First Jews in South India P. M. Jussay wrote that it was believed that the earliest Jews in India were sailors from
King Solomon's time. It has been claimed that following the destruction of the
First Temple in the
Siege of Jerusalem (587 BCE), some Jewish exiles came to India. Only after the
destruction of the Second Temple in 70
CE are records found that attest to numerous Jewish settlers arriving at
Cranganore, an ancient port near Cochin. Cranganore, now
transliterated as
Kodungallur, but also known under other names, is a city of legendary importance to this community. Fernandes writes, it is "a substitute Jerusalem in India". Katz and Goldberg note the "symbolic intertwining" of the two cities. Ophira Gamliel notes however that the first physical evidence of the presence of Jews in South India dates only to the granting of the
Kollam copper plates. The copper plates are a trade deed dated to the year 849 C.E bestowed upon the Nestorian merchant magnate Maruvan Sapir Iso and the
Saint Thomas Christian community by Ayyan Atikal, the ruler of the
Kingdom of Venad. The copper plates include signatures in Kufic, Pahlavi, and Hebrew and serve as evidence of West Asian mercantilism in Kerala. In 1768, the influential banker Tobias Boas (
nl) of The Hague had posed eleven questions to Rabbi Yehezkel Rachbi of Cochin. The first of these questions addressed to the said Rabbi concerned the origins of the Jews of Cochin and the duration of their settlement in India. In Rabbi Yehezkel's response (Merzbacher's Library in Munich, MS. 4238), he wrote: "after the destruction of the Second Temple (may it soon be rebuilt and reestablished in our days!), in the year 3828 of
anno mundi, i. e., 68 CE, about ten thousand men and women had come to the land of Malabar and were pleased to settle in four places; those places being
Cranganore, Dschalor, Madai [and] Plota. Most were in Cranganore, which is also called
Mago dera Patinas; it is also called Sengale."
Saint Thomas, an
Aramaic-speaking Jew from the
Galilee region of Israel and one of the disciples of
Jesus, is believed to have come to Southern India in the 1st century, in search of the Jewish community there. It is possible that the
Jews who became Christians at that time were absorbed by what became the
Nasrani Community in Kerala. A number of scholars have noted that the Cochin Jews maintain striking cultural similarities to the
Knanaya, Jewish-Christian migrants from Persia who settled in
Kodungallur, Kerala in the 4th or 8th century. These symmetries are noted in both the wedding traditions and especially the folk songs of the two communities, some songs maintaining the exact same lyrics with few corruptions and variations. Central to the history of the Cochin Jews was their close relationship with Indian rulers. This was codified on a set of copper plates granting the community special privileges. The date of these plates, known as "Sâsanam", is contentious. The plates are physically inscribed with the date 379 CE, but in 1925, tradition was setting it as 1069 CE. Indian rulers granted the Jewish leader
Joseph Rabban the rank of prince over the Jews of Cochin, giving him the rulership and tax revenue of a pocket
principality in
Anjuvannam near Cranganore, and rights to seventy-two "free houses". The Hindu king gave permission in perpetuity (or, in the more poetic expression of those days, "as long as the world, sun and moon endure" A family connection to Rabban, "the king of Shingly" (another name for Cranganore), was long considered a sign of both purity and prestige within the community. Rabban's descendants led this distinct community until a chieftainship dispute broke out between two brothers, one of them named
Joseph Azar, in the 16th century. The Jewish traveler
Benjamin of Tudela, speaking of
Kollam (Quilon) on the Malabar Coast, writes in his
Itinerary:"[t]hroughout the island, including all the towns thereof, live several thousand
Israelites. The inhabitants are all black, and the Jews also. The latter are good and benevolent. They know the
law of Moses and the
prophets, and to a small extent the
Talmud and
Halacha."These people later became known as the Malabari Jews. They built synagogues in
Kerala beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries. The oldest known gravestone of a Cochin Jew is written in Hebrew and dates to 1269 CE. It is near the Chendamangalam Synagogue, built in 1614, In 1341, a disastrous flood silted up the port of Cranganore, and trade shifted to a smaller port at
Cochin (Kochi). Many of the Jews moved quickly, and within four years, they had built their first synagogue at the new community. The
Portuguese Empire established a trading beachhead in 1500, and until 1663 remained the dominant power. They continued to discriminate against the Jews, although doing business with them. A synagogue was built at Parur in 1615, at a site that according to tradition had a synagogue built in 1165. Almost every member of this community emigrated to Israel in 1954. Thekkambagham Synagogue was built in Ernakulam in 1580, and rebuilt in 1939. It is the synagogue in Ernakulam sometimes used for services if former members of the community visit from Israel. In 1998, five families who were members of this congregation still lived in Kerala or in Madras.
A Jewish traveler's visit to Cochin The following is a description of the Jews of Cochin by 16th-century Jewish traveler
Zechariah Dhahiri (recollections of his travels
circa 1558).
1660 to independence The
Paradesi Jews, also called "White Jews", settled in the Cochin region in the 16th century and later, following the
expulsion from Iberia due to forced conversion and religious persecution in Spain and then Portugal. Some fled north to
Holland but the majority
fled east to the Ottoman Empire. Both "Black Jews" and the "White Jews" (the Spanish Jews) of Malabar claimed that they are the true inheritors of the old Jewish culture. Some went beyond that territory, including a few families who followed the Arab
spice routes to southern India. Speaking
Ladino language and having
Sephardic customs, they found the Malabari Jewish community as established in Cochin to be quite different. According to the historian Mandelbaum, there were resulting tensions between the two ethnic communities. The European Jews had some trade links to Europe and useful languages to conduct international trade The Paradesi Jews built their own house of worship, the
Paradesi Synagogue. The latter group was very small by comparison to the Malabaris. Both groups practiced
endogamous marriage, maintaining their distinctions. Both communities claimed special privileges and the greater status over each other. In the early 20th century,
Abraham Barak Salem (1882–1967), a young lawyer who became known as a "Jewish Gandhi", worked to end the discrimination against
meshuchrarim Jews. Inspired by Indian nationalism and Zionism, he also tried to reconcile the divisions among the Cochin Jews. He became both an
Indian nationalist and Zionist. His family were descended from
meshuchrarim. The Hebrew word denoted a
manumitted slave, and was at times used in a derogatory way. Salem fought against the discrimination by boycotting the Paradesi Synagogue for a time. He also used
satyagraha to combat the social discrimination. According to Mandelbaum, by the mid-1930s many of the old taboos had fallen with a changing society. ==Relations between the Cochin Jews and other Jews==