Yulia Egorova - Jews and India: Perceptions and Image

This book explores the image of Jews in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looking at both the Indian attitudes towards the Jewish communities of the subcontinent and at the way Jews and Judaism in general have been represented in Indian discourse.

Despite the fact that the Indian Jewish population constitutes one of the countrys tiniest minorities, the relations of the local Jews with other communities form an integral part in the history of Indian multiculturalism. This has become increasingly apparent over the last two centuries as Judaism and its image have been incorporated into the discussions of some of the most prominent figures of different religious and nationalist movements, leaders of independent India, and the Indian mass media. Furthermore, recent decades witnessed mass adoption of Israelite identity by Indians from two different regions and religious groups.

This is a topic that has hitherto received little attention and Jews and India seeks to rectify this situation by examining these developments and providing a fascinating insight into these issues. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Jewish and Indian cultural studies.

Yulia Egorova received her doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. She is a Research Fellow at Cardiff University and her research interests focus on conceptual implications of science including the impact of genetic anthropological studies conducted in India and among different Jewish communities of the world.

Series Editor: Oliver Leaman, University of Kentucky

Studies, which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology, religion, as they relate to Jewish affairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterised Jewish culture both in the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals.

MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY
An Introduction
Dan Cohn-Sherbok

FACING THE OTHER
The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas
Edited by Sen Hand

MOSES MAIMONIDES
Oliver Leaman

A USERS GUIDE TO FRANZ ROSENZWEIGS STAR OF REDEMPTION
Norbert M. Samuelson

ON LIBERTY
Jewish Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by Daniel H. Frank

REFERRING TO GOD
Jewish and Christian Philosophical and Theological Perspectives
Edited by Paul Helm

JUDAISM, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE
Selected Studies by E. I. J. Rosenthal
Erwin Rosenthal

PHILOSOPHY OF THE TALMUD
Hyam Maccoby

FROM SYNAGOGUE TO CHURCH: THE TRADITIONAL DESIGN
Its Beginning, its Definition, its End
John Wilkinson

HIDDEN PHILOSOPHY OF HANNAH ARENDT
Margaret Betz Hull

DECONSTRUCTING THE BIBLE
Abraham ibn Ezras Introduction to the Torah
Irene Lancaster

IMAGE OF THE BLACK IN JEWISH CULTURE
A History of the Other
Abraham Melamed

FROM FALASHAS TO ETHIOPIAN JEWS
Daniel Summerfield

PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF CRISIS
Don Isaac Abravanel: Defender of the Faith
Seymour Feldman

JEWS, MUSLIMS AND MASS MEDIA
Mediating the Other
Edited by Tudor Parfitt with Yulia Egorova

JEWS OF ETHIOPIA
The Birth of an Elite
Edited by Emanuela Trevisan Semi and Tudor Parfitt

ART IN ZION
The Genesis of National Art in Jewish Palestine
Dalia Manor

HEBREW LANGUAGE AND JEWISH THOUGHT
David Patterson

CONTEMPORARY JEWISH PHILOSOPHY
An Introduction
Irene Kajon

ANTISEMITISM AND MODERNITY
Innovation and Continuity
Hyam Maccoby

JEWS AND INDIA
Perceptions and Image
Yulia Egorova

First published 2006
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

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2006 Yulia Egorova

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ISBN 0-203-96123-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-40040-6 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-40040-4 (hbk)

I owe a debt of gratitude to my supervisor Christopher Shackle for his indispensable support and constant encouragement. I also wish to thank a number of academics who gave their valuable comments on my work. I have received a lot of help from Alexander Knapp, the late Julia Leslie, Tudor Parfitt, Avril Powell and Simon Weightman at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, and Alexandra Safronova and the late Boris Ivanov at the Moscow State University, and Chimen Abramsky. I have also been aided and encouraged by Shalva Weil of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Nathan Katz of the Florida International University, who were among the pioneers of Indo-Judaica and whose interest in my particular topic I appreciate a lot.

I am indebted to my friends and colleagues who helped me in collecting my data. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of the help which I received from Jack Lunzer, who kindly allowed me to use his unique collection of Indian Jewish publications housed at the Valmadonna Trust Library. I would also like to thank sincerely the librarian of the collection, Pauline Malkiel. I owe a debt of gratitude to Alexander Kadakin and Alexander Khozin, who helped me a lot during my stay in India. Needless to say, my project would have never been completed but for the assistance of my friends from Indian Jewish communities.

Financial support for my research has been provided by the Ian Karten Studentship, Overseas Research Students Award and Research Students Fellowship at SOAS. My travelling expenses were covered by SOAS Additional Fieldwork Award and by the University of London Central Research Fund.

I am indebted to Joe Whiting and Oliver Leaman for inviting me to contribute this book to the series and for their helpful comments. I am extremely grateful to my parents and all my friends who believed in me and whose inspiring encouragement helped me to complete this project. Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Brian Black, whose love and support have very much enriched my work.

This book is devoted to the Indian discourse about the Jews, who constitute one of the countrys tiniest minorities, and about Judaism, a religion which most would not immediately associate with the subcontinent. What was specific about the otherness of the Jews with respect to India? In considering this question it may be helpful to turn to the typology of the other offered by Todorov (1992) in his study of the conquest of America. He divided the category of the other into three broad groups: the other in oneself, the other who is interior to society (like women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the normal) or exterior to it. This latter type of the other, whom Todorov also defines as remote, represents another society which will be near or far away, depending on the case: beings which everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand (Todorov 1992: 3). I would suggest that in India, Jews could be described as both an interior other, the other which was part and parcel of Indian society, and an exterior or remote other, which belonged to a different environment. Jews are present on the subcontinent and their tiny community forms a part of the Indian population, although the paucity of the Jews in India means that only a limited number of Indians have ever had a chance to get acquainted with them in India itself. However, Indias encounter with the West introduced its population to more sources of knowledge about the Jews and Judaism. Vis--vis the Indians, Jews could be even described as doubly remote, as they were often known to Indians via a secondary source (e.g., the Bible brought by Christian missionaries, European fiction, etc.) and not as a result of a direct contact.