THE DISPERSED ISRAELITES THE DISPERSED ISRAELITES Indian-2, Burma -8, Kashmir-14, Afghanistan/Pakistan-16, Cambodia/ Laos/ Philippines/ Taiwan-2, Indonesia, Uzbekistan/ Azerbaijan-25 Afghanistan/ Iran/ Yemen-26, China-27, Japan-30 Latin America-66, Cuba-67, Ecuador-68, Africa-70 THE DISPERSED ISRAELITES Asia The Jews of Africa are not the only Jews who live in remote or distant areas, far away from the mainstream of contemporary Judaism. Similarly non-traditional Jewish communities exist all over the world, from the jungles of the Amazon to the distant mountains of India. The Jewish people can trace their history back several thousand years to the Fertile Crescent, an area bordered by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the Central Asian region once known as Mesopotamia. Since their inception as a people, many Jews have traveled eastward from the Fertile Crescent to trade silk and spices with other Central and Eastern Asian merchants. When the Assyrians conquered Palestine in 721 B.C. and the ten northern tribes of Israel fled to points unknown, did some follow those trade routes through Persia and Afghanistan to India, China, perhaps even as far as Japan? Some researchers believe that Jewish practices may more likely have spread eastward through gradual contact with Hebrew traders, but the fact remains that there are practicing Jewish communities sprinkled about Asia. In fact, there are well-documented cases of Jews fleeing eastward to avoid religious persecution by Romans and Muslims, and as recently as World War II, tens of thousands of Jews fled to distant Asian cities like Shanghai to avoid Nazi persecution, joining communities of already-practicing Jews in Central Asia, India and China. Some of the more interesting communities that the authors could feature in The Jews of Asia may include: India: -- the Shinlung ("cave dwellers") live in the northeastern India near the border of Myanmar. According to tribal lore, this Jewish community descends from the wandering tribe of Menashe, cast out of Israel almost 2,700 years ago. After traveling through Persia to Afghanistan and finally to China, this tribe claims that they fled religious persecution a final time by moving into caves in the mountains of northeastern India. Over the centuries they emerged from the caves and began to live in mountain towns, finally falling prey to Christian missionaries in the late 19th century. In the last twenty-five years, several thousand Shinlung rediscovered their ancestors’ religion and have since become observant Jews. Three hundred members of the community have emigrated to Israel, though five thousand remain in India. The Jews of Indian: India has a legacy of three distinct Jewish groups: the Bene Israel, the Cochin Jews and the White Jews from Europe. Each group practiced important elements of Judaism and had active synagogues. The Sephardic rites predominate among Indian Jews. The Bene Israel ("Sons of Israel") lived primarily in Bombay, Calcutta, Old Delhi and Ahmadabad. The native language of the Bene Israel was Marathi, while the Cochin Jews of southern India spoke Malayalam. The Bene Israel claim to be descended from Jews who escaped persecution in Galilee in the 2nd century B.C.E. The Bene Israel resemble the non-Jewish Maratha people in appearance and customs, which indicates intermarriage between Jews and Indians. The Bene Israel, however, maintained the practices of Jewish dietary laws, circumcision and observation of Sabbath as a day of rest. The Bene Israel say their ancestors were oil pressers in the Galil and they are descended from survivors of a shipwreck. In the 18th Century they were "discovered" by traders from Baghdad. At that time the Bene Israel were practicing just a few outward forms of Judaism (which is how they were recognized) but had no scholars of their own. Teachers from Baghdad and Cochin taught them mainstream Judaism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jewish merchants from Europe traveled to India in the medieval period for purposes of trade, but it is not clear whether they formed permanent settlements in south Asia. Our first reliable evidence of Jews living in India comes from the early 11th century. It is certain that the first Jewish settlements were centered along the western coast. Abraham ibn Daud's 12th century reference to Jews of India is unfortunately vague and we do not have further references to Indian Jews until several centuries later. The first Jews in Cochin (southern India) were the so-called "Black Jews," who spoke the Malayalam tongue. Israelite Network P.O. Box 1747 NYC 10101, Tel: 917-892-0361, http://israelite.net2 THE DISPERSED ISRAELITES The "White Jews" settled later, coming to India from western European nations such as Holland and Spain. A notable settlement of Spanish and Portuguese Jews starting in the 15th century was Goa, but this settlement eventually disappeared. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Cochin had an influx of Jewish settlers from the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. The Jews of Cochin say that they came to Cranganore (south-west coast of India) after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. They had, in effect, their own principality for many centuries until a chieftainship dispute broke out between two brothers in the 15th century. The dispute led neighboring princes to dispossess them. In 1524, the Moors, backed by the ruler of Calicut (today called Kozhikode) attacked the Jews of Cranganore on the pretext that they were "tampering" with the pepper trade. Most Jews fled to Cochin and went under the protection of the Hindu Raja there. He granted them a site for their own town that later acquired the name "Jew Town" (by which it is still known). Unfortunately for the Jews of Cochin, the Portuguese occupied Cochin in this same period and indulged in persecution of the Jews until the Dutch displaced them in 1660. The Dutch Protestants were tolerant and the Jews prospered. In 1795 Cochin passed into the British sphere of influence. In the 19th century, Cochin Jews lived in the towns of Cochin, Ernakulam and Parur. Today most of Cochin's Jews have emigrated (principally to Israel). Sixteenth and 17th century migrations created important settlements of Jews from Persia, Afghanistan and Characin (Central Asia) in northern India and Kashmir. By the late 18th century, Bombay became the largest Jewish community in India. Bene Israel Jews lived in Bombay, as did Iraqi and Persian Jews. Near the end of the 18th century, a third group of Indian Jews appears. They are the middle-eastern Jews who came to India through trade. They established a trading network stretching from Aleppo to Baghdad to Basra to Surat/Bombay to Calcutta to Rangoon to Singapore to Hong Kong and eventually as far as Kobe, Japan. There were strong family bonds amongst the traders in all these places. Typical is the founder of the Calcutta community, Shalom Aharon Ovadiah HaCohen. He was born in Aleppo in 1762 and left in 1789. He arrived in Surat in 1792 and established himself there. He traded as far as Zanzibar. In 1798 he moved to Calcutta. In 1805 he was joined by his nephew, Moses Simon Duek HaCohen, who married his eldest daughter Lunah. Soon the community was swelled by other traders and Baghdadis outnumbered those from Aleppo. Under British rule, the Jews of India achieved their maximum population and wealth, and the Calcutta community continued to grow and prosper and trade amongst all the cities of the Far East and to the rest of the world. The Indians were very tolerant and the Jews of Calcutta felt completely at home. Their numbers reached a peak of about 5,000 during World War II when they were swelled by refugees fleeing the Japanese advance into Burma. The first generations of Calcutta Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic at home, but by the 1890s English was the language of choice. After WWII, the rise of Indian nationalism made Jews feel less comfortable because they were identified with the English by the Indians. India's Jewish population declined dramatically starting in the 1940s with heavy immigration to Israel, England and the United States. This is were most Indian Jews live today. The Telugu: a very poor community of Jewish "untouchables" who live in the eastern Indian region of Andhra Pradesh. They believe that their ancestors are Jews that migrated from northern India, Afghanistan or the North-East Frontier region (Manipur, Mizoram) during the 9th or 10th centuries and settled around the area of Nandial. Most of the current Telugu Jews live in the small town Kottareddipalem, though some scattered families live in Ongole in the Prakasham District. Cochin: The Jews of Cochin -- a small city in Southwestern India -- claim that they first arrived in India after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Great Temple in the year 70. Their sprawling Jewish community consolidated the town of Cranganore in about 1000 when the local Hindu leader granted control of the region to a Jew named Joseph Rabban. When the Moors raided Cranganore in 1524 the Jews fled to Cochin under the protection of a Hindu Raja who granted them their own area of the city, which later came to be called "Jew Town." Though most Cochin Jews have emigrated to Israel or the West, some still inhabit Jew Town and maintain Jewish practices there. THE DISPERSED ISRAELITES Bnei Menashe In North East India, in the land mass that lies between Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Bangladesh, there lives a small group of people who have been practicing Judaism for more than 25 years. They have not taken on a "new" religion. These people, in fact, have returned to the religion of their ancestors.