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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 1 / 11 Asian Judaism 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, 2 / 11 Asian Judaism 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 3 / 11 Asian Judaism 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 4 / 11 Asian Judaism 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 5 / 11 Asian Judaism 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. 6 / 11 Asian Judaism 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 7 / 11 Asian Judaism 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 8 / 11 Asian Judaism 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 9 / 11 Asian Judaism 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). 10 / 11 Asian Judaism 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). 11 / 11