The Baghdadi Jews in India

Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity

Shalva Weil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429533877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the extraordinary differentiation of the Baghdadi Jewish community over time during their sojourn in India from the end of the eighteenth century until their dispersion to Indian diasporas in Israel and English-speaking countries throughout the world after India gained independence in 1947.

Chapters on schools, institutions and culture present how Baghdadis in India managed to maintain their communities by negotiating multiple identities in a stratified and complex society. Several disciplinary perspectives are utilized to explore the super-diversity of the Baghdadis and the ways in which they successfully adapted to new situations during the Raj, while retaining particular traditions and modifying and incorporating others. Providing a comprehensive overview of this community, the contributions to the book show that the legacy of the Baghdadi Jews lives on for Indians today through landmarks and monuments in Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata, and for Jews, through memories woven by members of the community residing in diverse diasporas.

Offering refreshing historical perspectives on the colonial period in India, this book will be of interest to those studying South Asian Studies, Diaspora and Ethnic Studies, Sociology, History, Jewish Studies and Asian Religion.

Part I

Sociological and historical perspectives on the Baghdadi Jews under the Raj

1 Super-diversity among the Baghdadi Jews of India

Shalva Weil

Super-diversity in all its manifestations

“Super-diversity” has been proposed by Steven Vertovec (Vertovec 2007) as a concept and theoretical tool that enables us to envisage our ever-evolving globalized social reality by accentuating the enormous amount of diversity that exists within different groups in societies around the world. Vertovec argues that super-diversity in Britain “is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade” (2007). The concept refers to increased diversity not only between immigrant and ethnic minority groups, but also within them. Super-diversity is usually associated with the increasing ethnic and cultural complexity of Western European societies, and therefore associated with the rise of so-called majority-minority cities, such as Amsterdam, Brussels and London. The concept, I would argue, may be equally useful as a heuristic tool for understanding non-Western citiscapes, like Mumbai, Kolkata and Pune, where the “Baghdadi” Jews once thrived. Indeed, in his later works, Vertovec has adapted super-diversity to socio-spatial urban patterns in different types of cities, such as New York, Johannesburg and Singapore (Vertovec 2015), and recently, in a review of 325 articles on super-diversity, has examined the concept and how it has been interpreted in various ways (Vertovec 2019).

The Indian “Baghdadis”, as they are colloquially called, did not all originate in Baghdad.¹ Members of this community comprised Iraqi Jews from different centres, and other Arabic, Afghani and Persian-speaking Jews, who settled in India largely from the middle of the nineteenth century. These diverse and scattered immigrants from different places in the world, who are transnationally connected and differentiated socio-economically and legally, akin to those pinpointed by Vertovec in Great Britain in the past decade (Vertovec 2007), existed for well over 100 years in Indian and other non-Western cities. These types of communities have often been overlooked in discussions and criticisms of the notion of super-diversity, which seek to portray the complexity as well as the diversification of migration trajectories and variance in human capital (Meissner and Vertovec 2015), but sometimes miss historically complex and unique intertwined communities in varying citiscapes.

Demography and geography

The vast majority of India’s 1.4 billion population are Hindus; 13.4 per cent are Muslims, 80 per cent of whom are Sunni Muslims; 2.5 per cent are Christian; and less than 0.0004 per cent are Jews. The majority of the 3,000 Jews remaining in India today live in Maharashtra, namely in Mumbai, the Konkan villages and Pune. There are small remnants of Jewish communities in Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Calcutta; only five Jews remain in “Jew Town” in Mattancherry, Cochin, and a dozen or so more Malabar Jews are scattered around Kerala. Even in their heyday before 1950, Indian Jews from all three Jewish groups – Cochin Jews, Bene Israel and Baghdadis – only numbered 28,000 souls. They neither suffered from anti-Semitism at the hands of their fellow countrymen – Hindu, Christian, Parsee or other – nor experienced ethnic tensions with Indian Moslems. Somehow, they created and maintained unique Indo-Judaic customs, which they enacted in the multi-religious and complex society of India (Weil 2018). The Baghdadi Jews never numbered more than 8,000 souls; today, just 70 remain in all of India.

In recent years, Judaizing groups such as the Bnei Menashe in the states of Mizoram and Manipur, and Bnei Ephraim in Andra Pradesh, have emerged. Several thousand of the Bnei Menashe have managed to come on aliya (literally “go up”, i.e. to immigrate) to Israel after converting to Judaism, while thousands would like to join their family members. Based on a narrative that they are lost Israelites who travelled through China and ended up in the Burmese and Indian north-eastern highlands, members of different tribes, such as the Gangte, Kuki and Mizos, have succeeded in gaining support in some circles in Israel (Weil 2004). At present, only one member of the Andra Pradesh group of Bnei Ephraim is residing in Israel.²

The Baghdadi Jews of India are well-known in India and abroad, despite their small numbers. These Jews were Arabic-speaking and originated not only in the city of Baghdad, but also in other Jewish centres in Iraq such as Basra and Mosul, as well as in Syria, and Aden. At different historical periods, other Jews from Persia (and particularly Meshed), Bukhara and Afghanistan joined them and became part of the community. Before, during and after the Second World War, individual European Jews became incorporated into the “Baghdadi” communities. The super-diversity of this tiny transnational community in terms of internal stratification, global connections and multiple origins coalescing into even smaller communities and playing out with economic complexity, has sometimes been overlooked by scholars. In pre-independence India, the Baghdadis established small Jewish communities in today’s Pakistan (Weil 2010) and Bangladesh (Weil 2012). In post-independence India, they were located in three major Indian cityscapes: Calcutta (today Kolkata), Bombay (today Mumbai) and Poona (today Pune) (Weil 2010). Edifices and monuments in these three cities still capture the Baghdadis’ enormous contribution to India and their impact on the development of the country.

After 1947 and the withdrawal of the British from India, with whom the Baghdadi Jews had associated as non-native Indians, many of the Baghdadis decided to emigrate to English-speaking countries, such as England, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States, and to Israel. Some could not bear the difficult conditions in Israel at the beginning of its formation as a state, established only a year after India in 1948, and re-emigrated to English-speaking countries to reunify with kin and friends. Most Baghdadis intermarried with other Jews of different origins, although Baghdadi congregations with special rites and liturgies lived on.

History³

Maharashtra

Bombay

The first Jew to arrive in India from Baghdad was Joseph Semah in 1730. He landed in the port city of Surat in Gujarat, 160 miles north of Bombay, where he built a synagogue and cemetery.⁴ Semah extended his commercial enterprises to Bombay, where he and some other Baghdadis eventually settled (Roland 1989). Bombay had become the British East India Company’s headquarters in 1674 (Farrington 2002:64) and was just beginning to develop as a serious commercial centre.

By the nineteenth century, Bombay had become a refuge for Arabic-speaking Jews fleeing persecution at the hands of Dawud Pasha, the last Mamluk⁵ governor of Iraq, who reigned from 1816 to 1831. During this period, Iraq was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire.

In Bombay, the advent of David Sassoon and his family in 1832 marked a new era in the economic development of that city. Sassoon, born in Baghdad in 1792, had escaped from Basra in 1829 to Bushire on the Persian Gulf, and was followed by hundreds of Jews from different cities in the Ottoman empire, who were seeking prosperity and security.

David Sassoon’s first residence in Bombay was at 9 Tamarind Street⁶ within the precincts of the city.⁷ He soon moved to the Byculla neighbourhood, residing in the bungalow “Sans Souci”, a former palace named Shin Sangoo (today Massina Hospital). Sassoon managed his international enterprises from Bombay, including trade in cotton, jute and, most significantly, opium. His commercial intuition and prowess, as well as the scope of his business enterprises, are legendary.

Since David Sassoon was an orthodox Jew and did not travel on the Sabbath, he quickly set about to establish his own network of synagogues to be led according to the Iraqi Jewish rites with which he was familiar. At first, he hosted a prayer hall in his home. In 1857, he purchased the land and in 1861 he built the

Figure 1.1 David Sassoon Library and Reading Room founded 1847, Bombay, 2018 (courtesy Shalva Weil).

Magen David (Defender of David) Synagogue in Byculla for members of his community, who streamed in to Bombay as they fled persecution in their homelands. He offered employment to scores of less wealthy Baghdadis, as well as Bene Israel, who had moved from the Konkan villages and settled in Bombay, and they all worked in the mills he had established (Weil 2014a). David Sassoon

was known by Jews and non-Jews alike as a philanthropist. He set up the David Sassoon Benevolent Institution, where, according to Jackson (1989:35), pupils were taught to sing “God Save the Queen” in Hebrew, English and Arabic. In 1857, he built the David Sassoon Mechanics Institute, which became the David Sassoon Library in 1870, and contains a statue of its namesake.

He also established or financed many other important public institutions and edifices, including the Sassoon clocktower in Byculla in 1864, the entrance to Sassoon Docks at Colaba in 1875, the David Sassoon Industrial and Reformatory Institution for Juvenile Offenders, David Sassoon Elderly and Destitute Persons Home or the David Sassoon Infirm Asylum (1863) and the statue of the Prince Consort complete with Hebrew inscription, which used to be in the front garden of the Victoria and Albert Museum (built in 1861; today the Bhau Daji Lad Museum) (Lentin 2009). David Sassoon died in 1864, and his children took over many of his enterprises. In 1884, his grandson Jacob Sassoon built the Keneseth Eliyahoo (Congregation of Elijah) Synagogue in the Fort area, which was renovated in 2019, where many Baghdadis then lived, in memory of one of David Sassoon’s sons and his father, Elias (Eliyahoo) Sassoon.

In the twentieth century, Sir Victor Sassoon (1881–1961) took over much of the wealth of the Sassoon dynasty, known as the “Rothschilds of the East”. Victor was the grandson of Elias Sassoon, one of David Sassoon’s eight sons, who had branched out from the family firm David Sassoon and Sons in 1867 and established E.D. Sassoon & Co. in Bombay and Shanghai. Victor was the son of Edward Elias Sassoon, lived in China until the age of seven, and was later educated in England and read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. During the First World War he served in the RFC (Royal Flying Corps, now the RAF). Victor inherited his father’s fortune, including 14 textile mills employing over 20,000 native workers, but he managed to squander most of it during his lifetime on horse-racing, and high-flying living. Meanwhile, prior and during the Second World War, the Bombay Baghdadi community increased ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Part I: Sociological and historical perspectives on the Baghdadi Jews under the Raj
• Part II: Diversified religious life
• Part III: The Baghdadis of Maharashtra: formal and informal education
• Part IV: The Baghdadis of Bengal: formal and informal education
• Part V: Print and digital dissemination
• Index