Bene Israel
Those Jews who call themselves the Bene Israel have an even more obscure
past.^5 Their myth of origin claims their ancestors landed on the Indian coast
in the first century CEas the result of a shipwreck. They claim that their
ancestors maintained Jewish traditions consistent with the Israelite com-
munities prior to the destruction of the first temple. These are said to
include performance of circumcision by “cohens,” the reciting of the “shema
Israel” before or during all rites of passage, the celebration of Yom Kippur
at home in silence, and use of a funeral shroud exactly as described in
the Hebrew Bible. Certain festivals, dating after the destruction of the
first temple (e.g., Hanukkah and Purim), were celebrated, though Rosh
Hashanah, Passover, and Sabbath have also been celebrated.
Whatever their origins, members of the community trickled into Mumbai
in the late 1740s, working largely as oil pressers, who, because they refused
to work on the Sabbath, came to be known as the Sabbath oil pressers “caste.”
Three events brought about a renaissance in the community which there-
tofore had little conscious sense of their religious identity. The first of these
events was the visit of David Ezekiel Rahabifrom Cochin in the eighteenth
century. Rahabi was said to be Arabic and a member of the Maimonides
family. He imparted religious and biblical education to young and old alike,
taught prayers in Hebrew, and trained cantors orally (a method of teaching
common in the Indian tradition). A second event was the establishment
of the first Bene Israel synagogue in 1796. The third event was the work of
John Wilson, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who founded a college and
some twenty-five Mara ̄thı ̄-medium schools and published a Bible translated
into the vernacular. In some of the schools and in the college (eventually
known as Wilson College) Jewish religion and Hebrew were taught. Many
Jews took advantage of these educational opportunities.
The “Bombay Jews” in the modern period have maintained some nine
synagogues, three of these for the exclusive use of Baghdadi Jews (the oldest
of these built in 1851). The size of the community at its largest was some
20,000 in 1951, but since then increasing numbers of them have emigrated
to Israel so that only a handful of families remain in the Mumbai area. An
interesting measure of the community’s adaptations to the Indian landscape
was the extent to which “Hinduization” has occurred in its ritual life. The
tying of the ta ̄li, for example, is used to mark a marriage, though a locket
is tied to the ta ̄liwith the husband’s name inscribed in Hebrew; similarly,
the bride’s hands are adorned with henna as in local tradition. Elders of the
community speak of the “faith of Abraham” as consistent with the monism
of Advaita.
While virtually all Indian Jews will have disappeared from India within
the next generation, their presence on the subcontinent for well over a
Streams from the “West” and their Aftermath 165