The exodus of Jews has left India poorer

India lost a valuable element of cosmopolitanism with the exodus of its several Jewish communities. Only a culturally vibrant and economically dynamic nation attracts settlers from abroad. India was both. There’s a third condition: the host nation must also be socially and politically tolerant. That, too, India was before bigots
began splitting ethnic and religious hairs.

Jews, Armenians, Parsis, Chinese and others would not otherwise have made a home among us. The Cochin Jews came 2,500 years ago. Mumbai’s Beni Israel arrived four centuries later. The Baghdadi Jewish community is about 300 years old. Of course, we can’t blame only ourselves for their disappearance. Reading the memoirs of 91-year-old Sally Solomon, descendant of Shalom Aaron Cohen of Aleppo who founded Calcutta’s Jewish community in 1797, brought home to me Benjamin Disraeli’s comment that race is the ultimate reality. A Jew baptised a Christian because his father knew it would improve his prospects in England would know.
Sally movingly described her Calcutta childhood in Hooghly Tales: Stories of Growing Up in Calcutta Under the Raj. She and her husband moved to Chennai in 1948 and migrated to London in 1972. That’s where I got to know her. Despite being completely at home in India, Sally would probably agree with Disraeli.
“Are we English?” she asks in her second book, Where Rivers Meet: Memories of Madras 1948-1972. “Are we Indian? I did not feel either of these; just thought of myself as Jewish — not so much in a religious sense as belonging to a group identified by its religion. I dressed like the English, spoke their language, embraced some of their ways of life; but neither they nor I would consider I belonged. The same applied to being Indian, but in different areas. I did not adopt their dress, speak their language even reasonably well, yet I belonged more, felt India was my native place. I still feel this today.”
I wonder if Nissim Ezekiel, the poet who sent me books to keep my mind occupied when I was recuperating from illness in the early 1960s, also felt estranged from his surroundings. Or Jake Jacob (Lt. Gen. J.F.R. Jacob, hero of the Bangladesh War) with whom I sailed back from Liverpool even earlier when he was a lieutenant-colonel. Obviously, my classmate at school, Justin Aaron, must have felt different since he migrated with his family.
I wonder whether our teasing played any part in the decision. We used to throw rulers at him ordering him to turn them into snakes like his Biblical namesake. “Justin Aaron, king of the Jews, sold his wife for a pair of shoes” we also chanted. The second verse, which I have forgotten, described Justin demanding his wife back when the shoes wore out.
Our Anglo-Indian school unconsciously emulated British attitudes. But Sally recalls a far worse case of taunting. After seeing a film of the Easter story and Crucifixion, a Muslim student at a Kodaikanal convent pointed at her daughter and said, “Jew, look what you have done!” Nevertheless, Indians never practised the institutional racism that excluded local Jews from the Madras and Adyar Clubs.
Sally couldn’t relate to European Jewish refugees, probably because Indian Jews “had not gone through the horrors of the Holocaust”. The few Israelis in India emerge as strident, officious and sanctimonious. She enjoyed her holiday in Israel but when it came to living there, she “realised that being a Jew and being Israeli were two different things”.
Back to the recurring question, “Then what was I? I was just a Jew, living in India. Even as an Indian national, I never really felt Indian or anything else. India was my home, and got my total loyalty. I do not think I could have felt the same way about Israel; committing myself wholly, even to the extent of expecting my children to join the Army. I would never dream of any such thing.”
Sally observes astutely of Israel’s 75,000 Indian Jews, “Sometimes, a religious background did help to decide in favour of emigration; more often, the cutting edge was the standard of living.” I have no doubt of the economic draw that motivated the Cochin Black Jews I met in Israel speaking only Malayali and Hebrew. Betterment must also be the prime impulse for Mizos and Manipuris who have suddenly discovered they are the lost tribe of Manassey. Such humble Asian immigrants serve the economic needs of Israel’s dominant European Jews.
Kolkata’s three synagogues recall the time when it was a thriving centre of Baghdadi Jews. Nahoum’s in New Market is probably the only place in India that still makes and sells Fetta cheese. Sir David Ezra had a private menagerie and my grandmother used to attend Lady Ezra’s garden parties. The rich Gubbays donated the zoo’s monkey house, Gubbay House, where my father regularly threatened to banish me. The Gariahat Excise Conspiracy Case of 1939 exposed the big-time manufacture of spurious drinks. The ghosts of Jewish opulence felled by taxation demands must haunt the income-tax offices at Bamboo Villa.
The Sassoons moved from Mumbai to Kolkata to Hong Kong and Shanghai, made a fortune in opium, and became English gentry. My old friend and colleague, Ellis Abraham, was doubly descended from the Sassoons. I attended his funeral in the Narkeldanga burial ground where Shalom Aaron Cohen, who died in 1836, is also buried. Ellis’s adopted Bengali son Jiban helped to carry the long-handled box (aron) that is a Jewish coffin, with a handkerchief on his head. Otherwise, the congregation consisted of only a few old men. Calcutta will not need another Jewish cemetery.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author