The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era - Softcover

Roland, Joan G

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765804395 ISBN 13: 9780765804396

Publisher: Routledge, 1998

Synopsis

Although the Bene Israel community of western India, the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay and Calcutta, and the Cochin Jews of the Malabar Coast form a tiny segment of the Indian population, their long-term residence within a vastly different culture has always made them the subject of much curiosity.  India is perhaps the one country in the world where Jews have never been exposed to anti-Semitism, but in the last century they have had to struggle to maintain their identity as they encountered two competing nationalisms: Indian nationalism and Zionism.  Focusing primarily on the Bene Israel and Baghdadis in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Joan Roland describes how identities begun under the Indian caste system changed with British colonial rule, and then how the struggle for Indian independence and the establishment of a Jewish homeland raised even further questions.  She also discuses the experiences of European Jewish refugees who arrived in India after 1933 and remained there until after World War II.

To describe what it meant to be a Jew in India, Roland draws on a wealth of materials such as Indian Jewish periodicals, official and private archives, and extensive interviews.  Historians, Judaic studies specialist, India area scholars, postcolonialist, and sociologists will all find this book to be an engaging study.  A new final chapter discusses the position of the remaining Jews in India as well as the status of Indian Jews in Israel at the end of the twentieth century. 

About this title

About the Author:

Joan G. Roland is professor of history at Pace University in New York. She is the editor of Africa: The Heritage and the Challenge.

Review:

“Roland portrays sensitively the evolution of the identity of the two groups from the arrival of the British to the emergence of independent India. . . [The Jewish Communities of India] is an important work that illuminates not only a little-known aspect of Jewish and Indian history, but also the process of the emergence of ethnic and national identities in multicultural settings.”— Aron Rodrigue, American Historical Review

Joan Roland gives an admirably lucid and thoughtful account of Indian Jewish history."-Anita Desai, New York Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0765804395
• ISBN 13: 9780765804396
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 392