Judaism:  India is the only country in the world where there has never been an indigenous anti-Semitism. Jews have flourished in India perhaps for 2,000 years, although only around 6,000 remain today.

Indian Jews have been Prime Ministers to the Maharajas, the tutor to the Crown Prince of the Mughals, fabulously wealthy industrialists, international spice merchants, modern India's greatest war hero, film moguls and movie stars, celebrated poets, playwrights, Kabbalists and mystics, an environmentalist zookeeper, medical researchers, a concert violinist and the Court Jeweler to the Nawab of Oudh.

Indian Judaism developed creatively. Indian Jews have been learned and pious, leaving a body of religious poetry, folk songs, legal and mystical treatises, and some of the most striking synagogues in the world.

There have been three major Jewish communities in India.

The Cochin Jews date themselves from the destruction of the Temple in 72 CE. From the eleventh century, they lived as an autonomous community of agriculturalists, spice merchants, shipbuilders and soldiers. The 1568 Cochin Synagogue is not only the most famous in India, it is the oldest in the British Commonwealth and one of the most beautiful in the world. Nowhere else has Jewish culture flourished so long in freedom than here. Their unique tradition blends indigenous Jewish Malabari with Sephardic, Yemeni and Iraqi elements.

The Bene Israel of Bombay and the Konkan Coast were "lost" Jews who were recognized as Jews by either the 12th century David Rahabi, merchant brother of Maimonides, or the 18th century David Ezekiel Rahabi of Cochin's preeminent merchant house (according to Bene Israel and Cochini traditions, respectively). Their "religious evolution," from an anonymous group of rural oil-pressers into an accepted group in world Jewry, is miraculous and inspiring. They have been prominent in the arts, professions and government service not only in Bombay, where the great majority live, but throughout India. They built synagogues in Ahmedabad, Pune and Delhi, too - all of which we'll visit.

The "Baghdadi" Jews were middle eastern merchants, many Iraqi but many also Syrian, Turkish and Persian, who came to India about the same time as did the British. They flourished, and left when the British left - for the most part. But they left their marks, in Calcutta and Pune, but most of all in Bombay, where they built schools, hospitals, libraries, monuments, synagogues, docks and factories. They also left a sense of romance.

See the itinerary for our forthcoming Judaic Tour of India.

Further reading:

Who Are the Jews of India?, by Nathan Katz (Univ. of California Press, 2000).

The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish identity in Hindu India, by Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1993).

Three Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era, by Joan G. Roland (Transaction Press, 1998).

The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities, ed. by Orpa Slapak (The Israel Museum, 1885).

India's Bene Israel: A Comprehensive Study and Soucebook, by Shirley Berry Isenberg (Judah L. Magnes Museum & Popular Prakashan, 1988).

The Jew in the Lotus, by Rodger Kamenetz (Harper San Francisco, 1994).