Baghdadi Jews Research Articles

Self and the City: Literary Representations of Jewish Baghdad

"Maybe there is something in Baghdad that ties him to the city like an umbilical cord, something that he is powerless to extract from his heart," muses the narrator of Eli 'Amir's Mafriaḥ hayonim (The Pigeon Keeper). What does it mean to identify so passionately with a home from which you were ejected, a home that has become "enemy terrain?" How do you "write the city" of your youth from a vantage point of no return? How does the remembered space of the city interact with and mediate memories of self and community? This article explores how the literary writings of Baghdadi Jews in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English foster a dialectical relationship between self and the city, one in which Baghdad is the plaster cast of identity, suddenly imploded, yet indelible in its imprint.

Who Are the Jews of India? (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 556–562 NATHAN KATZ. Who Are the Jews of India? The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xv Ⳮ 205. In the last ten years there has been a proliferation of books about Indian Jews. These include specialized monographs and edited works by Indian, Jewish, and foreign scholars on the three distinct communities: the Bene Israel of western India, the Cochin Jews of Kerala, and the Baghdadi, or Iraqi Jews, of Bombay and Calcutta. There are, in addition, memoirs by Indian Jews themselves. Most of these works have focused on one or, at best, two of the communities. Nathan Katz has now given us, in one relatively short volume, a readable overview of all three communities. (Although he is familiar with them, Katz has opted not to discuss the tribal groups in Northeastern India, the Bnei Menasche, who have claimed Jewish descent.) This book will be a welcome introduction for those readers wishing to know something about the Indian Jews, who could then follow up their interests by reading more specialized works. It could also be used as a text in Jewish history courses that want a global focus, for, as Katz points out, the Jews are not Western but global, ‘‘thus the Jewish experience in India modifies our understanding of Jewishness and of immigrant identity’’ (p. 4). Although their population is microscopic (never exceeding 30,000, a high reached in the early 1950s, and no more than 5,000 now), the Jews of India have managed to maintain their identity. They have never known anti-Semitism from their Indian hosts—a testimony to the basic tolerance of Indian civilization. It is ironic that the one country in which the Jews have not known persecution finds its Jewish population dwindling. Katz’s specialty is comparative religion and he is very well grounded in Indian religions and culture. He understands the importance of legend and myth and introduces the new relationship between those and genetics and DNA. He also tries to look at the Jewish experience in the broader context of the practices and beliefs of their Hindu and Muslim neighbors, as well as in that of normative Judaism. Although scholars may find this approach valuable and enlightening, Indian Jews themselves are sometimes disturbed to find any of their practices related to those of other religions. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. KATZ, WHO ARE THE JEWS OF INDIA?—ROLAND 557 The overarching theme is identity: the chapter titles are ‘‘A Balanced Identity: the Jews of Cochin,’’ ‘‘An Identity Transformed: The Bene Israel ,’’ and ‘‘An Identity Aloof: Baghdadi Jews of the Raj.’’ Katz attempts to demonstrate that communal identity is not fixed but is instead a creative response to dynamic, outside events. He also points out that the experience of all three communities demonstrates that maintaining a Jewish identity is not merely a defense mechanism against a hostile world. Katz sees the Cochin Jews as being firmly rooted in two great civilizations , Indic and Judaic, firmly exemplifying a successfully acculturated identity. He feels that their experience shows how a tiny minority can preserve its religious and cultural identity without either rejecting or being overwhelmed by the larger society. According to Katz, they have neither submerged their Jewishness by assimilating into their host culture nor used their Jewishness as a refuge from a hostile Gentile host society: ‘‘Side-by-side but not submerged, acculturated but not assimilated ’’ (p. 10). This achievement owes much to the tolerance of the Hindu culture of Kerala and to the resourcefulness and creativity of the Cochin Jews. Katz explains three mechanisms by which this took place. First, the Cochin Jews articulated a narrative about themselves filled with motifs that generated status in both the Judaic and Indic worlds. Second, they emulated, thereby affirming, the social hierarchy of Kerala. Third, they borrowed symbolic and ritual motifs from the local Hindu culture, especially those involving asceticism and royalty, and enacted them in their own ritual...

From the rivers of Babylon to the Whangpoo: a century of Sephardi Jewish life in Shanghai

This book examines the interaction between the Baghdadi Jews and their Ashkenazi coreligionists, some 6-8,000 who escaped from religious persecution in Russia, and some 20,000 refugees from Nazi persecution.

From Orientals to Imagined Britons: Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai

Studies and reminiscences, which dissect the communities of the Baghdadi trade diaspora, have so far tended to over-emphasize the smooth Anglicization process experienced by Baghdadi Jews in British India, Singapore and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The myth of the Sassoons as the ‘Rothschilds of the East’ has, in particular, distorted and enhanced the representation of Baghdadi Jews as wealthy, Anglicized and thoroughly integrated in British social circles. In reality, if we want to unravel the multi-layered history of Baghdadi Jews from India to Japan we must not only analyse in depth the complexities of the westernization process of the Baghdadi upper classes but also reconstruct carefully class divisions within Baghdadi communities. With this aim in mind, this essay will investigate the various strands of identity developed by Baghdadis during their stay in Shanghai and will especially focus on the local allegiances forged between Baghdadi and British settlers, the so-called Shanghailanders. The following pages will, at the same time, delineate the social structure of the Baghdadi community in Shanghai and will indicate that westernized affluent Baghdadis were forced to confront painfully their own ‘other’: destitute vagrant co-religionists who hailed from the Middle East and India and roamed between the various nodes of the Baghdadi diaspora. The period considered in this essay stretches from 1845, the year the first Baghdadi trader set foot in the city, to the middle of the 1930s when large numbers of Jewish refugees from Europe started to flock to Shanghai in search of a safe haven.

Constructing a Jewish Nation in Colonial India: History, Narratives of Discent, and the Vocabulary of Modernity

Throughout the nineteenth century, Baghdadi 1 and British Jews questioned the "Jewishness" of the Bene Israel community of western India. Leading the charge were the Bombay Baghdadi Jews. One reason why the Baghdadis challenged the Bene Israel's Jewishness was to achieve the status of Europeans in colonial India. 2 They viewed the Bene Israel as an Indian community with a tenuous Jewish claim. Baghdadi Jews, in contrast, viewed themselves as "pure" Jews. Association with the Bene Israel, for Baghdadi Jews, was viewed as an association with Indians. This was unacceptable for many in the anglicized Baghdadi community who saw themselves as foreigners in India. In Britain, some in the Anglo-Jewish community questioned the Jewishness of the Bene Israel because the Bene Israel were unlike so-called "traditional Jews." That is, for many British Jews and Baghdadi Jews, the Bene Israel seemed Indian, not Jewish.

Studies of Indian Jewish Identity. Edited by Nathan Katz. New Delhi: Manohar, 1995. 203 pp. Rs. 250 (cloth).

The seven contributions in this volume analyse the historical, social and religious identity in three distinct communities of Indian Jews the Cochin Jews the Bene Israel and the Baghdadi Jews. The authors address historical development, social interaction with Gentle neighbours modernization and the influence of Zionism and the role of religion.