. Rather it was celebrated, enjoyed and protected. Boundaries were maintained around inter-marriage as that would dilute community and religious identity. Each community had their own particular identity and customs and traditions that found expression in the private and public spheres. Ethnic based and religious clubs played an important role in reinforcing community identity. Simultaneously, integrated clubs for sports, cards and general socializing were opened to members of all communities though British and European clubs were exclusive. This co-existence of exclusive and shared community cultural spaces among the local communities created a critical confluence of pride in community ethnic identity and enjoyment of the diversity that surrounded them. In this way, Calcutta’s colonialism did not disable the local communities from embracing difference. The distinct ethos of each community, all the respondents emphasized, made Calcutta richer in every way. Calcutta’s cosmopolitan past may offer some useful insights as our contemporary world struggles to embrace difference. In this vitiated atmosphere official and political scripts of “multiculturalism” are often undermined by practices that heighten difference. In such contexts, members of minority communities, faced with exclusionary politics and desiring to maintain their own identities, live in separate spaces, do not merge with the dominant culture and may be excluded from the mainstream of the societies where they live and work. To bolster their own identities and to combat racism all too frequently, the politics of assimilation have been rejected. This has undermined the development of a shared worldview among minority communities in many places. Formal commitments to multiculturalism have resulted in exclusion and isolation rather than integration. Minority communities too often find themselves apart from where opportunities flow. 30 In Anglicized colonial Calcutta, however, assimilation emerged naturally as the various communities sought to participate in the colonial project. The parallel processes of colonial assimilation and inter-communal acceptance are perhaps most visible in the role of British cultural institutions, such as the races, in creating literal sites of assimilation and intercommunity socializing. Iti’s nostalgic recollection of the richness of social and cultural acceptance and interactions between communities underscores the indelible link between this brand of multiculturalism and the colonial project: Whenever we collect together, the reminiscence is always about the halcyon days of our childhood. Every conversation starts with “Remember when…?” Others listen in wonder tinged with envy. We ourselves, for a few brief hours, relive the glorious days of Agarpara and remind ourselves, “Yes, there was a Camelot.”

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In Iti’s retelling, the fragments of memory containing the last remnants of multicultural, Anglicized colonial Calcutta, reference back to the British legend of Camelot. Bibliography Abraham, Margaret. “Marginalization and Disintegration of Community Identity among the Jews of India,” Studies of Indian Jewish Identity, ed. Nathan Katz. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1995. Chakrabarti, Kaustav, “Glimpses into the Lives of the Jewish Women on Calcutta,” in The Journal of Indo Judaic Studies 14, 27 – 43. 2014. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2001). Ezra, Esmond David. Turning Back the Pages: A Chronicle of Calcutta Jewry. Vols. I and II, London: Brookside Press, 1986. Stephen Jay Gould, “Measuring Bodies: Two Case Studies on the Apishness of Undesirables,” in The Mismeasure of Man. (Norton, 1996), 152-73. Hyman, Mavis. Jews of the Raj. London: Hyman Publishers, 1995. Katz, Nathan. Studies of Indian Jewish Identity. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1995. Luhrmann, T. M. The Good Parsi: The Fate of the Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Musleah, Ezekiel N. On the Banks of the Ganga: The Sojourn of the Jews in Calcutta. North Quincy, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1975. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Roland, Joan G. Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989. Silliman, Jael. Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames, Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2001. Sinha, Pradip. Calcutta in Urban History. Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Limited, 1978. _____, “Calcutta and the Currents of History 1690 – 1912,” Calcutta the Living City: Volume 1: The Past. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990. Sperber, Rabbi Daniel, “Report to the London Beth Din on the Calcutta Jewish Community (1965), The Journal of Indo Judaic Studies 14 (2014): 129 – 134. Stratton, Jon. “The Impossible Ethnic: Jews and Multiculturalism in Australia,” Diaspora 5, no. 3 (1996): 339 – 73. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Nehru Fulbright program for their research support. I am also deeply grateful to the insightful comments and discussions with Paul Greenough, Anuradha Chatterji, Shikha Bhattacharjee, Anindyo Roy and Betsy Hartmann that have enriched my theoretical framework considerably. Upasana Datta’s research assistance and attention to detail was invaluable.


APPENDICES Appendix I: Table of Respondents: Name

Year of Birth

Religious Affiliation

1. Abeda Razeq

1976

Muslim

2. Ahmed Khalil Khan

1943 approx.

Muslim

3. A. M. Cohen

1946

Jewish, was Christian

4. Anita Mansata

1955

Punjabi Hindu

5. Anuradha Chatterji

1954

Bengali, Brahmo

6. Arabinda Ray

1930

Bengali, Hindu

7. Ashoka Ghosh

1942

Bengali, Hindu

8. Dolores Chew

1955

Anglo-Indian, Christian

9. Farkondeh Khalili

1942

Irani

10. Iti Mishra

1941

Bengali, Hindu

11. Name Withheld*

1938

Anglo Indian, Christian

12. Katayun Saklat

1938

Parsi

13. Kishore Bhimani

1944

Kutchi Hindu

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14. Marcelle Dhatigara

1929


15. Maureen David

1939


16. Minati Dey

1928

Bengali Hindu

17. Naresh Kripalani

1945

Sindhi, Hindu

18. Naseem Ahmad

1942

Muslim

19. Nilima Dutt

1927

Bengali Hindu

20. Om Dhawan

1928

Punjabi Hindu

21. Otto Brown

1951 approx.


22. P. M. John

1927

Syrian Christian

23. Rahul Gupta

1945

Bengali Hindu

24. Raj Dutt

1935

Punjabi, Hindu

25. Rati Vajpeyi

1954

Punjabi Hindu

26. Reena Das

1935

Bengali, Brahmo

27. Roma Bhagat

1931 approx.

Punjabi Hindu

28. Sanoo Gandhy

1932

Parsi

29. Shaikh Nassir

1939 approx.

Muslim


30. Sibaji Sinha

1936

Rajput Hindu

31. Sunanda K Datta Ray

1937

Bengali Hindu

32. Susmita Ghose

1955

Bengali Hindu

33. Utpal Singh Roy

1946

Bengali Hindu

34. Valerie Harazi

1951


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All the interviews were conducted between August 2014 and Feb 2015 except for an unstructured but in-depth interview conducted with Minati Dey in 2013. She has expired. * Requested that her name be withheld. Appendix II: Survey Instrument: Section I: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x. xi. xii. xiii. xiv. xv. xvi. xvii. xviii. xix.

Did you have Jewish friends, neighbors, employees, teachers or class mates etc.? What age were you when you first came into contact with Jewish people? How well did you know him/her? Did you visit their homes? Did you meet their families? Did you have meals in their homes? Did they eat in yours? Do you know of any case of intermarriage with Jews? How was this perceived by both communities? On what sort of occasions did you interact? Were these interactions considered acceptable by your parents and your community members? Was this considered unusual in your family? Did your family have a long standing association with the Jews? Were there unwritten rules regarding social mixing? Were these different between generations? Did you consider the Jews you interacted with to be a closed community? Did you interact with other minority communities? Armenians, Parsis, Anglo-Indians? Were there differences in which these others were perceived? Did issues of skin tone and class arise in these relationships and how? Did your family and community regard Jews any differently to their own communities to which they did not belong? Did they dress or dress or behave differently from other minority communities? If so, how? How did this intermingling change with age as well as gender? Were there changes over time in the ways people interacted with Jewish community members?

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Section II: Professional Relationships: i. ii. iii. iv. v.

Did you have Jewish colleagues/employers/employees/others in your professional world? How well did you know them/him/her? For example, did you visit their homes, did you meet their families? Did you have meals in their homes? Did they eat in yours? On what sorts of occasions did you interact?

Section III: General: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

Contributions? Most vivid memory? Positive association? Negative association? Did you keep in touch over the years? Why did they leave

Notes This Is The Area Where The British, Anglicized Bengalis And Other Indians And Minority Communities Settled. It Was A Rather Small Area From Burra Bazaar Area To Lower Circular Road. 2 There Are About 20 Jews Left In Calcutta (2015), Most of Them Very Old. 3 The Jewish Exodus From The City Started In The 1940s And By 1970, Majority Of The Jews Had Left The City. 4 See e.g., Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2001), 203 5 The Calcutta Jews are called Baghdadi even though the community included many from other parts of the Middle East. They are called Baghdadi because they followed the liturgy of Baghdad. Baghdad had a very large Jewish population and was a seat of Jewish learning. 6 Ezekiel Musleah notes in his book On the Banks of the Ganga: The Sojourn of Jews in Calcutta that 40% were poor and there are other references to poverty in the community by him and others. However, poverty was relative to other Jews. The poor Jews all had a place to live though many did live in substandard housing, and from hand to mouth. 7 Here again, there is no clear figure of how many Jews there were, with the numbers ranging from four to five thousand. 8 At one point sir David Ezra was one of the largest property owners in Calcutta. 9 Kaustav Chakrabarti, “Voices From Antiquity: Glimpses Into The Lives Of The Jewish Women Of Calcutta,” Journal Of Indo Judaic Studies 14 (2014): 30 10 For more detailed information on notable members of the community, women pioneers, and Jews in the theater and film, see www.jewishcalcutta.in 11 The British were the rulers and predominantly mixed among one another, though the very elite of the various communities did mix socially with the British to a certain extent. The British had their own clubs and social spaces that were closed to non-whites—a practice continued after independence till the early 1960s. 1


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Rabbi Daniel Sperber, “Report to the London Beth Din on the Calcutta Jewish Community” (1965) provides an account of the state of the community and its institutions and the challenges it faced. 13 Some may question this thesis that underlines inter community respect as Calcutta was rocked by violent Hindu Muslim clashes. The violent clashes started in 1946 with Direct Action Day. But even so, rapidly snowballing mob violence under pressure points in history cannot be an accurate reflection of the cosmopolitan nature (or the lack of it) in the city. 14 She had attended the Jewish girls’ school when there were already no Jewish girls there, but she and her family had close friendships with Jewish community members who stayed on or still live in Calcutta. 15 Middle class Jewish girls sometimes attended the Anglican schools if they were closer to their homes than the Jewish girls’ school. 16 Many mansions and impressive commercial and other buildings that were owned by Jews and Armenians, who were large landholders, are iconic landmarks. See the section on buildings and mansions in www.jewishcalcutta.in for visuals and more on this topic. 17 This interview with Minati Dey was captured on the digital archive. She passed away in early 2014. 18 Most of the wealthier Jews had their own businesses and many, especially the B N Elias group employed middle-class and working class Jews. they also hired Bengalis for some of the technical managerial jobs as they did some qualified European Jews who came to Calcutta in the 40’s to escape the Nazis. 19 As i am now on the management committee of the community and they are under our employ, I thought it would be more ethical for Upasana Dutta to conduct these interviews. 12

A discussion of the interviews of the caretakers is available at www.jewishcalcutta.in in the section entitled from the outside in that has many excerpts from the interviews displayed. 21 Jews typically employed Muslims cooks in their homes, as they too did not eat pork. They were also employed in the synagogue probably due to commonalities in their religious traditions and because they did not eat pork. 22 Typically an interview lasted from 45 minutes to an hour and a half. 23 See Appendix ii for an outline of survey instrument. However in some instances I did not use the survey as I thought it may be richer to have a less structured conversation 24 This has been substantiated in all the written accounts of Calcutta Jews where they discuss their social milieu and in the key books on their sojourn. 25 Rahul Gupta, 70 years old, never happened to come across a member of the Jewish community in his business/personal interactions, in contrast to Sibaji Sinha, another respondent. The dwindled numbers left it to pure chance. 26 This is also the case for other Jewish communities in India. Jews only faced anti-Semitism under the Portuguese in the southern part of India (Kerala). 27 The Dalhousie Club, that used to be primarily an Anglo-Indian club, has now mostly an Indian membership, but it still holds a big Christmas function each year as do most of the other clubs in the city. 28 Aloomakala is a deep fried potato dish that is a Calcutta specialty. Mahashas are made from a variety of vegetables that are then stuffed with rice and chicken that is flavored with tamarind as well as other spices 29 An essay about her growing up in Agarpara, a Jewish factory compound, can be found in the social and cultural exhibit in the archive at www.jewishcalcutta.in 30 This has been the case, for example among many immigrants in Europe and America. There are ethnic enclaves where minorities and immigrants speak their own language, are not familiar with the dominant language and culture, and are not economically integrated. 20

Book Review Her-Story Nina Haeems and Alysha Haeems, eds., Indian Jewish Women: Stories from Bene Israel Life (New Delhi: Mosaic Books, 2014). 262 pages. ISBN 978-81-9071405-1. Reviewed by Joan Roland Writing about the Jews of India has almost become a cottage industry in the last thirty years or so. Books, journal articles, popular news stories, doctoral, master’s and even undergraduate theses have focused on the various communities, the existence of which had been almost unknown to most westerners. Very little, however, has been written by and about the Indian Jewish women, especially those from the Bene Israel community, the largest of the three. Women of Cochini, and especially, Baghdadi Jewish origin have written memoirs, introductions to the music of the community, and scholarly works. A notable exception, of course, is Esther David, the Bene Israel novelist and short story writer whose works have received international acclaim. The works of the educator Rebecca Reuben who also wrote articles and stories; those of the gynecologist Jerusha Jhirad, who published some memoirs; and those of Meera Mahadevan, the founder of Mobile Creche and the author of an early novel about the Bene Israel, are known primarily in India. The Marathi memoir of another educator, Flora Samuel, who immigrated to Israel, has not been translated. In the l990’s , Nina Haeems, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wilson College in Mumbai who was associated with Vacha, a women’s resource center that was exploring the experiences of Hindu, Muslim, and tribal women, undertook pioneering research to document the stories of women of her own community, the Bene Israel. She and a Hindu colleague, Sonal Shukla, launched a series which they called “On Being Jewish, Indian and Women: an Occasional Communication,” which was circulated privately between 1992 and 2011. This publication included accounts of and by Bene Israel women about their families, work, perceptions of Jewish life and ways of maintaining it, and the impact of migration and modernization on them. Haeems was able to ferret out, through interviews, life stories of an earlier generation of Bene Israel women living in small communities, including rural ones, outside of cities like Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Pune – areas that had larger concentrations. Translations from Marathi were also included. In 2002, Haeems edited a collection of these documents in a book entitled Jewish, Indian and Women: Stories from the Bene Israel Community, published by Vacha. In a lengthy introductory chapter, Haeems outlined the background of the community, thus establishing the context of the women’s stories, and presented a valuable discussion of the contributions of some of the more prominent ones. Now a second edition of this work, entitled Indian Jewish Women: Stories from Bene Israel Life, has appeared. Haeems enlisted the help of her granddaughter, Alysha Haeems and has produced an expanded volume of thirty selections. Half of them did not appear in the first edition, while ten selections from the previous edition are excluded from this one. An important feature of this new edition is the inclusion of some eighty photos, most of them never published before. The introductory chapter of the first edition has been rewritten and divided into two shorter chapters, “Konkan Heritage” and “City Lights.” Some of the original introductory material appears later in this new book but those looking for a fuller, comprehensive account of Bene Israel women will want to read Haeems’s first chapter of the first edition. This second edition is divided into three sections: Family and Community Life; Education and Careers; and Four Women, and includes both recorded interviews and articles. It explores the lives of those whose impact was more on their own family and community, as well as of those whose work had broader influences. The first section, “Family and Community Life,” consists of a collection of short vignettes mostly written by contemporary women and men, about their mothers and grandmothers. Several pieces describe life in Gujarat, not only in Ahmedabad, of which

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Serena Jacob’s “Growing Up in Ahmedabad” gives an interesting account, but also in smaller communities, such as Ruby David Abraham’s “The Judah Compound of Jubbulpore,” a description of the efforts to preserve Jewish holidays and practices in a “mini” community which provided a Jewish environment for some thirty Jewish families that lived in Jabalpur and nearby. These accounts are also informative in terms of the contributions the women made to the rural economy. Part II, “Education and Careers,” is particularly valuable as it has contributions from some highly accomplished women. Because many Bene Israel women knew English, they had career opportunities that might not have been available to their counterparts of other communities. As Haeems points out, Bene Israel were among the first women to become school teachers in Maharashtra. In Ahmedabad, however, many well-known private schools, attended by students of all faiths, were opened by Bene Israel, and as she describes in “Bene Israel schools in Ahmedabad,” women played a primary role. Two informative articles by Elizabeth Corley and Venubai Panse shed light on Huzurpaga, a leading High School for Indian Girls in Pune where not only many Bene Israel students were educated in the preindependence years but also where many Bene Israel teachers were employed. Three Lady Superintendents (heads) of the school were members of the community. There seems to have been a “Jew Boarding” section and kosher meat was available. Several graduates went ahead for tertiary education and successful careers. Shoshanna Mazgaonkar Padhye’s account of her role as a trade union activist and political worker from the late 1940s through the 1980s contains material not found elsewhere. Rivka Israel’s well-written, loving account of the medical careers of her aunt Lily Israel, and her mother Sarah Israel, focuses on how these women managed to balance family and career. Sarah became involved in areas of public health and traveled extensively in connection with the World Health Organization. This section also includes a moving tribute by the literary scholar Elizabeth Reuben to her late sister, the entomologist Rachel Reuben. Part II closes with the reprinting of Esther David’s forward to her first novel, The Walled City. Although Esther David may be the best known of Indian Jewish writers—she is also an artist – and her books and scholarly assessment of them are readily available. One wishes that this volume contained a little more by and/or about her. Readers interested in Bene Israel life are strongly advised to read her novels. The final section, Four Women, consists of three brief biographies and an autobiographical note of Bene Israel who were well known outside their own community. Shirley Berry Isenberg’s appreciation of Meera Mahadevan is reprinted from KIDMA: Israel Journal of Development, 1985. Mahadevan’s novel, Apna Ghar (A House of One’s Own) first published in l961, and later translated into English with the title Shulamith was the first novel focusing on the Bene Israel community and recounts the life of a family, some of whose members emigrated to Israel. She is best known throughout India, however, as the founder of Mobile Creches, an organization that cares for and educates the children of poor migrant construction workers, primarily in Delhi and Mumbai. The project attracted international funding. Personnel and equipment could follow the workers from site to site and eventually provided services and activities for all age groups. Nina Haeems’s piece on Dr. Esther Solomon – the Sanskrit scholar who was one of three Bene Israel women awarded the Padma Shri, a high civilian honor given by the Indian Government –lists the books and articles on language and philosophy published by Solomon. What is unusual here is that a Jewish woman was recognized as for her expertise in Sanskrit in India, traditionally a preserve either of Brahmins or European Indologists of the 19th century. Haeems, who has compiled and edited a book on Rebecca Reuben, has also contributed to this volume a brief biography of this outstanding educator and community leader of the Bene Israel in the first half of the twentieth century. Reuben, who could have had a more prestigious career on a broader stage, chose to devote herself to her community. Haeems’s setting of Reuben’s career in the political and social context of the time makes this piece particularly compelling. The gynecologist Dr. Jerusha Jhirad was the first Bene Israel woman to become a physician. She discusses the evolution of

Book Review

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her own career from that of a medical student in England from 1914-1919 to being appointed the Medical Officer (head) of Cama Hospital. Although Haeems states that the women interviewed were not a representative sample or cross-section of the women of the community, this book offers a wealth of material not published before on how Bene Israel women lived and worked, and on their interactions with other communities. In addition to the many photos, this new edition has a useful index. Since this volume is culled out of women’s own voices, it makes an important contribution to the study of the lives of urban and rural women, some prominent, some not so prominent, in India. It will appeal to students of Indian history, women’s studies and anthropology as well as to those of Jewish studies.

Book Review Aroma of Memories Elana Benjamin. My Mother’s Spice Cupboard: A journey from Baghdad to Bombay to Bondi. (Melbourne, Hybrid Publishers, 2012). X + 226 pages. ISBN: 9781921665554. Review by Luke Whitmore In this elegant and poignant account, Elana Benjamin traces the lives of her Baghdadi family across time and space. She lucidly and painstakingly documents the lives and travels of five generations of her family across the locations of Iraq, India, America, Israel, and Australia. She is drawn particularly to the experiences of the women in her family. As she traverses these pasts and presents, she evocatively brings the reader along with her on her journey as she pieces together, for example, what life must have been like for her grandmother Hannah as a young married woman in Bombay, or for her mother Sheila who as a new wife in Sydney learned how to cook the Indian and Iraqi dishes of her new family. One central emphasis of this book is the way in which food grounds and embodies memory and meaning in a way that language based-memories do not. Benjamin’s daughters do not understand much Arabic or Hindi but they still ask for more chapatis (218). She begins her journey into the world of her family by describing aloomakala, the Arabic-Hindi hybrid term – meaning fried potato –which her grandmother used to describe a popular snack (5). She uses aloomakala as the springboard for a set of stories that begin with the departure from Iraq and the making of a home in Bombay. From India, many of Benjamin’s family members found their way to Australia, some via the United States and Israel. Benjamin draws on an impressive number of primary and secondary sources and deftly foregrounds how the decisions of her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents fit into the larger political, economic, and social dramas of their times. Another central emphasis is on the ways that specific foods, foodstuffs, food practices, recipes, and meals connect women and provide arenas for agentive action. Benjamin writes “My kitchen doesn’t contain a dedicated spice cupboard like my mother had while I was growing up. But my pantry doors are lined with spice racks containing all the spices I need to prepare the Indian and Iraqi food I grew up eating. And it is my daughter who can name all my spices and who loves to smell their different aromas.” (218) It is through a description of her spice cupboard and what it means to her daughter that Ilana Benjamin connects herself to the transnational pasts, presents, and futures of her family. When her grandmother Hannah says “I’m too tired to cook” (187), it serves as a marked indication that she is no longer able to live on her own but will need to move into a nursing home, a nursing home where significantly she would complain about the “mass-produced food” (204). The kitchen of the Sephardi Synagogue in Sydney served as an important site of connection and solidarity for Sephardi Jewish women (160). There is an elegiac sense to this book. Benjamin has charted textures of taste, place, language, and time that she sees vanishing into the thinner air of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote this book with the intent that it would be there for her children when they are old enough to appreciate it (xiii). Yet in placing this work before the reader she has performed a service to the broader public as well. Elana Benjamin has offered a precise, accessible example of how a focus on food and lived experience illuminates the ways that specific women make homes for themselves and their families in a constantly changing world.

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Book Review If Food be the Music of Culture… Essie Sassoon, Bala Menon, and Kenny Salem. Spice & Kosher: Exotic Cuisine of the Cochin Jews. (Toronto: Tamarind Tree Books, 2013). xi + 207 pages. ISBN 978-0-99191570-5. Reviewed by Nathan Katz Food is nutrition, food is pleasure, food is culture, food is social relatedness, food is religion. Just as food is more than what one eats, this cookbook is more than just recipes. Much more. Of course, there are recipes, wonderful recipes well organized in sections on breakfast books, fish, poultry, Yemenite dumplings, pastels of Spanish origin, beef and lamb, mutton, rice dishes, breads, vegetables, chutneys, pickles, homemade wine – fresh and fermented, plantains, savories, the Cochin variant of the Passover charoset, and sweets. The recipes translate well for the western kitchen, blending the fabulous spices of Kerala with readily available supermarket items. At each step, the authors inform their western readers about a specific food: for example, a dosha is translated as a blintz. Some recipes are relatively simple preparations, but most are authentically complex and time-consuming. All of the ones we have tried are delicious, wafting us back to the Jew Town tables of the Cohens, Salems, Koders and Halleguas. For those familiar with Cochin Jewish cooking, this book is culinary nostalgia; for those yet to discover this cuisine’s delight, it is an exploration into the “exotic” (as the subtitle promises). This book is more than a cookbook, though. The reader is introduced to not just the foods of Kerala, but also the history of the Cochin Jews, and the rudiments of observing kashrut in South India. As one meanders from recipe to recipe, there are tantalizing excursions into Kerala festivals like Onam, Cochini Passover practices, the resettlement of Cochinim (as they are known in Israel) after making aliyah, a history of the spice trade, and the scientific names and descriptions of the ingredients. For example, the authors are not content to list tapioca as an ingredient and leave it at that, but they discuss the role of tapioca in Kerala culture. They add further flavor to it by including some of the songs that were sung by Cochini Jewish women as they prepared their meals. In short, in this book, as in actual life, food is the entrance to culture, and especially to the people who bear that culture. Skilled ethnography pervades the book; Cochin’s colorful personalities frequently come to life. With a flip of the page, one jumps from Cochin to Haifa to an Israeli moshav and to Toronto, meeting irrepressible Cochinites at every turn. Their vibrant mini-portraits are a testimony to the authors’ rigorous methodology, as well as their unprecedented access to the people and their kitchens. The background sections are well researched. The authors obviously respect and enjoy engaging scholars who have written about their community. The appended bibliography would do my graduate students proud for judiciously selecting from among scholarly and popular books, journal articles, newspapers, primary documents, web sites, and encyclopedias. In short, this is an altogether outstanding book. Specialists in Indian Jewry in particular, as well as chefs looking for a new flavor, will benefit from it; and everyone in general will enjoy reading it. I must add a disclaimer. I am fortunate to count Kenny Salem first as an informant and as a friend ever since my wife and I lived in Jew Town, 1986-7. (The book mentions that we were there from Rosh Hashanah until Chanukah, but actually we were there through Shavuot.) Bala Menon has been an engaging e-penpal for decades, and I know Essie Sassoon slightly. I very much like all three of them. I feel confident that I would have enjoyed this book every bit as much had I never met any of them.

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Book Review A Maze of History of Amazing Ancient Hospitality Practices Philippe Bornet. Rites et pratiques de l'hospitalite : mondes juifs et indiens anciens. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010). ISBN: 9783515096898, 3515096892. Iii and 301. Reviewed by Flavio Geisshuesler Philippe Bornet’s Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité explores hospitality in the worlds of ancient Judaism and Hinduism. His study is centered on the tension underlying practices of hospitality, as acts that are both recommended and discouraged. Asking why hospitality is offered in certain situations rather than in others, and to certain people rather than to others, the author examines hospitality as a cultural practice in which a community’s identity is forged and negotiated. Throughout his study, Bornet emphasizes the ritualistic nature of hospitality practices, which frequently follow strict protocols – particularly the critical moments of the encounter such as the welcoming and the departure of the guest, or the offering of a meal. In tying these ritual procedures to other forms of public ritual practices such as sacrificial cults, Bornet comes to understand hospitality as an important vehicle for the “domestication of religion,” which he defines as the “transfer of specialized ritual functions onto the domestic sphere” (227)1. Structurally, the study is divided into four chapters: an introduction, two case studies on Brahminical and Rabbinic practices of hospitality, and a chapter of conclusion. The introductory chapter (7-42), while offering a Begriffsgeschichte of the concept of “hospitality” – as it developed from the Greco-Roman period, through Christianity, into modern times – distinguishes itself through interesting methodological reflections. Like most contemporary thinkers on religion, Bornet is fully aware of the difficulties associated with comparative studies in the history of religion – particularly the universalizing kind that dominated the discipline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, unlike many of his colleagues, these insights do not lead him to abandon a comparative approach to his subject matter, but propel him to search for a responsible way of engaging in comparison of “hospitality” across distinct cultures. The result is a more modest and conservative comparative program that emphasizes the “general” over the “universal,” “hypothesis” over “explanation,” “contrast” over “continuity,” and “documents” over “religions.” Bornet’s study could be described as a bottom-up approach to hospitality as he advocates for comparison that is grounded in a careful study of religious phenomena in their own contexts, before engaging in any kind of abstraction and theory building. As a consequence, the second (43-138) and third (139-222) chapters on the Jewish and Hindu practices of hospitality – grasped through careful study of the Mishnah and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds on the one hand, and dharmasūtras and the dharmaśāstras on the other – make up the major parts of this work. In these chapters, Bornet’s investigation is characterized by precision and attention to detail. He engages in a thorough study of Hebrew and Sanskrit terminology related to hospitality, offers a broad range of models for possible encounters of hospitality (identifying types of hosts and visitors), and defines a variety of key variables involved in hospitality practices (levels of comfort, eating, preparation of food, numbers of visitors, length of stay, motive for invitation, place of visit, and so forth). He also chronicles several specific case studies for each tradition that illustrate the many ways in which complex issues related to identity result in diverse concerns and priorities for different communities and individuals involved in hospitality. In this context, the reflections on the problematic status of women in rituals of hospitality are of particular relevance. In fact, Bornet shows how the position of the woman of the household is marked by ambiguity as she is both recognized as the primary artisane of the hospitality and relegated to secondary importance

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– or even perceived as a disturbance – as it is her husband that is the one offering the hospitality. The final chapter of the work (223-254) builds on the detailed studies of the previous chapters by expanding the conversation to include various theoretical conceptions of hospitality. Here, Bornet’s most sustained discussion concerns Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don and his theory of the logic of exchange. While not always in agreement with the French sociologist, Bornet follows Mauss in his understanding of the logic of exchange by interpreting hospitality as an important contributor to social coherence and identity formation. Finally, the closing pages hint at a more radical critique of the discipline of religious studies by questioning the validity and usefulness of some of its most cherished concepts. In fact, the author’s exhaustive survey of documentary evidence concerning hospitality practices in Rabbinic Judaism and Brahminical Hinduism enables him to demonstrate that some key categories usually associated with hospitality – such as “charity,” the “foreigner,” “alterity,” or “religion” – are not pertinent in the cases under scrutiny, are too broad to offer actual insights, or are too heavily grounded in the discipline’s Christian self-understanding. Professing his conviction that many other “‘great themes’ of history of religion are not evident and demand to be reexamined in light of empirical facts” (252), Bornet seems to call other historians of religion to return to the textual sources of individual traditions to join in the task of refining the discipline’s conceptual and methodological apparatus. Overall, Philippe Bornet’s endeavor must be applauded for its attention to empirical detail, its effectively simple structure, and its call for a conservative approach to comparison. As the author himself acknowledges in the book’s preface, these merits are in important ways the consequence of the training he received at the University of Lausanne. Strong emphasis on mastering languages relevant to various religious traditions combined with many years of historical, methodological and epistemological training in the discipline of religious studies, make it one of the world’s most amenable places for comparative research that is not only grounded in sound translation work of primary sources but also in methodological selfreflexivity. The aforementioned qualities of this book – its attention to detail, its structure, and its conservative comparativism – could also be construed as its vulnerability: the meticulous discussion of hospitality in these two distinct cultural contexts can make the central chapters at times hard to read for the non-specialist; the book’s structure creates a sense of rupture between the emic understandings of hospitality and the author’s etic interpretation thereof; and, finally, the commitment to a more conservative and empirical approach to comparative studies could make the reader feel uncertain as to whether Bornet fully delivers on his promise to discover the practices and behaviors associated with hospitality that “possess a ‘transcultural’ anthropological signification” (224). Indeed, while a solid empirical and documentary foundation prevents the historian of religion’s scholarship from losing its grounding in reality; drifting aimlessly in the lofty spheres of ideas and abstractions, it can also rob it of its broader relevance in the social scientist’s pursuit of uncovering the mysteries of human nature and religious thought and practice. Nonetheless, despite these minor reservations, Philippe Bornet’s work represents a major contribution to the various fields of inquiry it addresses. Not only does it offer new insights into the conception of hospitality in ancient Judaism and Hinduism, but it also has the potential to invigorate the discipline of religious studies as a whole. In articulating a critical comparative program and applying it to specific case studies, this rising scholar steps into the footsteps of some of the discipline’s greatest thinkers and represents a promise for the future. Notes 1

All citations translated from French by the reviewer.

Book Review Zayde Tales of the East – A Tribute to Rabbi Marvin Tokayer Marvin Tokayer and Ellen Rodman, Pepper, Silk & Ivory – Amazing Stories about Jews and the Far East. (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2014). ix +316 pages. ISBN 978-965-229-6474. Reviewed by Nathan Katz A Zayde (Yiddish for “grandfather”) is the one who tells stories to the next generation, but not just any stories. A Zayde story – unlike the unfairly much-maligned Bubbe-meisser, or “grandmother’s story” – conveys values, orientations, and models for thinking and behaving. That could serve as a suitable introduction to Rabbi Marvin and his wonderful life, through his impressive new book. After serving as a U. S. Air Force chaplain in Japan and in search of a new career position, he tells of a fateful meeting with the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. Hearing about the young rabbi’s experiences in Japan, the Rebbe advised him to return there to serve the tiny local Jewish community, to redeem sparks from their shells. And so he did, serving as the de facto “Chief Rabbi of Japan” for eight years. He became fascinated with Japanese culture and learned the language, eventually writing twenty books in Japanese. He explored Jewish connections in East Asia – a cemetery in Nagasaki, the “lost” Jews of Kaifeng in China, and researching Japan’s paradoxical role vis-à-vis the Jews during World War II. He collected stories of Jewish life there from those who lived the adventure as well as from arcane scholarly and other stories. He built bridges, forged new cultural friendships, eventually pioneering Jewish tourism in Japan, China, India, and Southeast Asia, decades before it became fashionable. He also told his tales in synagogues and universities across North America. It was these tales that inspired his audiences to want to learn more, and among those to follow his lead was the next generation of specialists in this yet-to-emerge academic field of Jewish life in the East. The best of his tales are in this book. But his deepest legacy is expanding Jewish friendship from the Indus to the Yellow River. Each of the twenty-three chapters is a delight, appealing to the love of the “exotic.” The power of these stories rests upon the imaginative leaps they take. He writes in the preface, “In this book, while all of the stories are true, some may be anecdotal and some may have been embellished in the course of being passed down through the generations… In many instances I either knew the subjects of these stories or knew their relatives and still am in touch with many of them. In addition, I have access to, and even now possess, personal documents and artifacts relevant to their stories” (p. x). Among the more amusing tales concerns a Dr. Leshiniskata, a Romanian Jewish physician who became “Mao’s sex therapist,” prescribing Novocain injections (local anesthesia used for dental problems) that of course did not work. But apparently Chairman Mao remained impressed by her. The role of Jews in Singapore was disproportionate to their small numbers and included David Marshall (1908-1995) who seamlessly moved from being president of the Jewish community to becoming the architect of Singapore’s independence and serving as the small nation’s first Chief (or Prime) Minister (page 271). Tokayer also writes fondly about Lt. Gen. Jack Jacob, arguably India’s greatest military hero of modern times and Chief Minister of the fractious Punjab and later, peaceful Goa. (General Jacob’s obituary appears in this issue of JIJS.) There are dozens of such tales, some culled from historical studies, and some from more recent times. This book, ably co-authored by Ellen Rodman, is a perfect popular introduction to the endlessly fascinating study of Jewish experience in Asia. It honors the visionary Rabbi Tokayer, and it blesses all of us with insights that can re-orient ourselves (no apologies for the pun!) as a truly global people.

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Impressions from the Anjuman Al-Pathan conference Jaipur, 17th May 2015 By Eyal A. Be’ere It was an overwhelming sight at the auditorium where the second conference of the Anjuman Al-Pathan (the Pathans movement of Rajasthan) was being held. There were about a thousand people in the hall, looking at a screen dominated by the image of an eagle with wings outstretched, and a banner proclaiming “Vive La Education”. I had been invited by the president of the movement, Colonel Abdul Rasool Khan, and the Vice- President, Hassam Muhamad Khan. There were interesting speeches and observations about the Pathans’ capabilities, their courage and Eyal. Be'ere (MA), Pathans Researcher, Ariel University in perseverance, their ambition and excellence in various fields. Samaria In the past, when the leadership was still tribal, the Pathan “Jirga” fulfilled a role similar to that of the “Anjuman”, and acted as an assembly of law makers. The term Jirga is originally Mongolian and means ‘a circle’, referring to the mode of seating of the assembly. The Jigra, was for many years, the sole authority in all community matters. The Scottish general M. Elphinstone reported in his book The History of India1 that the Jirga played a major role in community life – this reference is about the first decades of the 19th century. The Jirga described by James Spain in 1963 is no different from that of Elphinstone2. The very existence of the Jirga for so long proves that custom, society and law are interwoven in the community life of Pathans. Mukulika Banerjee (2000) wrote that the Jirga is still active in India 3. However, it seems that its functions have changed in different regions. It is possible that Jirga is still a force in the Andhra Pradesh province, but Professor Navras Aafreedi from Presidency University contends that in his birth town Malihabad in Uttar Pradesh, the Jirga ceased its activities after August 1947, when India gained independence. There was a decline in the influence of the Jirga in all Pathan regions, and as an alternative they obeyed the Indian constitution. The historical origin of the Pathans is a subject of interesting contentions and controversies. Some researchers chart their trajectory as descendants of Aryans who migrated to the Indian sub-continent in the second millennium BC; others contend that they are descendants of the ancient Egyptians, or Alexander the Great’s soldiers; while some others believe they are descendants of “Bnei Israel”. In the memoirs of Badshah Khan, a Pathan who was also known as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a good friend of Mahatma Gandhi – he writes the Pathans were urged to recognize and revere their identity and origins. The massive 1500 year old idols of Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, (which were utterly destroyed by the Pathans of the Taliban in March 2001); the expansive Buddhist University in Ada near Jalalabad; the Taxila university; and the works of art combining wood and stone – these are all proofs of the advanced cultural ability of Pathans who, in his opinion, progressed no less than the culture of the Chinese, or that of South East Asia. Badshah Khan writes “our splendid culture was taken away from us,” (p. 19). One was pleasantly surprised at the conference, to meet people of great social standing who are well integrated in different branches of the north Indian society. Distinguished men and women from the fields of health, finance, defense, economics and administration, appeared on the podium one by one. It was heartening to see female Pathan doctoral students who have fought against all odds and the dead weight of tradition to reach where they have. Distinguished doctoral students went up onto the stage to the cheers of the audience, followed

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by college students, high school and primary school pupils, all recipients of prizes and accolades for their accomplishments. One also was fortunate to witness the soulful and poignant music of Nabina, a visually challenged singer with the voice of an angel. The atmosphere at the conference was exuberant; and all the enthusiastic applause expressed their determination to continue in their endeavors – determination to excel in education so that every Pathan man or woman would have the opportunity to succeed, and so that the community would march ahead in turn. The positive and remarkable process that this community has undergone is indeed remarkable. The president of the movement, Colonel Abdul-Rasool Khan, gave an impassioned speech praising the progress of Pathans in the field of education, and then surprised me by inviting me up onto the podium and embracing me warmly. He declared that the cause of Pathan education is inseparable from the need to reiterate the historical ties with the Jewish people. He emphasized that he intends to write an explanatory booklet about this singular relationship, and he even intends to visit the State of Israel in order to learn firsthand about the historical identification of the Pathans with the people of Israel. Standing on the podium, I noticed the expression of contentment on the face of Sardar Muhamad Khan, the “Bara Hazari” from the village of Niwana. He had been an amazing host a number of times while I was researching for a paper on the Pathans genealogy. This research gained great significance in the summer of 2013 when I discovered that the Pathans have 20 ancient tomes of genealogy which had been founded whilst still in Afghanistan. They were in the safekeeping of Bara Hazari’s family. For over 500 years, in accordance with the directives of the Pathan ruler Sher-Shah Suri (1486-1545) – who had the Grand Trunk road constructed, and whose tomb is in Sasaram, Bihar – these families have recorded every birth, marriage and death in these books. These books are written in Dhundhari, a script that is a blend of Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Pushtu and Aramaic letters. The writing is aligned from left to right. From the initial study of the text we found the records of the first twenty four generations of mankind from Adam to Noah, then Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons, some of who had retained their biblical names (Joseph, Benjamin, Ephraim, Judah, Zebulun and Gad). The others’ names had been altered and it is unclear what their sources are. Benjamin the offspring of Jacob and Rachel, is one of those twelve sons. One of Benjamin’s descendants is ‘Malik-Talot’, who is also mentioned in The Holy Quran, and known in the Holy Bible as King Saul. One of Saul’s sons is the King Qais Abed-Alreshid, who came out of the mountains of Afghanistan in the seventh century as the leader of a delegation to meet the Prophet Muhammad in the town of Medina, then joined his army, bringing the new religion Islam to the Pathan nation. This ancient concept has support from many sources, starting from the Greek Herodotus in the 5th century BC onwards and from various Hindu-Afghan chronicles between the 10th and 15th century. Even in modern times, generals, clerics; and British, Norwegian, American and German researchers, living in or working on the Hindi-Afghan regions, write about it profusely. According to these sources, the Pathan people originate from the nation of Israel thus the genealogical books in Bara-Hazari’s possession add another important literary-historical reference to this notion. When the speeches were done and the applause had quietened down, we went out for lunch. During the meal I met many Pathan friends who embraced me and showed their affection for a guest who had come from afar to participate in their annual conference. Many of them took great interest in the research currently being undertaken in the Israeli University of Ariel. I also did face hostility – from three scowling men who approached me and declared that they hated Israel and all Jews, and that in their opinion Israel is an evil state because of its treatment of the Muslim Palestinians. I was taken aback by such a gesture, and it caused me to reevaluate the changes in Pathan hospitality. The Pathans are famous for their devotion to all guests, whoever they may be. And I, who had visited Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and

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Kashmir, had repeatedly been impressed by the warmth of the Pathans’ hospitality. I was not insulted by the statements of hate. I knew that they stemmed from lack of acquaintance and from hostile press. I secretly hoped that in the near future, some of my Pathan friends would come and visit Israel; and then maybe their anti-Semitic attitudes to Israel and the Jews would be alleviated. At the end of the conference I found myself sitting next to the “Bara Hazari”, surrounded by an enthusiastic group of youngsters who wanted to find their family ties in the genealogy books. Sitting amongst the community scribe and the youth, it occurred to me that the issue of genealogy is still embedded in the hearts of young Pathans, despite standing at crossroads between the stringent Islamic religion and a democratic-secular Indian culture of the 21st century. They still feel linked to the old ancestry which is faithfully recorded to this very day, and when their time comes to get married, they will tie the knot only into one of the families whose name is written in that books. As an Israeli researcher, I felt that Anjuman Al Pathan’s wish to raise the level of Pathan education is an important landmark, and indicates the revival of the Pathan Jirba in Rajasthan. In this conference one could see how this distinguished caste is reinstating itself historically and in terms of identity, combining the past with present. The Pathans are seeking to build a bridge that connects the two, by wisely promoting education. Notes Elphinstone, Mountstuart, The History of India (London: John Murray, 1841) Spain, James Williams, The Pathan Borderland (Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Columbia University, 1963), 69 3 Banerjee, Mukulika, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North West Frontier (James Curry Publishers, 2000) 1 2

A Note on the Sir E.V. Sassoon Papers Thomas A. Timberg Sir E.V. Sassoon (1881-1961) was one of the richest people in the world in the 1920s and 1930s. He headed the E.D. Sassoon and Co. segment of the Sassoon family. E.D. Sassoon was a major international commodity trader, which had under its second owner Sir Jacob (1843-1916), Sir E.V.’s uncle, founded some of Bombay’s largest cotton and wool textile mills. Besides the considerable charities, Jewish and general, that Sir Jacob funded, his mills provided employment to hundreds of Baghdadi and Bene Israel Jews. The history of the Sassoon Family as a whole is culled out of numerous sources, which all refer to E.V. in a greater or lesser extent as Sir Victor (as we will call him in this paper). The two most cited sources are a Cecil Roth volume with special emphasis on the Jewish aspects of the Sassoons’ history, published in the darkest days of World War II in England; and Stanley Jackson’s The Sassoon Dynasty published in 1968.1 I have summarized the literature on the family in a paper posted on my website, http://timberg.us/publications/, “Who are the Sassoons?” David Sassoon (1792-1864) who established the family’s position in India, had eight sons and numerous daughters. The sons mostly continued business as David Sassoon and Co. which remained a major Bombay firm. After his death, his second son, Elias David established his own separate company as E.D. Sassoon and Co., also a major Bombay firm. In the late 1920s, Sir Victor was the representative of the Bombay Textile mill owners in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi, and through the later 1920s he was a key spokesman for the Indian textile industry. He had succeeded his father in 1924 as a hereditary baronet and head of the family firm. However, in 1930, he announced that he was giving up on India and focusing his firm’s new investment on China. From that point until WWII, he centered his commercial activity in Shanghai real estate, and built several structures which epitomize Art Deco there. He got out of China just before the Japanese invasion, right before it would have been too late, and spent most of the time during World War II in Bombay. During that period he sold off his textile mills to a group of cotton commodity traders, and his woolens mills to the J. K. Singhanias. After the war, despite some efforts to recover his Chinese assets, he lost his Chinese properties. He is reported to have said, “I gave up on India, and China gave up on me.” He settled in the Bahamas where, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, he continued his business activities especially in real estate until his death in 1961. Sir Victor, as most of those who dealt with him note, was a larger than life figure, in continuous movement geographically, meeting everyone, left right and center, including Communists and shady operators, saints and sinners, the elite and thousands of humble people, male and female. He was a major race horse owner, leading socialite, and a figure in the racing world especially in India and England. He was as well a major business figure. In this, he differed from almost all his Sassoon contemporaries who left their marks in other fields of endeavor. Sir Victor loyally supported many Jewish charities; his cousin Rabbi David Sassoon, noted that he always gave generously.2 Until his sale of his Bombay properties during World War II, he remained the titular head of the Bombay Baghdadi Jewish community. Nonetheless Jewish involvements were relatively peripheral for him, of which see more below. Toward the end of his life, he married his nurse Evelyn Barnes, with whose family he found a comfortable final refuge, and whose brother managed his affairs continuing after his death. That family has donated his diaries from 1927 to 1961 to Southern Methodist University in Dallas where they are now available along with photos and other materials. He was a keen amateur photographer.

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I went through his diaries of the period 1927-1945. His niece, who took off a year after high school to accompany him on his world travels, told me he that used these diaries first and foremost as an aid to his memory of names of people he met, a use to which several business magnate diaries I have read, are put. There are passing references to lots of things and clippings from the newspapers which refer to others but the focus is on the names of all the people he met or were part of dinners and other social events he attended. I am happy that I read through the diaries, but suspect that they will not be too useful for most researchers on Jewish history, or even Indian commercial history. The key exception would be someone focusing on the last two years of World War II for Jewish history in Bombay, or someone following commercial policy developments in 1927-31 in the Central Legislature. I append several illustrative references from the diaries. He reports, for example on March 6, 1927 “Six Mohamedans offered to sell their votes for 2000 rupees a piece. I refused to consider any question of bribery.” On March 9 he reports a comment by an ICS officer that if the rumor “that government have resorted to bribery” is true, it is the “beginning of the end.” During the late 1920s and again in the World War II period, he moved around extensively in India, visiting various places. On a November 10-11 1929 for example on a, visit to Jaipur he goes to Ajmer and visits the Mayo College, “Nice lovely lot of boys.” He reports that the Japanese had offered him 50% of their worth of his assets in August 1941 and that he turned them down. On November 10, 1941 he notes “RD Tata to dinner. Very bitter against British. Think they want positive chaos after independence.” On Jan. 17, 1942 he notes “In office, Govindram Seksaria, [a leading Bombay cotton trader], met me on his income tax troubles with [name unclear]”. Sir Victor refers earlier to his own conflicts with the Bombay income tax authorities which must have been routine for businessmen. There is some reference to dickering with the Singhanias about payment details for selling the Raymond Woolen Mills. However, there is very little on the sale of the Sassoon cotton textile mills. He notes details of a testimonial dinner, tendered him by the purchasers of the cotton textile mills, at the iconic Bombay Taj Mahal Hotel. There are references to farewell visits to the mills, and newspaper clippings including one about the anxieties of Jewish employees about the future. A more extensive account of the purchasers, albeit one which some have questioned, is contained in Stanley Jackson’s book.3 The guests at the dinner on Dec. 13, 1943 included RB Bagla, Govindram Seksaria, Madhoprasad Morarkas, BP and D Poddar, R. Poddar, R. Morarka, Matadin Khetan, Sakharam Sekhsaria, [the preceding are all leading Bombay Marwari businessmen and probably among the purchasers] Sir Cowasji Jehangir, Sir Frances Low, Sr. W. Reynard, Sir Homi Mehta, Sir VN Chandavarkar, Sir Fred Stone, Sir RM Chinoy, Sir Joseph Kay, Mrs. Tandon (could this be Mrs. Prakash Tandon, the Swedish born wife of Prakash Tandon of Unilever? Her daughter thinks not, because they were fairly junior at the time, but she also says they were the only Tandons in the Bombay phone directory), C.P. Wadia, Mrs. Passmore, RC Church, Hardev Madhavdas, Shivnandrai Poddar, F. Ibrahimtoola, Naval Tata, Ms. Commisariat, E. Solomon, DL Davy, JK Raj, R. Kaidan, Dr. Jul Paten, Mrs. Enmriti, Kanji Dwarkadas, S. P Kura, M. Nemani, Eric Ellis, C. Parekh, P. Garg, Mrs. Peabody, Bagubhai Mafatlal, Kantilal Achalchand, B Modi, and Bhau Apte. There is a reference to the sale of the cotton mills on September 19, 1943, a visit to the Jacob Mills (one of them) on September 30, 1943. There is also a clipping of an article in the Bombay Sentinel (a leading crusading nationalist newspaper) on Oct 1, 1943 on “Future of Jews in India.” The article notes that “since 1920” many Bene Israel have been employed. A farewell visit to the Woolen Mills is noted on November 4, 1944. And a meeting of investors on November 4, 1944.

A Note on the Sir E.V. Sassoon Papers

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He notes a visit to the David Mill on September 27, 1945. This is interesting because it belonged to the Sassoon J. David Group, not part of Sir Victor’s family, though the founder, Sir Sassoon J. David married his great aunt. Jewish matters are sporadic – such as a visit to, and donation to the Ahmedabad synagogue. A generalization – though the Sassoon charities were primarily focused on Baghdadis, the Sassoons had continuing Bene Israel involvements. His aunt, Flora Sassoon’s, servants in London were all Bene Israel. But most important were the hundreds of Bene Israel employed in the Sassoon Mills. Again there are references to visits to Jewish institutions, and Jewish relatives. His visits to Calcutta typically included his cousin Sir David Ezra (head of Jewish community there), though they included B.N. Elias, the biggest post WWI Jewish businessman as well. Some of the family references reflect some emotional distance from the people concerned. When he meets Sir Philip Sassoon, a cousin and later the Minister of State for Air, a subject in which Sir Victor was actively involved and for which he raised funds throughout the late 1930s, he writes, “Saw Philip Sassoon on China Situation, he was quite nice to me.” An injured World War I Pilot in the Royal Air Force (he used a cane), one of Sir Victor’s major activities in the 1930s was promoting British air preparedness, and he was active in a number of Royal Air Force veterans groups. In 1941, he notes that he met B.N. Elias, David Ezra, and GD and BM Birla at the Calcutta Club in Calcutta. (This was the “cosmopolitan” Club of which elite Indians were members like the Willingdon Club in Bombay, and in contrast to British only clubs) His executives in Mumbai and especially Shanghai included many Jews, and they frequently met with him. In Ahmedabad on Nov. 17-18, 1929 he visited the Bene Israel Synagogue and made a donation of 100 Rupees, and had tea with the Bene Israel Community under Dr. Solomon. On November 26, 1929 “after dinner, went to Nagpada Neighbourhood House” which served the neighborhood where the poor Jews lived. On June 20, 1932 he opened the Shanghai Jewish School. On April 9, 1940 while in Palo Alto, California, he visited the Jewish Club with lots of Jewish names at dinner. In New York he notes on June 2, 1942 “With Herman Leman [is this Herbert Lehman?] to Newark to dine at Temple B’nai Jeshurun [somewhere in New Jersey] “(Rabbi Weiss and 71 others) and talk on India, collected $32 for [unclear] Leeds for British War Relief.” There was an elaborate visit to Cochin in the period around November 5, 1943 including meetings at the synagogue and with the leaders of the community. S.S. Koders wife was a cousin. They were perhaps celebrating the 375th anniversary of the synagogue. A major exception in terms of his Jewish involvement was a canteen for Jewish Servicemen he supported in Mumbai, during the last two years of WWII, in which he involved himself in the details of catering and so forth. Roughly in these same two years, perhaps influenced by being cooped up there, he went to a number of local Jewish events and met community leaders – several of whom were distant cousins. However, he expressed surprise that anyone pushed to have the canteen closed on Jewish holidays and the sabbath. He notes Yom Kippur once, on October 1, 1941 in Mumbai and again on Sept 27, 1944 before an afternoon at the horse races. These are the only times it is referred to in his diaries. He was the First President of the Central Jewish Board of Bombay, founded in 1943. He was succeeded by Dr. E. Moses, a Bene Israel leader, and then Meyer Nissim, another Sassoon cousin, and both also were Mayors of Bombay. On Nov. 17, 1941 he addressed the Judaean Club at the Sassoon School. However, it is in 1944-5 that the pace of his Jewish involvement increases. On June 4, 1944 Ellis Judah take him to a workshop for Jewish girls. On February 2, 1944, Solomon Judah and Jacob Sassoon spoke with him “of communal matters.” On February 3, 1944 he talks with Rosenfeld on communal matters.

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On Feb 13, 1944 he “Visits Habonim Show at Cowasji Jehangir Hall run by Menasse [probably Albert Menasseh, a distant cousin and Bombay Community leader] and Dr. Ellis Judah.” He notes several attendants including Peter David. On March 9, 1944 “to Jewish Women’s Association dinner at PVM Gym at which found Mr. Ellis Judah, Florence Meyer, M. Goorji, Mussry and Joseph Doris Marshal, daughter of [unclear] of Wavell [the Viceroy], and his cousin Victor [unclear] Joseph alleged to be Mr. M’s boyfriend.” Habonim is treated extensively in a memoir by Rachel Menasseh, Albert Menasseh’s widow, in Baghdadian Jews of Bombay – Their Life and Achievements: A Personal and Historical Account, (Great Neck, NY: Midrash Ben Ish Hai, 2013) On March 10, 1944 he attended “Jewish Cooperative Jubilee, JE Solomon, Khan Sahib Samson” [this is a Bene Israel group] March 11, 1944 Rosenfeld and Jewish chaplain at dinner. March 22, 1944 “to Jewish Ladies’ Dance where found Mr. [unclear] Rosenfeld, Frank Cohen, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Judah, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Judah, Florence Moses, Mr. and Mrs. Gourgey, Mrs. Francis Klein, Mr. George Hitchup, Mr. Lemande , Mr. and Mrs. [unclear] Salem (US Intel, Major Marty [unclear], and M. Jackson.” On April 1, 1944 he notes Orde Wingate’s death. On April 9, there’s a note about a meeting of Jewish Hospital Committee. On July 13, 1944 he has Rosenfeld and the head of Jewish relief to lunch. On October 12, 1944, he notes a visit with Rosenfeld and Pollack to Sassoon Service Club about architect and housekeeper selection. He visited it again on October 31, 1944 and notes that Rosenfeld is back from leave. He remarks about a “Great Success” at an event at this club on November. 10, 1944.Again on November 13, he visits the Club and meets Rosenfeld John Klein. He notes a change of manager, as a Mrs. Weiss is to take over as manager. Mrs. Pollack and Metzger ask for 1500 Rupees for WIZO [for Americans WIZO is what Hadassah is called everywhere else in the world] Bazaar and he gives 5000. On January 19, 1945, he notes, “Shochet to see me. Wanted only Matzo served in SSC over Pesach.” There are more visits to SSC on Nov 17, 22, and 30, 1944. For those who know her later role in the Mumbai community, on Dec. 2, 1941 he writes. “Met Sophie Kelly whom I had financed to go to London and who runs a Hill Grange School, Pedder Road, and is running [unclear] a show for the War Fund.” And then on Dec. 12, 1941, “Went to Sophie Kelly War Fund show at Hill Grange School, Pedder Road, where me Mr. and Mrs. Venura.”4 On June 30, 1940 he relays a joke about Jews in an anti-Semitic village “We don’t allow Jews in this village. That why it is only a village.” Notes Cecil Roth, The Sassoons (London: Hale 1941) Stanley Jackson, The Sassoon Dynasty (London: Heineman, 1968). 2 From Stanley Jackson’s account referred to in another footnote. 3 Jackson, op. cit., 264ff. 4 There is a picture of Sir E.V. visiting the school on page 223 of Menasseh, op. cit. 1

Indo-Judaic Book Wins Canadian Award By Joseph A. Hodes Joseph Hodes’s book, From India to Israel, has won the 2015 Canadian Jewish literary award in the category of history. This is an exciting news for scholars of Indo-Judaic Studies, for even though it’s a niche field, it is gradually getting the recognition that is due. Within Jewish studies itself, the study of Eastern European Jewry has been considered more important than Indian Jewry. This award will encourage other scholars to pursue the study of Indian Jewry, showing that not only is it worthy of study, but that studies on the subject are winning international acclaim. Dr. Joseph Hodes is a visiting assistant professor of Middle Eastern history at Tulane University. Bibliographic Details Hodes, Joseph. From India to Israel. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, Series 2 (Book 29). (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014)

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Obituary Farewell Jakes . . . JFR Jacob (1923-2016) By Lt. Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain

Lt Gen (Retd.) JFR Jacob (1923-2016) will long be remembered for his qualities of head and heart – he was the quintessential General Officer difficult to find today. Lt Gen JFR Jacob, former Governor of Punjab and Goa, GOC in C Eastern Command, and the man who played a larger than life role as Chief of Staff HQ Eastern Command during the liberation of Bangladesh, is no more. My deepest regrets; it is a profound loss not just for India but for the world. Why would I, someone 32 years his junior and not even from his Arm or Regiment, be writing this ‘Remembrance’? Primarily because he was my father’s dear colleague and friend. I spent the happiest years of my life at the Indian Army’s Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), Wellington, from 1961 to 1963 when Gen Jacob (known as Jakes to my parents and their contemporaries in the Army’s large family) and my father were posted there as Directing Staff (DS). Jakes (and I will affectionately continue to call him that) came from a Kolkata-based Jewish family and studied at Kurseong (Darjeeling) before signing up for the British Indian Army when he learnt of the holocaust in Europe. Having fought in North Africa and on the Burma front, he was later assigned to Sumatra which is where he and my father met and became ‘thick’ friends. Being a Gunner (Artillery), he went on to do specialized gunnery courses abroad, and after command of his Regiment, was posted at DS DSSC. That is where I ran into him as a child. He was a bachelor and remained one all his life. He preferred to live at the Wellington Gymkhana Club (WGC) rather than the Officers Mess and was the life of the station after working hours. He would often dine at our house and raid my mother’s refrigerator

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at midnight whenever he was hungry. For him our house was always open and I often stayed up at night to listen to his stories of ‘shikar’ and angling. He also taught me a game called Hot Hands in which you have to strike your opponent’s hands while he tried to avoid that strike. Trips into the Nilgiri’s fishing spots were always a delight as there were great accompaniments of food and drink alongside the fishing gear. Jakes was posted from Wellington to Pune and that’s where we met him while my parents were proceeding on posting to Lansdowne and driving through three fourths of India to do that. We stayed with Jakes as the RSI and dined at Dorabjees where I ate the first ‘naan’ of my life. Jakes went on to command the artillery and infantry brigades before he was assigned the command of 12 Infantry Division at Jodhpur in early 1967. India’s fledgling desert force was just coming into existence and he wrote the first manuals on desert warfare. In 1969, he was back to Kolkata but before that I met him at DSSC Wellington again. Still a bachelor, he joined us for dinner all three days that he spent at Wellington. In fact the rumors that the Field Marshal wanted him in Kolkata were rife but he kept expressing his unwillingness to go back to his hometown until he was forced to. The rest of this story, as the cliché goes, has gone down the annals of history as legendary. As Lt Gen Jagjit Aurora’s Chief of Staff (in rank of Major General) he was first assigned the insurgencies of the north-east and the fledgling Naxalism which had erupted in West Bengal. However, his real claim to fame came as a result of the turbulent conditions in East Pakistan brought on by the obstinacy of Pakistan’s dictatorial leadership. He along with Maj Gen (later Lt Gen) BN Sarkar were assigned the role and task of coordinating the Mukti Bahini which had become a force to reckon with. Bangladesh’s exiled leadership also was in Kolkata through 1971 and it was Jakes’ responsibility to keep in touch with them and seek their advice from time to time. As Gen Aurora’s responsibilities multiplied with the piquant situation, it was Jakes who offered his firm shoulder and advice when needed. Coordinating conferences at New Delhi were a regular affair, and his proximity to the Field Marshal helped greatly in creating the right amount of confidence between the Eastern command and Army Headquarters. It needs to be mentioned that it was the game of ‘bridge’ which tied both Jakes and my father to the Field Marshal and Mrs Manekshaw who were avid bridge players themselves. Of course, Jakes shared some of the qualities of the Field Marshal in terms of his likeness for artifacts, carpets and china; one of the finest collections of which exists in his house even today. When the war commenced on 3 December 1971, Jakes as Chief of Staff had his hands full with coordination tasks. When the Indian Army formations drew close to Dhaka after bypassing islands of Pakistani resistance, it was Jakes who was assigned by Gen Aurora to proceed to Dhaka to negotiate the surrender. The classic photographs of the surrender ceremony at Dhaka’s Maidan are now folk lore and prominent in all of them is the man who negotiated the surrender and drafted the surrender document. Pakistan signing the instrument of surrender: Seen here, standing to the left of Niazi, is JFR Jacob The safe transportation of 93,000 prisoners of war was no mean feat itself. It all happened under his direct supervision and not one Pakistani PoW did ever complain. Jakes went on to raise HQ 16 Corps to take on the responsibility of the LoC south of the Pir Panjal in 1972, and was later assigned back to Eastern Command as Army Commander where he stayed for almost four years. The merger of Sikkim was in his tenure as was the stabilization of Bengal after the initial turbulence by the Naxalites.

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Later, Jakes went on to be Governor of Punjab and Goa. Politically, he was close to the BJP. He authored two books Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation and An Odyssey in War and Peace: An Autobiography. He was also instrumental in the early overtures to Israel after India decided to open diplomatic relations with that country. While some may have been critical of his claims that it was he, and not Aurora or Manekshaw, who drafted the grand strategy for the 1971 Indo-Pak War, that controversy is best rested with the idea that it was the finest hour of the Indian Armed Forces and who the author of it was, remains irrelevant. At the ripe age of 93, one of India’s great military icons has passed on. For me personally, a part of my finest memories of childhood have come alive in a nostalgic outburst. Farewell ‘Uncle Jakes’; that is what I always called you and will continue to do so long after you have gone. Thanks for bestowing me such rich memories. It is to you I shall turn whenever I need to remember that soldiering is a gentleman’s profession. This first appeared in Swarajya and is re-published with permission. http://swarajyamag.com/columns/farewell-jakes/