The Last Jews of Kerala

by Edna Fernandes

  The loss of the temple was a devastating blow. The earthly seat of God had been razed, their holy kingdom transformed into wasteland and their people scattered. There was no longer a physical manifestation of the spiritual epicenter of their faith. The link between heaven and earth had been severed.

  But the hope of returning and rebuilding their Jerusalem was not extinguished. Instead, in their period of banishment, these first exiles sought to preserve the purity of their faith: keeping the Sabbath, circumcising their male children and so on. They remained distinct from non-Jews. These were the outwards signs of the Jews being a holy people. By refusing to relinquish their faith and maintaining their separateness, the hope of return to Israel was kept alive and eventually realized by some. Indeed, the same mentality was adopted by the Cochin Jews during their time in India.

  By 520 BCE the foundations of the Second Temple in Jerusalem had been laid and on the Jewish feast of Sukkoth a special dedication ceremony was held by the priests. This new manifestation lacked the magnificence of the Temple of Solomon and it no longer housed the sacred Ark, but it did resurrect hope. It would be some 500 years later in 19 BCE that Herod decided to fully restore the Second Temple, returning it to something approaching the resplendence of the first. To ensure the holy site was not polluted by ordinary men, he had a thousand priests trained as masons and carpenters so that they could take responsibility for the Hekhal and Devir. In such a way the new temple was completed. It was a glorious return.

  The Second Temple drew huge numbers of pilgrims during the time of Herod’s rule, with as many as half a million coming to the major feast days such as Passover and Sukkoth. The atmosphere at these times was one of enormous jubilation. On the special festival of Sukkoth or Tabernacles, marking the Israelites’ period in the desert after their Exodus from Egypt, each Jewish family would prepare a sacrificial lamb at the Temple. The ecstasy of return after exile, of seeing their temple resurrected to its former glory, was a remarkable reversal of fortune for the Jewish people.

  But it would not last. By 70 CE the Jews were crushed into submission once again. In that year the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem and broke into the Temple’s inner courts. Six thousand Jewish zealots lay in wait, willing to lay down their lives to defend their beloved Temple. Even in the face of death, they were careful to safeguard the purity laws associated with the Temple chambers.

  In his writings, the second-century Greek historian Dio Cassius described the incredible fortitude of the Jewish faithful: “The ordinary people fought in the forecourt and the nobility in the inner courts while the priests defended the Temple building itself.” It was to no avail, and when the Jews saw the Second Temple ablaze they uttered agonizing cries of despair, with some of those present throwing themselves upon the sword of the enemy or plunging into the flames rather than live to see their Temple destroyed.

  The Temple was smashed to pieces by Roman troops and only the Western Wall of the Devir remained standing. The wall is all that survives to this day and it is the most sacred place for Jews around the world. Even now, the memory of the Temple’s destruction has the power to move its people to tears and plunge them into grief anew. When I visited the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall as it is also known, the sheer force of reawakened sorrow and despair were palpable: people would come to the wall to pray and then without warning their bodies would crumple before its towering presence, fingertips clinging onto the pale yellow brickwork as they wept into the stones.

  The Jewish people were left in no doubt about their position after the fall of Jerusalem and the Temple. After 70 CE there was a Roman coin in circulation that depicted a Jewess with hands bound tight as she sat under a palm tree. An order was issued to the Romans to hunt down and execute any Jew who claimed to descend from King David. Jewish property was confiscated and many were driven out. Their people faced humiliation and a kind of religious emasculation in their own city. The temple taxes extracted from male Jews by the Romans were donated to the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. Roman soldiers would make sacrifices to their gods in Jerusalem’s streets. The Jewish holy city was defiled and the debris of the Temple was polluted by the blood of its own people.

  Even decades after the destruction, the Jewish people remained in a state of shock and spiritual paralysis, with the Book of Baruch saying that nature itself should succumb to a period of mourning:

  “For why should light rise again

  Where the light of Zion is darkened?”

  In the period after the fall of Jerusalem, Jews were again expelled from their holy city and their fortunes scattered to foreign winds. Again, they were exiles.

  It was to this juncture in history that the Cochini Jews attributed the arrival of the first large-scale community of Jewish migrants from Israeli to Indian soil. The Kerala coastline was already on the map of the Jewish people due to trading links that went back almost a millennium. Now in their moment of desperation, the Jews of Israel came not as merchant traders, but as refugees. How could they know it would be millennia before they returned?

  This is seen as the pivotal moment in Cochini Jewish history, providing the crucial link between the sacred city of Jerusalem and what would become a substitute Jerusalem in India, the port city of Cranganore. Out of the fire and devastation of Jerusalem, this community of Jews was delivered on the west coast of Kerala.

  * * * *

  It is remarkable that India should have been a natural choice of refuge for the Jews during this tumultuous period. Various factors point to why this is so. Trade was well established between Israel and India from the time of Solomon, according to old Hebrew and Biblical accounts, as described above, but this was given fresh impetus by 45 CE with the discovery of the monsoon winds by Hippalus, which cut the sea journey to India dramatically.

  The Indian community was well looked upon in Jewish society, it would appear. Josephus describes in his chronicles that in Israel during the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, there was some knowledge of Hindu philosophy. He made the astonishing revelation that the Hindu attitude towards life and death was discussed by a group of Jewish zealots just before the mass martyrdom of Masada in 73 CE, according to Katz and Goldberg. In Josephus’ account of the speech of the leader of the rebels, Eleazar, he used Hindu philosophy towards death. In Hinduism, death is seen as merely part of the ongoing cycle of destruction and rebirth. He drew upon this to persuade his soldiers to embrace martyrdom:

  “We . . . ought to become an example to others of our readiness to die. Yet if we do stand in need of foreigners to support us in this matter, let us regard those Indians . . . These have such a desire of a life of immortality that they tell other men beforehand that they are about to depart and nobody hinders them but every one thinks them happy men . . .”

  Josephus said the Masada Jews were swayed by his argument and martyrdom proceeded. The writer William Whitson concurs with the theory that Hindu beliefs had permeated early Jewish culture: “How was there knowledge of Indian beliefs and practices? Josephus is described by some scholars as a Hellenized Jew with knowledge of Greek historians who held Indian philosophy in high regard.”

  So Hindu culture was already part of Jewish consciousness and, in turn, the Keralites welcomed foreigners to their shores, seeing them as a source of revenue and skills which enhanced the regional economy.

  Around this time, the Romans already had connections on the Malabar coast and had established a colony at Muziris. In 60 CE, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a mariners’ guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, described the scene: “Muziris . . . abounds in ships sent there with cargoes from Arabia and by the Greeks . . . Kings send large ships to those market towns on account of the great quantity and bulk of pepper.”

  Ships came loaded with gold in their cargos and returned with holds bursting with black pepper. Such exchanges ensured that it swiftly entrenched its position as a wealthy port city and cosmopolitan hub with a rather raffish air. The great classical second-century Tamil
poem the Shilappadikaram, or Lay of the Ankle Bracelet, portrays a city glinting with foreign gold, where “lusty sailors sang” and “all night, lamps were burning, the lamps of foreigners who talk strange tongues, who watch over precious cargoes near the docks.”

  Against this energizing backdrop of fast-expanding trade and migration from Israel, Greece, Syria and Rome, Jews arrived over the centuries that followed the fall of Jerusalem to establish their first large-scale settlement in Kerala. The earliest Jewish settlements were in Calicut and Quilon. But Cranganore remains the most important of all. The settlement of Jews on the northern side of Cranganore was at Pullot, where there was a temple ferry. The word “ferry” in Malayalam is “kadavu” and so the Jewish settlement came to be known as Kadavumbagam or “the ferry side”. The Jewish settlement on the southern bank of the River Periyar was known as Tekkumbagam—these communities were made up of poorer Jews who were involved in the docks or as commercial agents.

  There was also a settlement at Cherigandaram, made up of Jewish merchants. It was in this area that Joseph Rabban settled after being conferred with princely privileges by the local raja. These rights, sometimes described as the Cochini Jews’ Magna Carta, were set out on the engraved copper plates that now lie with the Paradesi Jews in their synagogue. The plates have been dated as late as 1000 BC by historians.

  This was a time of the Chera-Chola conflict in the south and during a crisis point in the war the Chera King, Bhaskara Ravi Varma, convened a war council of the governors of the provinces, his commander-in-chief and regional leaders. It is believed that Rabban agreed to help, placing assets and men at his disposal and so the king raised the status of the Jewish settlement to an autonomous entity and made Rabban the head, granting the seventy-two privileges. Rabban’s reward for such fealty was a kingdom of his own, in perpetuity.

  Cochin’s line of Hindu kings would honor the deal struck with Rabban and the Jews were held in extremely high regard, even centuries on. This close relationship between the Jews and the raja of the princely state is seen to be unique within India, according to numerous historical accounts. The other Jewish communities in the Indian cities of Bombay and Calcutta were successful businessmen but did not have the same political privileges bestowed by the local ruling power.

  Until Independence in 1947 the Jews benefited from a number of privileges in Cochin, which remained a Hindu princely state until the British left India. For example, Jewish holidays were observed and the banks were closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Exams were never held for Jewish students on Shabbat and they were given a seat on the legislative council of the state of Cochin, even though they did not have a big enough population to justify this. Jews were also allocated a certain number of places at medical and law school.

  Today, where Cranganore once stood there is little trace of its momentous history. Most of the ancient city was destroyed in periodic attacks by Arab and Portuguese soldiers. But something of the magic of those early years is conveyed in Tamil poetry from the second century that described a city “surrounded by a moat.”

  “On the surface of the water floated large lotus flowers, red and white water lilies and the blue iris,” it said. The residential quarters were graced with “wide avenues” where guards watched over “rich dwellings”. There were parks with trees and flowers and “pools with such limpid water that the inhabitants of heaven left their paradise to visit these banks.”

  In his History of Kerala, K. P.P. Menon marvels at the heritage of Cranganore in not just Jewish, but world history. It was here that Solomon’s ships alighted; here that St. Thomas first arrived in India in 52 AD, planted a cross and preached Christianity, according to Kerala tradition. Here that numerous trading powers, from the Chinese and Arabs to the Portuguese and Dutch arrived with lofty ambitions of conquest and commerce. Yet, today, its crumbling relics are the abode of howling jackals, Menon lamented. “The old moat is the haunt of crocodiles and paddy birds.”

  Some clues of the past remain. One of the earliest Jewish accounts of Malabar was written by the merchant Benjamin of Tudela, who chronicled life of Jewish communities across the world. Writing about the Malabar coastal region, he described the stupefying heat of an Indian summer:

  “From Passover to New Year . . . no man can go out of his house because of the sun, for the heat in that country is intense. Everybody remains in his house until the evening. They go forth and kindle lights in all the market places and all the street and do their work and business at nighttime. For they have to turn night into day in consequence of the great heat of the sun.”

  Turning to the Jewish community of Malabar in particular, he describes “only about one hundred Jews who were of Black color as well as the other inhabitants. The Jews are good men, observers of the law and possess the Pentateuch; the people have some little knowledge of the Talmud.”

  Further flashes of life are provided by the “Cairo Genizah documents”, a collection of 250,000 documents stored in the anteroom of a synagogue in Old Cairo. Genizah means “hiding place” in Hebrew, and when the archive was discovered in 1896 there were documents spanning several hundred years, giving an insight into Jewish life in the Middle Ages, including missives written by Jewish merchants who started to travel between the Mediterranean and China in the ninth century, stopping along Malabar’s coast.

  Translated by Shlomo D. Goitein, the letters regarding India painted a vivid picture: of the homesickness of the traders who missed family life, how they savored the kosher cheeses sent as a gift from their partners in Alexandria and Aden; how the men lapsed into using concubines during their long leaves of absence. The archive is a window into past lives. For example, some seventy fragments portray the life of a Tunisian-born Jew called Abraham Ben Yiju. He set off to make his fortune in Indian trade in the 1120s. The documents depict the small triumphs and tragedies that make up a lifetime. His correspondence tells of a difficult journey, his business dealings and marriage to an Indian slave girl called Ashu; his acumen in the import-export business—he exported iron and spices to his Jewish partners in Aden while importing arsenic, paper and other commodities to India; the birth of his three children and then the premature death of his young son in India.

  The documents relating to Ben Yiju tell one of the most important histories of the Jews who migrated and worked in India. He was a highly educated merchant, noted for his scholarship and calligraphy. His correspondence to Aden illustrated the type of trade that existed with India at the time. There was some suggestion that he also traded slaves. He opened a brass factory on the Malabar coast at one point, which employed local Jews as well as others.

  Clearly, he was well regarded by his business partners. One letter from a trading associate in Aden acknowledging the receipt of a shipment of black pepper concludes with the following gushing sentiments: “The letter of my lord, the most illustrious elder has arrived; may God make permanent your well being, may he guard your life and humble those who envy you.”

  After spending some eighteen years in India, he left in 1149 to return to Aden only to find many of his family had left the country. He received a frosty reception from the Jewish community who questioned the validity of his marriage. His homecoming was a less than happy one.

  Marco Polo also traveled to the region during the late thirteenth century and mentioned the kingdom of what is now Quilon on Malabar’s coast: “It is the residence of many Christians and Jews, who retain their proper language,” he said in his travelogue. “The king is not a tributary to any other.”

  “The heat during some months is so violent as to be scarcely supportable; yet the merchants resort thither from various parts of the world . . . attracted by great profits.”

  Cranganore was famous not just for commodities but for precious stones such as diamonds, rubies and pearls that were in much demand by rich Roman ladies. In his chronicles Naturalis Historia, the Roman military commander, philosopher and writer, Pliny the Elder, made clear his disapproval of the appetite
for such fripperies from what he called “India’s first emporium”: “Our ladies glory in having pearls suspended from their fingers, one, two or three of them dangling from their ears, delighted even with the rattling of pearls as they knock against each other; and now, the poorer classes are even affecting them as people are in the habit of saying ‘a pearl worn by a woman in public is as good as a lector walking before her’”, said the Roman military chief.

  Pliny was equally disapproving of the insatiable appetite for black pepper among his countrymen, clearly fearing it would drain Rome’s coffers dry: “Both pepper and ginger grow wild . . . and yet we buy them by weight like silver and gold,” he sniffed.

  Nose-tickling bounties of pepper known as “black gold”; exquisite shawls and turbans embellished with silver thread; luminescent pearls and corals harvested from the sea bed, perfumed camphor wood and oils destined to grace the boudoir of some fragrant foreign matron. These were the treasures that drove men from the sanctuary of family life to perilous sea voyages, ushering them to the heat-induced madness of Malabar summers and into the arms of their velvet-eyed lovers.

  Such was the scene at a time when Cranganore was the most important of cities in the region. As already established, the city was not just a trading center but a place imbued with religious significance. What would drive them from such a place?

  The old Shingly songs, the musical history of the people, hinted at quarrels over funds for the synagogue that led to a rupture in the Jewish leadership. But in 1341, it was nature, not man, that decided the fate of the Cranganore Jews and changed the course of the community. As a result of a torrential downpour of rain, the River Periyar flooded, silting up the harbor mouth. Because of this biblical-style flood Cranganore lost its strategic maritime position. A new harbor formed at Cochin that was smaller than the last but would replace Cranganore as the regional port. It was called Kochazhi or “small estuary” which eventually became known as Kochi or Cochin.