The Last Jews of Kerala

by Edna Fernandes

  The four places of worship lie within one kilometer of one another and the locals claim it is the only village in the world where one can hear the shofar of the synagogue, the peel of the church bell, the trumpet of the Hindu conch shell and the cry of the muezzin.

  Not far from here was the house of Anil’s grandmother’s brother, the eighty-two-year-old Menachem who was born in Chennamangalam itself. It was set in a wild garden full of pepper, tamarind and fruit trees. Jackfruits and papaya lay strewn on the ground ready to be collected, a kitchen garden of herbs grew in fragrant profusion in a corner. Black chickens scuttled back and forth from shade to bush and back again as they made brief forays for tidbits.

  The house was newly renovated, with a porch and tiled floor throughout. In the front parlor was an elaborately carved three piece sofa set and a coffee table already laden with ladoos, deep fried banana chips and other snacks, plus chai. The old man sat in an armchair. He had a fine head of grey hair and a broad physique, strong and muscled apart from his right leg which was withered after a childhood bout of polio. He tucked the leg back, hiding it from view beneath the folds of his lunghi. Menachem spoke in a high speed, voluble manner, periodically stopping to laugh at his jokes as he wiped his eyes. He was charming and a born story teller, accompanying his tale with fearsome gesticulation.

  I was here to listen to the story of a historic feud between Parul and Chennamangalam which stemmed from one of the most bizarre episodes in Kerala Jewish history. It was known as “Sarah’s story” and Sarah was a distant relative of Menachim, so who better to tell it. As I listened to the tale, I decided that Sarah would not have been Anil’s kind of woman, being the kind of Jewish wife who induced not just “headaches”, but crippling migraines.

  Sarah was a beautiful Jewess from a very wealthy landowning family in Parul. At a very young age she married an equally rich man from a family in Chennamangalam but was widowed a few years later after giving birth to two daughters. It was a difficult position for a young widow to be in. She was still young and very desirable, with the added complication that she was extremely rich. Her daughters would inherit a joint estate, which also made them targets for suitors.

  Her late husband’s family was keen to marry the daughters to their own young men, thereby securing the fortune. But Sarah’s brothers demanded the same, so with the seeming wisdom of Solomon, Sarah offered to give one daughter to Parul and the other to Chennamangalam. However, neither side was satisfied, so she incurred the wrath of both.

  In a further attempt to wrest control of her wealth, the relatives argued that Sarah was unfit to manage her money and offered to take control of her business affairs. But she was having none of it and decided to employ a poor Jew from Chennamangalam to assist her. She began to mix with people from all levels of society, further enraging the family who claimed she was damaging her reputation.

  Jussay wrote about the episode which seemed to include all the ingredients for a primetime soap opera. The otherwise dry historian reported breathlessly: “They deliberately spread scandals about her. She was depicted as a shameless slut tarnishing the image of the entire Jewish community. Her own behavior gave credence to these stories.” The historian seemed to have some sympathy with her relatives, adding reprovingly, “She used to stay away from home for days together and used to welcome home visitors during odd hours.”

  One of those visitors who stayed “suspiciously long” was Thomman, a Christian leader from Gothuruth, a village of daring zealots who modeled themselves on the exploits of the Red Cross Knights of Europe. Thomman and his friends formed their own Round Table of Knights, says Jussey, vowing to defend their faith with the sword and protect damsels in distress and the like. This fabulous medieval-style religious intrigue took place in the midst of Kerala’s tropical countryside just one hundred years ago.

  So here was our heroine, the Jewess widow, young, rich, gorgeous and refusing to deny herself any of life’s pleasures to the incandescence of her male relatives. Thomman was everything they despised: a tall, athletic Christian with his own private posse. I asked Menachem about the relationship between Sarah and Thomman and the old man looked coy and blushed a little, so we shall have to turn to Jussay’s version of events. “The two became intimate,” he said delicately and their behavior sent the elders into a fury. The result was a boycott of Sarah.

  But things got even more complicated. Sarah found out she was pregnant, although it is unclear by whom. She avoided scandal by marrying her footman. When the Jews of the two villages found out their seething resentment boiled over into rage. They seized her unlucky husband and thrashed him by the riverside. A friend of Thomman found him and took care of him and then Thomman offered Sarah his protection and invited her to stay at his home where she would be safe.

  Her life was now in danger and there were rumors that the Jewish elders would snatch her girls to save them from associated scandal. Sarah, her husband and the girls went to live with Thomman, her lover. The set-up was too much for the Jewish elders, who gathered a group at Cochin, collected firearms and weapons and set out by rowboat to Gothuruth to abduct the daughters and mother. Their plan was foiled when they were spotted by Thomman’s brother, who raised the alarm.

  Sarah ran to the rice pounding shed and hid, the girls went upstairs and bolted the room shut. The local Christians came to her aid, gathering makeshift weapons of poles, crowbars, choppers and spades. Menachem described how the attempted snatch failed:

  “One of the brothers came inside. He was holding Sarah and trying to bring her and the children forcibly. One Christian came in and told the brother to let go of her. The brother refused and said ‘I’m taking her now.’ So this person chopped the brother’s arm with a knife. After this, the Jews decided there should be no survivors and the Jews and their helpers sealed all the exits to the village. One of my uncles was killed in this battle—my father’s brother.”

  Overpowered and outfoxed, the Jews fled to the boat but it was pulled ashore and smashed to pieces by the Christians. By now many men of the local village had returned from the bazaar and joined the fray, assailing the Jews in the water with blows from oars and poles. Disgraced and battered, the Jews were forced to retreat. The Jews turned to the courts for help but were rebuffed because the court ruled the Christians acted in self-defense.

  “A lot of people died,” said Menachem sadly. “The people who came to take her lost their fight. The Jews were jailed for two or three years. My father was also punished; he was just eighteen years old. It was a shameful case, forcefully done,” said the old man, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “A shameful way to treat a woman.”

  In the end, through sheer force of character, she won and her story was immortalized in a ballad called “The Victory of Sarah.” She lived to an old age and her wishes regarding her daughters were fulfilled. One married into Parul, one into Chennamangalam. But the scandal took years to die down. Despite being cut off by her community, she brought up her daughters and educated them well and one of her granddaughters became one of the first Malabari Jews to get a university degree.

  Yet the people of both villages saw Sarah’s story as more than a little shameful. They believed her liberal attitude set a bad example to the younger relatives. I asked what that meant, only for the Anil to gently admonish me: “You have had the whole cake. It is just the cherry on top that’s been removed.”

  As we left his uncle’s house at sundown, it was clear Anil had some sympathies with Sarah’s male relatives. She had been a handful and they were only doing their duty to protect her and the children.

  “Even some modern girls can be like this,” he told me gravely. “A big headache. It’s not something I want. I don’t want any trouble when I get married.”

  “So will you go to Israel to find a wife?”

  “A Kerala Jewish girl would be the best for me. But there are no Kerala Jewish girls. I have to find a wife from outside Kerala who wants to come here. But it’s not easy. A person used t
o Indian culture finds western culture difficult to accept. Some people see us as primitive, it’s not that. This life is just a village life, no tension.”

  “Do you think a bride from Israel would find it difficult to adjust?”

  “For me it’s the ultimate. When I look around, nowhere is more beautiful than this. Just look,” he gestured to all around us. “But if I was brought up in Israel, it would’ve been a different situation. I’m very happy living here. I never had any racial discrimination, I have a lot of Muslim, Hindu, Christian friends. They tell me, ‘why go to Israel?’ But I need a wife.”

  “She couldn’t come here?”

  “Everything changes. The whole lifestyle changes. I was born and brought up in Israel as a boy—I know the lifestyle and tastes there. Then I came to India, so for me, it’s not difficult to adjust. For them, it’s difficult. If you’re jumping down the ladder, it’s different. I cannot ask an Israeli girl, I cannot ask her to give up her Western life for the village. I would have to be very lucky to find a girl such as this.”

  “But many Israelis love India.”

  “Loving India and living in India is different.”

  We were now driving through a stretch of waterways that led directly towards the sea. Black clouds tumbled like boulders across the horizon, swiftly blotting out the last vestiges of light. The biggest storm for months was descending. We could hear the low roll of thunder from just across the hillside and in just a few minutes the whole sky would turn white with sheet and forked lightening. Anil already knew he had to leave. The choice was not really between Kerala and marriage. He could always marry a non-Jewish girl here and stay. The choice was more fundamental, being between Kerala and his Jewishness. He had to lose one part of himself.

  “This place, always, it absorbs you. But this is it. Either I choose a bride who is not Jewish, or leave Kerala forever. That’s the saddest part of all,” said Anil. “You can’t gain without compromise. If you want to live in Kerala, you have to compromise on the Jewishness. If you’re not willing to compromise on the Jewishness, you cannot live in Kerala. That’s the choice we face.”

  “They should be queuing to come,” I told him as we bumped along the road home. Even in this unremitting onslaught of rain, the panorama that enveloped us was dramatic, primal, eternal. The storm had knocked out the electricity, plunging every house, every business, every road into utter darkness, turning sky, mountain and sea into a single entity of black. For a split second, the crackle of lightning illuminated the palm-fringed horizon that stretched before us, seemingly without end. Then it was gone again. Anil knew what he was about to lose.

  “They should be queuing, it’s true,” he replied, struggling to see the road ahead as it became engulfed with fast flowing channels of rainwater that ran down the road in quicksilver streams. “But in order to win, we have to find the exceptions in life. The Jewish girl who will sacrifice everything for Kerala. But we can’t always find the exceptions. If I want to live this Jewish life I must leave everything I love. For Israel.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Roses in the Desert

  “The sparrow has found his home at last,

  The swallow, a nest for its young.”

  —PSALM 84:3

  Dawn had not come. Yet it was close at hand and the nightly solitude of the Negev would be broken soon as the sun emerged from behind the mountains. For now, the trunk road that snaked through the desert was desolate, but in less than an hour there would be juddering convoys heading for the ports, army trucks moving towards military checkpoints in the south and carloads of commuters shuttling between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. As the clouds of night dissipated like djinns shrinking away to their daytime lairs, the skies softened to a near translucent grey and an immeasurable serenity emanated from the barren plains. When the sun finally surfaced, blinking into the new day, the grey skyline was streaked with stripes of candy pink. Set ablaze by the light, the desert came alive.

  The plains reached across an expanse of terrain from the Dead Sea down towards the blue finger of the Indian Ocean that pointed to Israel’s southernmost tip, Eilat. Flanked to the east by mountains beyond which lay Jordan and to the west by Egypt and the Palestinian territory of Gaza, this was pioneer country. When the first moshavs came here in the early fifties, they were equipped with little more than a determination to succeed and from the sands they had summoned up whole communities.

  By their very existence here they believed they were defending their country’s borders, bringing a Jewish presence after centuries of exile. Some of the moshavs were within striking distance of the rocket launchers from Gaza, the ceaseless fear of attack, of being supplanted from these soils, was coupled with the challenge of inducing the unyielding desert to bear life and hope. In spite of these challenges, perhaps even because of them, many, including the Cochini Jews, welcomed the chance to settle here, even above the holy city of Jerusalem, for the desert held an older and equally sacred significance for them.

  Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people known as “father of the multitude”, was inextricably linked with the Negev and specifically to the ancient city of Be’er Sheva, the capital of the region. The meaning of Be’er Sheva was “well of the swearing” which referred to a past agreement between Abraham and a local ruler Abimelech under which the prophet gained rights to use a well to water his flock.

  By emulating the life of the prophet, returning here was imbued with additional religious significance. The sacrifice went beyond the merely physical and was a living metaphor for the Jewish struggle. In the past the desert was seen as a place of death and chaos, a desolate void. Biblical descriptions depicted a place of “howling wilderness”, “a land unsown”, which appeared to have been abandoned by all things good. It was a visceral reminder of the despair endured by the ancient Jews during their forty-year sojourn in the desert before they were led to the Promised Land and the fulfillment and realized destiny that ensued.

  There was a brief moment after 1948 when the Cochini Jews feared they would not be allowed to make the aliyah after all. Before being granted permission to resettle, the Cochinis were visited by an official from the Jewish Agency on behalf of the nascent state. In his report, he voiced grave concerns about the suitability of this people to settle in Israel. In particular, he was worried about their small stature, weak constitution and the high prevalence of elephantiasis among their number, fearing this would spread to the motherland. The “Report on the Jews of Malabar” described them as small in stature, weak and thin with many suffering from “a disease transmitted via mosquito larvae deposited on the skin at night and which burrow in through the moisture from the sleeper’s perspiration.” It added: “. . . More than 50 percent of all Jewish families . . . subsist . . . under acute want . . . the majority live on rice and fish . . . malnutrition is widespread.” An Israeli physician recommended that the Cochinis were resettled in very dry regions, with great variations in temperature which would minimize the risk of the condition spreading. For this reason, many ended up in the Negev.

  In a later report in 1949, the official said he feared the Cochinis were unrealistic about the tough conditions they would face. The officials lectured the Cochinis that they would have to work very hard as farmers in Israel. But the idealistic joy of the Jews of Kerala could not be dampened. All they could focus on was finally going home.

  On arrival, it proved to be every bit as tough as the Israeli officials had forewarned. In particular, the Cochinis found it difficult to adjust to living in a country that constantly had to be braced for battle. In the 1973 account Immigrants from India in Israel by Gilbert Kushner, the author described a night patrol with a Cochini guard on his round at 2:00 AM:

  “Aaron, one of the Cochini on guard duty tonight, is especially concerned about not tripping in the darkness for he is carrying a loaded rifle and wearing a heavy cartridge belt. He holds the weapon clumsily as if it were a piece of wood. I ask him to make sure the
safety lever is on . . . On the way back up the hill, Aaron tells me this never happened in Cochin . . .”

  The vast majority of Cochini Jews settled in moshavs across the southern region, with several settlements that were almost exclusively theirs. These were complete townships with their own residential district, shops and even synagogue all a short drive away from Be’er Sheva. Sixty years on, these communities were rejuvenated and replenished by new marriages and births. In one moshav in the south of the Negev, the Cochinis had created a facsimile of their old land which they called Little Kerala. The fear of demise that afflicted the people in India no longer tormented those resettled in Israel. The aliyah had facilitated a rebirth for the Jews of Kerala.

  The transition from India to Israel was all the more remarkable when one considered that they had not come from, say, the Rajasthan desert, but had traded a land blessed with fertility for the austerity of the Negev. Many of the Cochinis had rarely ventured beyond southern India, so they could never have envisioned what they were letting themselves in for. They never knew the true meaning of desert, only the Biblical depictions of suffering followed by deliverance. The sense of excitement on arriving in the land of Abraham was accompanied by an initial sense of dislocation. It was a natural response; being the opposite of everything they had every known: water, trees, flowers, where life is taken for granted. Into the cracked and hardened landscape, they had to discover ways of instilling some of the vibrancy, fertility and life of their old home.

  There, they had had every natural advantage. Throw a seed to the ground, leave it untouched, unnourished by human hand and it will flourish and proliferate. In Kerala they luxuriated in an abundance of water and its gifts whether it was the Arabian Sea, the lotus-strewn lakes or backwaters shaded by tendrils of tropical flowers that cascaded into the water. If they desired milk, there were buffalos who ambled like stately mehmsahibs in the surrounding fields. If they wanted fruits and vegetables, then they only need step into their gardens. In Israel, the Jews of Cochin were tested. It proved to be the making of some of them.