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The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000 Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community, by Edna Fernandes. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008. 228 pp. $24.95.
This review begins with the obvious. This book’s title, indeed much of the work itself, is highly derivative of the 1993 book by me and my wife, Ellen S. Goldberg (The Last Jews of Cochin, University of South Carolina Press). Perhaps I ought not even be writing this review, as we all tend to be possessive about our words, ideas, and painstaking years of research.
Nevertheless, one can still appreciate Ms. Fernandes’ vivid writing. A British journalist of Indian origin, she happened into Jew Town, Kochi, in 2002, became interested in the few remaining Jews there, and returned in 2006 for a visit. She interviewed people, visited a few of the remaining Jewish sites, and even attended a long-distance wedding celebration. Her descriptions of familiar places and people are sharp and bring memories to life. Her descriptive prose does justice to her perceptions, and the reader sees Jew Town come alive through her eyes.
That much being said, Ms. Fernandes’ eyes see everything through the perspective of race. She is obsessed with the oft-repeated “Black Jew/White Jew” characterization, so much so that it blinds her not only to subtleties of Judaic law and Kochi Jewish history, but even leads to mischaracterizations.
In fact, the Black/White dichotomy was a European superimposition onto Kochi Jewish life, as Barbara Johnson, David Mandelbaum, and my wife and I—indeed all scholars who have taken the time to understand this community—have abundantly demonstrated. But racial categories are simpler and, for one so inclined, seem to explain everything. Fernandes introduces this sensitive subject by saying this so-called Black/White racial system “proved to be their undoing” (p. xv), a claim that is excessive.
Indeed, the reasons for the demise of this proud and fabled community include the loss of patronage from local rajahs after Indian independence, the opportunity to emigrate to Israel for religious, economic, and other reasons, the sense of becoming politically inconsequential after the amalgamation of the Princely States of Cochin and Travancore into the Republic of India, land redistribution policies of the Communist Government of Kerala, and restrictions on the import of “luxury goods” that had been an economic mainstay of the community, as well as nationalization of the electric, water, and ferry monopolies that had been private Jewish-owned companies. Animosities between the so-called Black and White subgroups may well have played a significant role, but one cannot reasonably reduce social, political, economic, religious, and cultural complexity to one sole explanatory factor.
Modern scholars most often opt for indigenous terms Malabari (from the Malabar Coast of southwest India) and Paradesi (foreign) to describe the sub-communities that Fernandes clumsily terms Black and White. Of course, the reality on the ground is more complicated. Both Malabari and Paradesi Jews (like virtually all middle class Indians of the time) were slave owners, and those slaves, many of whom they manumitted, were part of the community of their masters. So when Fernandes claims that the Salem family members are “Black Jews,” she not only gives offense, she promulgates inaccuracy. The Salems are and always have been members of the Paradesi community, which Fernandes insists on oversimplifying as White. Skin pigmentation has never been the primary criterion for membership in one or another of Kochi’s Jewish subcastes, but Fernandes seems consumed by her racial presuppositions. It pervades her descriptions.
Having spent a short time visiting Kochi, Fernandes caricatures rather than portrays the people there. She does not “get” Gamliel Salem’s wit, taking his sometimes acerbic comments far too seriously. She presents the community’s leader, Sammy Hallegua, as an irascible boor, Keith Hallegua appears as a depressive recluse, and her version of Sarah Cohen is a swindler who takes merciless advantage of Hindu visitors. No doubt, everyone has bad days, but one simply cannot fathom another human being and pronounce firm judgments after only a superficial acquaintance. Nor would one proclaim that the community is rife with “… centuries of inter-breeding, (and) mental illness” (p. xix).
Academics who do field work with human subjects have a very strict code, enforced by university institutional review boards, about interviewing subjects and presenting them in published writing. I do not know whether journalists have any similar ethical code, but clearly Fernandes does not. Her presentations of Kochi’s Jews are shallow and, to put it mildly, unflattering.
Fernandes often mentions our 1993 book, and occasionally nods to Johnson’s seminal work. But she obviously has not read her sources carefully, for had she done so, she would not have confused family relationships (p. 10), and she would have known which local rajah gifted a Torah crown to the Kochi Synagogue (p. 11). She would also have understood that Dickie Cohen was not a shochet (the last ritual slaughterer left for Israel in the 1970s; one need not be a shochet to slaughter chickens), and would not have dated the “copper plates” royal charter of the Jewish community at 1000 B.C. (It is about two thousand years later than that.)
The book is hasty and badly in need of copy editing by a professional with some knowledge of Judaism. The fast for Yom Kippur is not from sunrise to sunset (p. 23), a haham is the Sephardic word that among Ashkenazim is rabbi (p. 57), the word “Y-hweh” is not how Jews refer to G-d (p. 129), and a Torah scroll is not read as blessings at a wedding feast (p. 149). A competent editor might have noticed the glaring disparity between the book’s subtitle on the cover (“India’s forgotten Jewish community”) and what is written inside, that they are “a world-famous community” (p. 40). One gets the impression of a slapdash, hasty, and poorly edited work. Competent editing also ought to have recognized that chapter six on the Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jewish communities has no connection to Kochi and does not belong in the book, and that “gourmand” is not a synonym for “gourmet” but its opposite (p. 58). One might even hope that her pages on India-Israel links in the ancient world (pp. 84–86) are extracted from our 1993 work but not cited.
Her description of a Jew Town celebration of a wedding in Israel during 2006 is one of the best sections in the book. Not only is it very well written, but it correctly portrays the Malabaris and Paradesis joyously celebrating together (p. 149). In Fernandes’ telling, such amicable relations between the two subcastes is anomalous and racism is the norm, but had she spent enough time with them, she might have understood that the case is closer to the opposite.
As discussed in our 1993 work, the Jews of Kochi got along very famously in social and commercial contexts, but practiced discrimination in the synagogue. As Gamliel Salem insightfully told us at the time, in this respect Jewish experience in Kochi is inverse to that in most other places, where there might be equality in the synagogue but not in social intercourse. And that is the point of cross-cultural studies, to understand that different cultures construct their relationships according to varying paradigms. It is too bad that Fernandes could not see beyond her presuppositions about race.
Nathan Katz
Florida International University
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