Aug 28, 2008

Lifestyle - Living far apart

YAHEH HALLEGUA is the last Jewish woman of child-bearing age in Mattancheri. Her cousins Keith and Len are the last eligible bachelors. But she is not keen on either of them. So within a few decades the extinction of the 400-year-old Jewish community in the port-village in India’s southern state of Kerala is assured.
Mattancheri is Indian Jewry’s most famous settlement. Its pretty streets of pastel-coloured houses, connected by first-floor passages and home to the last 12 sari- and sarong-wearing, white-skinned Indian Jews, are visited by thousands of tourists each year. Its synagogue, built in 1568, with a floor of blue-and-white Chinese tiles, a carpet given by Haile Selassie and the frosty Yaheh selling tickets at the door, stands as an image of religious tolerance. India’s Jews have almost never suffered discrimination, except from European colonisers—and each other.
Despite what some of them claim, Mattancheri’s Jews are not Kerala’s last Jewish community, nor its oldest. In nearby Ernakulam there are about 40 Malabari Jews, of dark, Keralite complexion. Survivors of a community over 1,000 years old, with seven synagogues, now disused, and once extensive landholdings, the Malabaris were the privileged stewards of Kerala’s ancient kings. But they were usurped by the white Jews, who arrived from Europe in the 16th century.
Until the mid-20th century, the white Jews, who prospered as bookbinders and traders, enforced a cruel apartheid. Defying top European rabbis, they barred the Malabaris from their synagogue. The first white Jewess to marry a dark Jew, in 1950, was ostracised. Unsurprisingly, the two communities still dislike each other. Yet the whites now depend upon the Malabaris to make a quorum in their synagogue and supply them with kosher meat.
In caste-attuned India, there was always a Jewish pecking order. At the bottom was India’s biggest community, the Bene Israel. They arrived in western Maharashtra state many centuries ago, but in the 18th century were “rediscovered” and re-educated in the faith by Keralite and Baghdadi Jews (Arabic-speakers who arrived in India around the same time). Under the British, the Bene Israel were granted privileges and, like their Jewish compatriots, prospered. By 1940 there were some 25,000 Bene Israel, 5,000 Baghdadi Jews and perhaps as many Keralite Jews. Most have since migrated to Israel. Indeed, it was migrants from Kerala who first planted roses in the Negev desert and made it bloom. There are now some 5,000 Bene Israel Jews left in India and perhaps a few dozen Baghdadis.
Edna Fernandes’s material is fascinating. Alas, she tends to relate it in cliché-ridden and sometimes annoyingly gushy prose. To say the feuding Keralites resemble “a quarrelling old couple” is criminally unimaginative. And her insinuation that their looming extinction stems from internal rifts, not simply emigration, seems spurious. Yet the story of these Jews is so compelling, and the author’s reporting of it so assiduous, that she deserves leniency.
Indeed, she has unearthed gems. These include the tale of a pair of poor Tamils, who regularly cross India to deliver free vegetables to one of Mattancheri’s aged Jews. They have their eye on her house. In a futile effort to ingratiate themselves to her, one even gets circumcised. They are known in Mattancheri as “Fools Number One and Two”.
And then there is Anil Abraham, a lighthearted young Malabari, who does not want to leave Kerala but fears that he must. He wants “a Jewish wife who will not give me a headache”. Yaheh, it seems, does not fit the bill

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