WHO ARE THE JEWS OF INDIA
By NATHAN KATZ
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 228 pages, $45

Lawrence Cohen

A friend of a friend in Bombay, not knowing I was Jewish, took it upon himself to explain to me who the Parsis were. "You see," he said, "they are basically the Jews of India." His point was that the Parsis were a successful business community and that they were in exile from their homeland. That was almost twenty years ago, and since then I have had not only Parsis but Bengalis, Marwaris, Brahmans, Sindhis, Sikhs, and Chettiyars described to me as "the Jews of India." You don't have to be Jewish, so it seems, to be among the Jews of India.

But it helps. There are three by now well-known, if dwindling, Jewish communities in India: the Cochin Jews of Kerala; the Bene Israel, further north along the subcontinent's Arabian Sea coast; and the most recent arrivals, the Baghdadi Jews, who have settled primarily in the large metropolises. In Who are the Jews of India? Nathan Katz discusses the history, identity, and religious and social practices of each of these communities. The book offers a trio of comprehensive and beautifully written portraits. Katz draws on the surprisingly voluminous literature on India's Jews and on his own extensive fieldwork done with Ellen Goldberg, his wife, while living in the Cochin community. (Katz and Goldberg wrote The Last Jews of Cochin in 1993.) The book opens with a plea not to consider these tiny communities as exotic curiosities but, on the contrary, to see how an understanding of their endurance and vitality might transform how we think about both Judaism and Indian religious life.
The Jews of Cochin take up half the book: Katz knows this community best, and their claim to have been in India for two millennia makes theirs the most intriguing, if puzzling, history. Katz carefully evaluates and never dismisses this claim of the Cochin Jews, but as a scholar of religion, he is able to shift the discussion of origins to "how their mythic narrative structures their sense of self." Rather than restricting his analysis to the origin stories of Kerala's Jews, he juxtaposes these with those of the region's Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. Katz also takes up what he calls the one "less savory" feature of Cochin Jewish history, the emergence of racially marked "subcastes" paralleling the larger organization of Hindu society: the white Jew/brown Jew/black Jew division. Following the late anthropologist David Mandelbaum, Katz suggests that the division may have emerged with the sixteenth-century arrival of European Jews-the Paradesi, or foreigners-who refused to intermarry with Jews they found too distinct in body, custom, and manner. Beyond such specifics, Katz develops a more general model, in which, within the incredible social diversity of Indian society, each grouping of the Jews of India acculturates through an alliance with one or more particular high-status "reference groups" locally.
For the rural Bene Israel of Maharashtra's Konkan coast, it was other Jews, the British, and colonial missionaries who became the reference groups authorizing a transformation of their identity. Katz appropriately seems agnostic on the question of Bene Israel origins, how an arguably Hindu, oil-pressing caste that did no work on Saturday raised its status and created a distinctly Jewish and distinctly Indian practice and identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continuing until today. (Katz calls this process Hebrewization, adapted from the anthropologist M.N. Srinivas's term Sanskritization describing how lower castes gain status over time by adopting high-caste practices.) It is not known whether the Bene Israel were a group of "lost Jews" rediscovered or (less likely) low-status Hindus who became Jews; whatever their origins, Katz writes attentively and compellingly of their religious practice.
The Baghdadi Jews from Iraq settled in the great trading centers of British India-Surat, Calcutta, Bombay, and Rangoon-throughout the nineteenth century. They turned to the British and elite Parsis as reference groups and were increasingly in an ambivalent relationship with the Bene Israel. Here, too, Katz's argument links his own detailed research and that of other scholars. Like the Bene Israel, most Baghdadi Jews have left India, many for Israel and Britain, but those who remain, Katz points out, declare a strong Indian national identity and speak of the particular value of Hindu tolerance.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, of course, "Hindu tolerance" has become caught up in a new set of meanings and politics revolving around religious fundamentalism and the growing illegitimacy of Islam in India. The Hindu right has a complex relation to Jewry. Hitler was a positive model for several of the founding fathers of the core ideological party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, who nevertheless have come to see Israel as a critical ally in their goal of containing Islam. The question of how "Jewishness" will be made meaningful in the India of the coming century is open and complex. But some patterns remain and recur. Over the past decades, two new groups claiming to be "the Jews of India" have emerged, one in the tribal hill country of Manipur, near Burma, and another in the rural farmland of Andhra Pradesh, in South India. Though the claims of both groups have been treated cautiously by immigration authorities in Israel and elsewhere, there seem to be some parallels with how the Bene Israel "rediscovered" their Jewishness two centuries earlier. Many scholars have written of how the intersection of European colonization and missionary Christianity created "Zionist" and "Jewish" emancipation movements around the world. At a time when the anthropology of Judaism is turning to the evidence of DNA to shore up a genetic basis for Jewishness, perhaps the continued emergence of new Jews in the crucible of Indian society holds a lesson, and promise.

Lawrence Cohen is an associate professor in the departments of Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley. He is the author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things.