Most people do not associate India with Judaism. The Indian subcontinent, however, has hosted various Jewish communities for centuries, each with its unique historical and cultural traditions. Some South Asian Jews trace their presence in the region back almost two thousand years while others immigrated less than two hundred years ago. On Wednesday, Nov. 18 at the Zachs Hillel House, a group of students and faculty got the opportunity to learn more about the tiny Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta (now Kolkata) in eastern India through a presentation given by award-winning journalist Rahel Musleah entitled “Jewish Rhythms of India: Spirit, Song and Story.” Born in Calcutta in a Baghdadi Jewish family that had lived there for seven generations, Musleah, through her unique presentation, with personal narrative interspersed with music and a slideshow of photographs, gave the audience a glimpse into Jewish life in India.
Today, the Jewish communities of India are a shadow of their former selves. At the height of their presence in the 1940s and 1950s, there were as many as 50,000 Jews in India. Since then, the population has dwindled to fewer than 5,000, which is mostly concentrated in the western metropolis of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). This is a consequence of large scale immigration since the end of British colonial rule to Israel (which today has a community of Indian Jewish ancestry of 70,000), as well as to member nations of the Commonwealth, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and, to a lesser extent, the United States.
Musleah and her family emigrated from India in 1964, when she was yet a child. Having lived most of her life in the United States has not diminished the sense of connection that she feels with India. Her efforts to preserve the culture of the Baghdadi Jews have been greatly helped by her father’s own efforts, who, as Calcutta’s only ordained rabbi, documented every gravestone in Calcutta’s Jewish cemetery. It is also because of him that Musleah has been able to trace her own family history in Calcutta to the early nineteenth century, and further back, to seventeenth century Baghdad in present day Iraq. The songs and prayers of Baghdadi Jewish life have been a source of emotion, comfort and joy for Musleah through each of her visits to India, which she shared with the audience as part of her presentation. Singing in Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic and Hindi, Musleah, who has also recorded Baghdadi Jewish songs in her distinctive voice and sold them in CDs, encouraged members of the audience to join her in the chorus.
Baghdadi Jews had been settling in India since the first half of the eighteenth century, with the first of them having immigrated to the city of Surat in western India in 1730. The first Baghdadi Jew to settle in Calcutta was Shalom Aharon Obadiah Cohen, who immigrated in 1798. Following his success there, others decided to join him. More left Baghdad, and other parts of the Middle East including present day Syria, in the 1820s and 1830s because of persecution, but also to pursue economic opportunity, and settled predominantly in Bombay and Calcutta. Many achieved great success in trade and commerce, while others saw success in other fields. There were Jewish mayors as well as film actors in the early years of Indian cinema in the twentieth century. They faced few, if any barriers. As Musleah noted, “India has never seen indigenous anti-Semitism, and Jews lived in harmony with their Hindu and Muslim neighbors.” The early immigrants to India spoke Judaeo-Arabic, but by the twentieth century, most spoke English as well as Hindi and Hindustani, and sometimes Bengali. Although a dying language today, Judaeo-Arabic, a mix of Arabic with Hebrew, was an integral part of Baghdadi Jewish religious and cultural life.
Baghdadi Jewish culture is a mix of a range of Middle Eastern, South Asian and Western influences. Growing up in what might well have been the only Indian Jewish family in Philadelphia’s large Jewish community, Musleah felt a cultural gap with her mostly Ashkenazi friends, who had never heard of Jews from India. Her father was appointed a rabbi in a mostly Spanish and Portuguese congregation. It was only in her adulthood, in 1997, that Musleah was given the opportunity as a journalist of Indian Jewish heritage to visit India with the support of the Indian government. During this trip, which she made with her parents, she was able to visit her former family home, the synagogue her family attended and other sites linked with Jewish life in Calcutta and meet her only relative who remained there. She got the opportunity to sleep in the bed where her father had been born, something that filled her with deep emotion, and identify other places in the house and the synagogue from family photographs. As a part of her presentation, Musleah shared photographs she had taken of the house, the streets and the synagogue, comparing these with photographs taken decades ago from her family collections.
Mumbai, Cochin in southern India and other places have resident Jewish communities with histories and cultures distinct from the Baghdadi Jewish experience. During this first trip, Musleah got an opportunity to visit these locations. She undertook a subsequent trip to India in 2006, and since last year, she has led regular tours of Jewish locales and other attractions in India, with interested tourists from various countries, and of all ages, which she looks forward to continuing in the coming years.
Since the founding of the religion, there has been a Jewish presence in practically every part of the world in every historical period. With its exceptional combination of storytelling and music, Rahel Musleah’s presentation about a strand of Jewish life in India gave members of the campus community unique exposure to the diversity within Jewish traditions, something that is easily ignored in contemporary discourse.
