Volume 37, Number 19 · December 6, 1990
Jews, Indians, and Imperialists
By Anita Desai
India's Bene Israel: A Comprehensive Inquiry and Sourcebook
by Shirley Berry Isenberg
Judah L. Magnes Museum/ Popular Prakashan,, 443 pp., $39.80
Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era
by Joan G. Roland
Brandeis University Press/ University Press of New England, 355 pp., $40.00
In 1919, at a public meeting held to consider the question of Zionism, an Indian Jew, David Erulkar, argued that 'to form a Jewish nation from peoples who were widely divergent in their civilizations, ways of thought, and economic conditions…would be to set back the world's progress by several centuries.' The diversity he felt was threatened is the subject of two books—one anthropological, the other historical—about the Jewish communities of India. Those who are not aware of any Jewish presence amid the warring Hindus and Muslims will be astounded to discover that there were not only quite different groups of Jews in India for hundreds of years but that the differences among them were so great that it frequently required official intervention to bring about a reconciliation among them. It is salutary to be reminded that religion was once so much at odds with history that the two occupied separate spheres—since the common experience of the twentieth century is precisely the opposite, with the remarkable harnessing of religion to history under the banner of nationalism, a term that was once meaningless.
Review, 5288 words
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