'In India I was a Jew, in Israel I am an Indian.' These words of a Cochin Jew, now an Israeli citizen, sum up the collective experience of a miniscule minority that had lived for centuries in India before its departure to the 'promised land' in far-off Palestine. The Cochin Jews had been an indelible part of the Subcontinent, though no one knows exactly when or how the community came to inhabit the Malabar coast. According to legend, the Cochin Jews came to the Subcontinent from Israel during the reign of King Solomon, during the 10th century BC. It is also possible that this community was made up of ethnic Southasians who adopted Judaism – though in order to adhere to the popular narrative, this review will stick to the premise that the Jews of Cochin migrated to the region.
A very religious community whose existence revolved around the synagogue, the Jews of Cochin did slowly incorporate many local Hindu Malayali customs. Still, it generally kept a low profile. Testimony to the fact that these people led peaceful, if uneventful, lives is that the state of Israel has officially acknowledged India to be one of the few countries without any record of anti-Semitism, though Jews have lived within the country's modern borders for almost two millennia.
Nonetheless, when the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, urged Jews around the world to migrate to their promised land after the country's establishment in 1948, the Jews of Cochin were some of the first to respond. Some even came back later to exhume the mortal remains of their relatives and transport them for burial in Israel. What motivated this mass departure, and how did they fare in their new homeland? These are the central questions tackled in The Jews of Cochin in Israel, which began as a doctoral thesis but has become one of the few detailed studies on the issue.
The first Jews and Zionists to arrive in Palestine from the diaspora were those from Europe, known as the Ashkenazim. Ginu Zacharia Oommen, now a researcher at the Indian Council of World Affairs in Delhi, traces how the Ashkenazim came to dominate the political, economic and socio-cultural scene in Israel, which meant that European culture and values were imposed on Israeli society – a primary example being the imposition of socialism. The Law of Return – the 1950 legislation that allowed any person of Jewish origin Israeli citizenship – motivated thousands of Jews settled in Arab and other Asian countries to migrate to Israel, both for greener pastures and also for reasons of security. Known as the Mizrahi, Oommen writes, these Jews 'were not Israel's first choice but there was no alternative than to accept them.' As immigration of Jews from Europe decreased, 'Zionist leaders … changed their position in order to satisfy the economic, demographic and military needs of the newly created state with its Ashkenazim elite. The immigrants came to Israel with their different norms, culture, values and lifestyle.' Perhaps inevitably, this led to issues of assimilation underpinning Israeli society.