Bene Israel

Bene Israel, the largest and oldest of several groups of Jews of India. Believed by tradition to have shipwrecked on the Konkan coast of western India more than 2,100 years ago, they were absorbed into Indian society, maintaining many Jewish observances while operating within the caste system. Of some 67,000 Bene Israel at the turn of the 21st century, less than 5,000 remain in India, the great majority having immigrated to Israel.

Their presence in India is and may remain a mystery, and Bene Israel tradition itself varies. Some claim descent from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who disappeared from history after the northern Kingdom of Israel was overrun by the Assyrians in 721 bc. Others believe that their ancestors fled by sea the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, a theory that explains the absence of a Hanukkah tradition in Bene Israel practice. Whatever the case, the survivors—by tradition seven men and seven women—settled in Konkan villages, adopted Hindu names (with surnames usually ending in -kar), and took up the profession of oil production. They were known in Marathi as shaniwar teli (“Saturday oil pressers”), because they abstained from work on the Jewish Sabbath. They also practiced circumcision, recited the Shema on ceremonial occasions, celebrated several major festivals, and observed Jewish dietary laws.

When the existence of a Jewish community in India first attracted public attention—from David Rahabi, who according to Bene Israel tradition may have arrived as early as ad 1000, but who may have been David Ezekiel Rahabi (1694–1772), of Cochin on the Malabar Coast, south of Konkan—the group still followed these practices. Rahabi was instrumental in revivifying Judaism among the Bene Israel. The Cochin Jews acted as cantors, ritual slaughterers, and teachers for the Bene Israel. Many Bene Israel migrated toward Bombay (now Mumbai) during this period. The first of numerous Bene Israel synagogues, all following the Sefardic (Spanish) liturgy, was built in Bombay in 1796.

In the early 19th century, Christian missionaries introduced Marathi-language versions of the Hebrew Bible (their Old Testament) to the inhabitants of the Konkan coast and set up English-language schools. This revelation, together with the model of normative Judaism provided by contact in the last half of the 19th century with Arabic-speaking Jews of Baghdad (late 18th-century migrants to India), finally broke their isolation from the rest of the Jewish world. When, in 1948, the state of Israel was established, many Bene Israel began to emigrate.

Like other far-flung Jewish groups, the Bene Israel over the centuries had become physically indistinguishable from the peoples they lived among, and their practices—much influenced by Hindu beliefs and practice—somewhat at odds with those of mainstream Jews. As a result, their immigration to Israel was marked by conflict for a few decades; some rabbis objected to their marriage with other Jews on the grounds that the Bene Israel could not have properly observed rabbinic laws governing marriage and divorce. In 1964, however, the chief rabbinate declared the Bene Israel “full Jews in every respect” but reserved to itself the right to decide the legitimacy of individual marriages.