Growing up Jewish in India | Sunday Observer

Growing up Jewish in India

29 August, 2021

Jews are the most important race in European history. Though they were originated in ancient Israel (from Hebrew people), later they couldn't claim a country of their own until the present Israel was formed in 1945 by United Nations Organization. Because of this, until then, Jews were dispersed all over the world and thus arrived in India as well, creating a larger Jewish community there similar to a Jewish diaspora in Israel and the United States. Growing Up Jewish in India is a newly released book which offers an historical account of the primary Jewish communities of India, their synagogues, and unique Indian Jewish customs.

With text and over 150 images, the book explores how Indian Jews retained their unique characteristics as Jews, became well integrated into the larger society of India as Indians, and offers a synthesis of cultural qualities wherever they reside. And also, it discusses the uniquely transcultural art of Siona Benjamin, who grew up in the Bene Israel community of Mumbai, then moved to the US, producing work that reflects a broad range of Indian, Jewish, and other influences. The book is, in fact, a memoir on growing up Jewish in India with essays on Siona’s Fulbright work in India and Israel, plus her other series of works. It offers a portrait of a unique slice of the Indian world for readers interested in history, art, religion, and culture, worldwide.

About the author

The author of the book Dr. Ori Z. Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across a range of disciplines. He is the former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, who has authored or edited 24 books and scores of articles and exhibition catalog essays. As he himself is a Jew, he has a wide knowledge of the Jews in India. Among the books he authored are Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust; Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness; Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish Art and Architecture; Magic and Religion in the Greco-Roman World: The Beginnings of Judaism and Christianity. His most recent book is Eros and Eris: Love and Strife in and Beyond the Greco-Roman World.

Jews in India

The book begins with Jew's presence in India. The following is an edited excerpt of the book:

"Indian Jews have historically lived across diverse parts of the Indian subcontinent over the centuries without experiencing the sort of anti-Semitism that has been so common in many other parts of the world, particularly Christian Europe, which exported its anti-Jewish sensibilities into the Muslim world eventually, particularly in the context of European colonialism and post-colonialism in the Middle East, culminating with World War I and its aftermath. Indeed, the most obvious exception to the rule of Jewish experience in India arrived with the control of Goa in the early 16th century by the Portuguese, who brought with them not only anti-Jewish feelings but the specifics associated with the development of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition that would affect New Christians suspected of secretly continuing to practice Judaism-and continue until the formal abolition of the Inquisition authority in 1812."

Non-violence Hindu Culture

The author praises non-violence Hindu culture in India which allowed Jews to live in harmony with other communities, complete contrast to the Europe. Below is an edited excerpt:

"The general lack of hostility and persecution may be understood in part as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a function of the nature of Hinduism, by far the dominant religion across India, and its embrace of diverse perspectives regarding how, specifically, one might understand and address divinity. Within the singularity of Brahman-Being-what we term ‘Hinduism’ recognises a nearly infinite possibility for divine manifestations: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, Krishna (and many other more minor figures) are both separate from each other and all understood to be part of each other and subsumed into a singularity that is Brahman."

Assimilation into Hindus

Any ethnic group who lives with other larger ethnic group is, invariably, assimilated into the larger ethnic community. But in the case of Indian Jews, they retained their Jewishness while integrating into the dominant Hindu culture. The book describes this fact too (an edited excerpt):

"Indian Jews are obviously, by definition, both Indian and Jewish. As such, in the broadest of senses, they are part of two interwoven historical and geographical continua, each with its own unique features. India is not only a vast country with dynamic contrasts between its towering mountains and its coastal lowlands and all that lies between. It is historically complex in terms of ethnicity, religion, culture and language."

Languages in India

Not only that, the volume goes into describe the history of Indian languages as well:

"To begin with, its native Dravidian population was largely pushed to its southern climes with the arrival and expansion of the Indo-Europeans around 4,500 years ago. Among other things, this means not only that Indians fall into two very broadly different ethnic groups, but that, whereas the country is overrun by scores of different languages - 23 ‘official’ languages, today, just for starters - these languages also fall into at least two very different families or categories. Thus languages like Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi are ultimately related Indo-Aryan members of the greater Indo-European family, and are largely derived from Vedic and Sanskrit (earlier and somewhat later versions of a branch of the far-flung Indo-European language family that encompasses languages from extinct Tocharian in what is now China, eastward, to Portuguese, English, and Icelandic, at the western edges of the Eurasian continent).

"Conversely, languages like Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam with an ancestry in Tamil, are part of the more geographically concentrated family of Dravidian languages. This is apart from smaller groups of Afro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages, and some in the Himalayas that are still not classified. There are, overall, perhaps 415 different languages spoken in India."

Hinduism

No doubt, India is as diverse religiously as it is linguistically. It is, as most people are aware, the country in which Hinduism was born, in fact the word ‘Hindu’ refers to the place, India, not to the form of faith. According to the author, "Hinduism’ is also a misnomer in being used as if there is a monolithic form of faith that goes by that name, just as it is often misunderstood to be polytheistic: there are, after all, any number of gods and goddesses, it would seem, that occupy its pantheon. In truth, (to repeat), an Indian who is part of this spiritual tradition understands all of these ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ to be particularized manifestations of a single god of Being."

He said, "Thus ‘Hinduism’ may be understood by Westerners as a more complex version, in a sense, of Christianity in its understanding of God as triune, for instead of a threefold, Father/Son/Holy Spirit Godhead, ‘Hinduism’ offers a poly-une Brahman (Being) expressed as Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Devi, and others. So one is typically a Saivite, say, or a Vaishnavite, believing that Siva or Vishnu represents the consummate expression of God, but embracing the legitimacy of other expressions, as well. Moreover, among the 10 avatars assumed by Vishnu over history, one of them is as a dark-skinned (blue or black) anthropomorph, Krishna, and over time, a growing community of Krishna’s followers or Krishnaites views him as the consummate manifestation of God-not as an avatar of Vishnu: on the contrary, Vishnu is viewed as a manifestation of Krishna."

In this way, the book discloses not just Jew's life in India, but compares it to predominant Hindu culture as well. 

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