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Asian Judaism
To appear in the Columbia Companion of World Religions (edited by Robert
A. F. Thurman)
Asian Judaism reflects interactions between normative Judaism and
local cultures. In adhering to this pattern, Asian Judaism resembles
Judaisms elsewhere, and in this case “normative Judaism” is Sephardic and
includes legal, philosophical, liturgical and cultural dimensions. And the
Asian host cultures are deeply diverse, from traditionally Confucian Kaifeng
to ultra-modern Singapore, from multireligious Kochi to glitzy, secular
Mumbai. What’s more, Asian Judaisms evidence differing degrees of
adaptation to local milieus, ranging from aloofness (in the case of so-called
“Baghdadi” communities in South, Southeast and East Asia) to acculturation
(in Kochi – formerly Cochin – in India) to assimilation (in Kaifeng, China,
and in India’s Bene Israel community of the eighteenth century).
It
is in the oldest of these Jewish communities that we find the most
profound interactions with the host culture, and the best examples are Kochi
in India and Kaifeng in China.
Kochi, India
According
to local traditions, Jews first settled on India's southwest coast
when the Second Temple was destroyed and the Romans exiled all Jews
from Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. They fled along maritime trade routes,
which had been in use since King Solomon's time and which had been
speeded by the discovery of the monsoon winds by Greek navigators early
in the first century. They settled at Cranganore, among other towns, where
they were granted political autonomy by local monarchs and flourished as
agriculturists, international spice merchants, petty traders, shipbuilders, and
in government service and the military. During the fourteenth century they
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migrated to Kochi. Their numbers in the Malabar rose as high as 3,000 at
the time of independence, but fewer than 50 remain today. Where there
were once nine flourishing synagogues, Jewish schools, scribes, scholars,
mystics, and poets, today the Cochin Synagogue, built in 1568, fails to
obtain a prayer quorum of ten adult males unless there are Jewish visitors
from elsewhere in India or abroad.
The
Kochi Jews, always part of the Jewish mainstream both
commercially and culturally, were knowledgeable about their religion and
savvy about affairs of state and currency fluctuations even in far-off Europe,
not to mention among the plethora of princely states of South India.
Knowing the languages of the subcontinent, the Middle East, and Europe,
they were played invaluable roles in both commerce and diplomacy.
Their
religious life evidences a high degree of acculturation into their
Indian context, but not assimilation. For example, during their autumn holy
days and at weddings, many Nayar (the local dominant caste) customs and
symbols of royalty were adopted. At a wedding, for another example, the
Jews would borrow an elephant from a neighboring Hindu temple to convey
the bridegroom to the synagogue for nuptials. During the festival of
Rejoicing in the Torah ( Simhat Torah), Kochi's Jews added three
elements to their celebrations found nowhere else in the Jewish world: they
displayed their Torah scrolls on a temporary Ark on the days just prior to the
festival; during the afternoon prayers, they made outdoor
circumambulations of the synagogue with their Torah scrolls; and at the
conclusion of the festival, they ritually demolished their temporary Ark to the
accompaniment of unique Hebrew songs. All of these behaviors reflect
Hindu temple festivals, when the deity (
murti
) of the temple is first displayed, then taken on procession, and then (often)
disposed of. None of these practices violate Judaic law (
Halachah
), so these borrowings from the local Hindu culture were judicious, reflecting
their firm Jewish identity, based on Judaic learning. They were acculturated,
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which is to say they were culturally at home in their Hindu environment,
without becoming assimilated, which involves a surrender of identity.
Kaifeng, China
Not
so with the Jews of Kaifeng, China, at least not in the long run. Jews
came to China following two routes. Persian Jews came via the Silk Route.
Judging from a Hebrew manuscript on Chinese paper discovered in a
Buddhist library in Dunhuang, as well as Muslim travelers' reports, Jews
were established in China no later than the eighth century. Indian Jews
came from via maritime routes to the South China Sea and settled in port
cities. The Kaifeng community is the only one that survived the Middle
Ages, having been "discovered" as an isolated, moribund community by
Jesuit missionaries during the early seventeenth century.
Jews
lived in Kaifeng for nearly a thousand years where they were
traders, agriculturists, artisans, physicians, and government officials. More
than a few passed the rigorous civil service examinations and became
Mandarins. They constructed a synagogue in Kaifeng in 1126 that included
an ancestor hall, typical of Chinese temples.
Kaifeng's
Jews increasingly identified with Chinese high culture. A 1488
inscription in their synagogue proclaimed: "Although our religion agrees in
many respects with the religion of the literati [Confucianism], from which it
differs in a slight degree, yet the main design of it is nothing more than
reverence for Heaven, and veneration for ancestors, fidelity to the prince,
and obedience to parents."
To
western Jews, it is striking to hear Judaism described in such
Confucian terms. Similarly, it is remarkable to see in the Kochi Synagogue
reflections of Hindu temple behavior. But on the other hand, one can
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imagine that to an Indian or Chinese Jew it would be unnerving to know that
their American coreligionists understand Judaism fundamentally as ethical
monotheism; such a characterization might sound so very Protestant. The
point is that Judaism, like any ancient religion, has many threads within
itself, and that one or another of these threads becomes highlighted in
response to the ethos of the host culture in which a particular Jewish
community finds itself. Such a process could be indicated by using a
concept borrowed from Gestalt psychology, that of background and
foreground. In relation to a background (the host culture), certain elements
in a perceptual field rise to the foreground (the particular Judaisms or India,
China or America). As Judaism, or any religion, moves from culture to
culture, or as it moves through time, differing threads are foregrounded and
others backgrounded, depending of course on the host culture and its
vicissitudes.
The Bene Israel
Similar
in their assimilation are the Bene Israel, found chiefly in and
around Mumbai, with active communities in Pune, also in Maharashtra
state, in Ahmedabad in Gujerat State, and in New Delhi. However, while the
Kaifeng Jews’ gradually increasing assimilation into Chinese culture led to
their demise, the Bene Israel have emerged from their assimilation in India
into a relatively recent sense of Jewish distinctiveness, and today they
thrive. All told, there are 4-5,000 Bene Israel in India and 40-50,000 in
Israel. While
most Bene Israel live in Mumbai, the nearby Konkan coast is their
spiritual home. Bene Israel trace themselves back to seven couples from
Israel who survived a shipwreck off Navgaon, in the unknown, distant past.
Somehow they clung to vestigial Judaic observances despite centuries of
isolation. Their tenacity in maintaining the Sabbath, ritual circumcision,
Jewish dietary codes and the Hebrew
Shema--the affirmation "Hear O
Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One."--set the stage for their unlikely
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transformation from an anonymous oil-pressing caste in the rural Konkan
into modern, urban members of the world Jewish community. This evolution
occurred over two hundred years, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth
century.
A
Kochi merchant heard missionaries’ rumors of a Konkani caste that
rested on Saturday and circumcised their sons on the eighth day, so David
Rahabi visited them. After spending some time with the community,
examining their dietary habits as well as eccentric (by Hindu norms)
religious observances, he concluded that they were lost Jews. He took three
of them back to Kochi where he educated them in Hebrew and the
rudiments of Judaism and sent them back with the title of
kazi, religious
leader. This began a longstanding relationship between Bene Israel and
Kochi Jews; as Bene Israel prospered, they hired Kochi Jews to be their
cantors, teachers, ritual slaughterers, and scribes. Bene Israel recall these
events as their "first awakening."
Subsequent
encounters with British and American missionaries and with
the nascent Baghdadi community of Mumbai built upon their sense of
Jewishness. This period is known as their "second awakening." They
learned Bible stories from the missionaries, and they shared their
synagogues (they built their first one in Mumbai in 1796) and cemeteries
with the Baghdadis. Both the British and the Baghdadis offered
opportunities in Mumbai, whether in the military, railway or civil service, or in
the mills and docks of the illustrious Sassoons, and Bene Israel migrated to
the new, glamorous city in search of their fortunes. It did not take long until
there were more Bene Israel in Mumbai than in the Konkan.
In
Mumbai, Arabic-speaking coreligionists who sought both security and
fortune under the British Raj, joined them. Known in India as “Baghdadis,”
they came to hold themselves aloof from Indian culture in general and from
the Bene Israel in particular in an effort to become accepted by the British
as "European" rather than "Indian"--a label with tangible economic benefits
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as well as social snobbery. This condescension became all the uglier when
the Baghdadis came to cast aspersions upon the very Jewishness of the
Bene Israel. The heart and soul of their newly found and hard-earned
identity was under attack.
In
Mumbai, they also encountered both the Zionist and Swaraj
movements for independence from Britain in Palestine and India
respectively, and they were rent by the competing nationalisms. On the one
hand, as Jews they had internalized the longing to return to Jerusalem and
rebuild Zion. On the other hand, their unhappy experiences with the
Baghdadis led them to mistrust foreign Jews, and as Indians they yearned
for independence from the British. On yet a third hand, they were also fond
of the British, their employers and patrons, and wanted to support them as
well. Mahatma Gandhi appreciated their ambivalence. Leaders of the
Ahmedabad Jewish community (where Gandhi had headquarters at his
Sabarmati Ashram) asked the Mahatma what should be the stance of
India's Jews
vis-a-vis the independence movement. He is said to have
replied that the Jews should "stand aside" because as a microscopically
small community, they would be crushed between the competing and
overwhelming forces of the British Empire, Indian nationalism, and Muslim
separatism. As a community, they did stand apart, although many Bene
Israel became involved as individuals. The bottom line, however, is that the
great majority of Bene Israel immigrated to Israel.
The “Baghdadis”
The
most recently arrived Jews in Asia are known in India as
“Baghdadis”; in China they preferred to be called “Sephardim.” In both
countries, as well as in the Southeast Asian satellite communities that
followed, they maintained a distance from their host cultures. Not only did
they never assimilate as did the Bene Israel and Kaifeng Jews, they did not
even acculturate to anywhere near the degree of Kochi’s Jews.
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These
Middle Eastern Jews migrated to India during the late eighteenth
century, about the same time as the British arrived. They settled in India's
port cities, especially Mumbai and Calcutta. Numbering about 5,000 at their
peak, they have declined to a few hundred, most of whom are elderly. The
Baghdadis played a significant role in the development of India's ports.
Beginning as jewelers and in the opium trade, Baghdadi entrepreneurs soon
moved into textiles and shipping in Mumbai, and real estate, jute,
manufacturing and tobacco in Calcutta.
In
Calcutta literally and in Mumbai metaphorically, the
Baghdadis were a ‘greytown’ community, perched precariously on the social
ladder between the elite British (and other Europeans) and the
overwhelming majority Indians. Sharing this shadowy social space were
other Middle Eastern mercantile communities, Armenians in Calcutta and
Parsis (Persian Zoroastrians) in Mumbai. After the 1857 “Mutiny,” relations
between the British and the Indians deteriorated and the Baghdadis felt
compelled to take sides. More than vanity was as stake; as race became
more and more enmeshed in the British bureaucratic system, very tangible
economic benefits accrued to Europeans, to the detriment of Asian and
Middle Eastern semi-elites. As a result, the Baghdadis strove to be
accepted as “European,” and part of their strategy was to distance
themselves from all things Indian, including their Indian coreligionists, the
Bene Israel. In the quest for cultural aloofness, the Baghdadis
condescended toward the Bene Israel. They would not eat meat
slaughtered by Bene Israel, not did they count them in their minyan or
prayer quorum. Many Baghdadis even went so far as to cast aspersions on
their very Jewishness. This stigma was not to be erased until 1961, when
the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel declared the Bene Israel to be fully
Jews. Ironically, this courageous rabbi hailed from Baghdad.
Leading
Baghdadi industrial and commercial families in Mumbai and
Calcutta established branches farther east. Indeed, modern Jewish
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communities in China date to 1844, when one of the sons of Mumbai
industrialist David Sassoon arrived. Elias Sassoon soon established a base
in Shanghai for his family's interests, mostly in opium, and soon had offices
in Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and Hong Kong as well. As soon as Japan
was "opened" to western trade in 1858, a branch was established in Tokyo.
Jews from Calcutta, Iraq and elsewhere soon followed.
Shanghai's
synagogues were built during the late nineteenth century,
and soon the city's Jewish community had its own newspaper and glossy
magazine, a religious school, a secular school, a hospital, and chapters of
the B'nai B'rith and Zionist organizations. Like their cousins in India,
China’s expatriate Jewish community felt compelled to mimic the Baghdadis'
sense of aloofness from the host culture. In China they styled themselves
as “Sephardim” rather than as “Baghdadis,” reasoning that the former term
connoted European ancestry (“Sepharad” is Hebrew for “Spain.”), which
was to be preferred over a Middle Eastern pedigree. As in India, in China
Europeans received commercial benefits as well as diplomatic protection.
At
the same time as Shanghai's Sephardic community was coming of
age, Ashkenazic Jews from Russia migrated east, following the overland
trade route to Manchuria, especially the city of Harbin. These adventurers
and furriers were soon joined by a wave of migration spurred by the 1917
Russian Revolution. When the Japanese conquered Manchuria in 1931,
most of these Ashkenazim moved to Shanghai, and they were soon joined
by German and Polish refugees from Hitler. During the 1940s, there were
more than 30,000 Jews in Shanghai--the only city in the world to remain
open to Jewish immigration throughout World War II. The end of the war
was followed by the Communist victory in China, at which time all but a
handful of China's Jews left.
In
the early nineteenth century, Baghdadis from Calcutta pursued their
fortunes to Yangon in Myanmar, gradually joined by Bene Israel and a few
Kochi Jews. Later that century they built their synagogue, and soon a
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vibrant community of several thousand flourished. Trading communities
spread throughout Burma. Most Jews fled to Calcutta when the Japanese
conquered Burma, and few returned.
Other
Calcutta Jews migrated farther east, to Singapore, Malaya,
Bangkok, Indonesia and the Philippines.
As
soon as Sir Stamford Raffles established a British settlement at
Singapore in 1818, Baghdadi Jews from India followed, mostly to pursue the
opium trade. Out of a community that at one time numbered two thousand,
David Marshall was undoubtedly the first citizen. The island-nation's "father
of independence' was Prime Minister in 1955 and United Nations
ambassador after that.
A
handful of Jews reside in Bangkok as citizens of Thailand, many more
as expatriates. In that country a law that requires all nonethnic-Thai citizens
to adopt a Thai name, which has caused considerable distress among
Muslims, the largest minority community. Jews have been the only group
exempted from the law. Conclusions
The
study of Judaism in Asia uproots several of our stereotypes. For
example, the adage that "east is east and west is west" becomes
transparent as a "colonizing myth" once a Jewish perspective is adopted.
Their
study also reconfigures our common understanding of Judaism
and the Jewish people. It is commonly held that Judaism is one of the
sources of western civilization, and that Judaism is a western religion. Such
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a view blinds us to Asian Judaism; it silences the millennia-old rich cultural
interactions between Judaic, Indic, and Sinitic cultures. On the other hand,
Jews have traditionally spoken of themselves as an
am-olam, a
'universal people', a cultural and mercantile bridge in a world recently
bifurcated into an east and a west. The study of Asian Jewish experience
debunks the Jews-as-westerners view and confirms the traditional
self-understanding as a truly universal people.
------------ Bibliography: Daniel J. Elazar, The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today (New York: Basic
Books, 1989).
Shirley B. Isenberg, India’s Bene Israel: A Comprehensive Inquiry and
Sourcebook (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1988). Nathan Katz, Who Are the Jews of India? (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: University of California Press, 2000).
Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg, The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish
Identity in Hindu India
(Columbia SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
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Donald D. D. Lesley, The Survival of the Chinese Jews: The Jewish
Community of Kaifeng
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972). Joan G. Roland, Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Age (Hanover
NH: University Press of New England, 1989).
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