The Last Jews of Kerala

by Edna Fernandes

  I was driving to Shahar to meet one such man. Eliahu Bezalel had come to Israel in the very first wave of Cochini immigration in the early 1950s. In India he had been, by his own admission, a young man of little consequence but larger ambition, with just a few rupees in his pocket when he embarked on the aliyah. On arrival, like many of the first pioneers, his first job seemed to hold little promise of achievement or greatness. He was a shepherd and he carried out his duty with diligence and pride, for even the smallest task was part of the wider effort to build Israel. This was the homecoming they had prayed for in Kerala for two thousand years: “Next year, in Jerusalem,” they toasted one another at each festival.

  Shahar was more than an hour and a half from Jerusalem on the road to Be’er Sheva, off the turning towards Gaza. After interminable vistas of reds and browns, breathing in air acrid as the ochre dust that enveloped the horizon, the landscape melted into a shimmer of softest green. As my Palestinian taxi driver Nazeeh drove into the heart of the community, all around we could see long white, tent-like nurseries that sheltered fragile seedlings. The trees, shrubs and lawns were verdant, not the washed out brown-green that forever thirsts for rain, but with the vividness of a freshly watered springtime. The settlement was made up of suburban avenues, some complete with idyllic white picket fences and lawns nourished by sprinkler systems that could put the proudest English country gardener to shame. Whitewashed bungalows with not a tile out of place were set in neat rows with well groomed gardens. Framing the roadside were bushes of billowing roses and fig trees, fragrant with ripened fruit. With eyes hypnotized by the suburban utopia, one could almost forget this was a desert of the East until one’s gaze was drawn to the middle horizon beyond the white fences. There lay the realities that the inhabitants kept at bay every day, relentless desert dunes and the blur of low mountain ridges that signaled the Jordanian border. Away from the moshav dream, underlying every Jew’s romantic ambition to make the desert of the Holy Land bloom, there was the unceasing nature of the struggle to conserve life in these lands and the vulnerability of its tightly drawn borders.

  Nazeeh was surprised as he slowly drove past the pretty houses, with children playing outside, their chocolate drop eyes, glossy dark skin and black kinked hair all signs that we were in the right place. With its palms, bougainvillea and tropical flowers, this could still be India. The Cochinis had created a corner of Kerala in the Israeli desert, even copying the village style bungalow with sloping red tiled roofs and wide pillared porches to snatch at a passing breeze. Just as in Kerala, rambling bushes trailed trains of pink blossom over low-rise walls. Flocks of sparrows chirruped among the date palms, periodically taking off to skim the skies in tight triangular formations like Israeli Air Defense squadrons on patrol.

  Amidst the loveliness was the house of Bezalel, the prettiest and with the most well kept of all the gardens, as if it belonged in a postcard. A young man who looked like a Cochin Jew squatted low among the flower beds, his forearms a burnished copper as he wrenched out stubborn weeds, shook their tangled roots free and tilled the soil. The sheen of sweat was evident on his skin as the white disc of the sun burned overhead. His face was shielded from the rays in a large brimmed straw hat, affording only a view of pursed lips and set jaw as he concentrated on the task at hand. Seeing strangers, he paused from digging, looked up and smiled, his teeth bright and dazzling, before turning back to the flowerbeds. I was to learn that this was Bezalel’s young son, who lived in the next door house and was taking over the running of the family’s horticultural business.

  The old man himself was inside in the shade of the kitchen that overlooked the rear garden. He was recovering from a recent operation on his knee a few weeks ago. It had left him housebound and only able to walk with the aid of a walking frame. Bezalel was in his late seventies but retained a touch of the rakish handsomeness that was evident in the gallery of photographs that lined the walls of his house, ones where as a young man in black suit and skinny tie he posed jauntily with Israeli leaders shortly after his arrival. Further along the wall, there were modern day portraits of him receiving awards and medals from the president of India or prime minister of Israel for services to horticulture or Indo-Israeli relations.

  From being a poor young émigré from India with just 250 rupees in his pocket on arrival in the country, he had become an ambassador for the Indian Jewish community, a flesh and blood emblem of the success that can come from simple hard work and devotion. Stepping into his home, one could smell the pungent tang of curry powder in the air: cumin, coriander, black pepper—the smells of Cochin’s tropical marketplace wafting on Middle Eastern desert winds. These same smells first enticed the merchant seamen of King Solomon to India’s shores almost three millennia ago.

  His wife and daughter, old and younger versions of the same woman, were rustling around the kitchen, laying out the requisite snacks and drinks of iced lemonade with chopped fresh mint before heading off to their lunchtime appointments. Bezalel sat with me at the table, now spread with homemade cakes, pastries and deliciously tart sliced apple from the Golan Heights. His face was worn with pain and as he rested his hands on the kitchen table, I noticed his fingernails were blackened from recent treatment for prostate cancer, although it was something he barely touched on.

  For despite illness, the physical discomfort and pain he bore, one sensed Bezalel was a man fulfilled, whose young man’s ambition had been sated. First he had made the journey from India to Israel. Then he had risen from ordinary shepherd, to soldier, to businessman to ambassador not just for his new country, but for Kerala. From this tiny agricultural community in the Negev, as small and unremarkable as any Indian village, Bezalel had accomplished much and reached beyond his narrow world into one where he consorted with leaders and delivered lectures on his business and Indo-Jewish culture to audiences from Jerusalem to Delhi to Washington.

  The source of all this was a simple idea from an ordinary man. Bezalel had won his fame by making the wastelands of the Negev bloom. He had brought roses to the desert. And even better than that, he helped turn it into one of the biggest exports of the Israeli economy. Now in his late seventies, he could contemplate a legacy that went beyond mere commerce. He was married to a Cochini Jewess called Batzion and they had four children: two sons and two daughters. Last, but most important of all, he was a grandfather. He took none of this for granted, especially when he heard of how things had worked out in his old country. But when he left in the fifties, such things were not on the mind of a young man looking for adventure.

  Every Jew who came to Israel harbored different motives in their hearts. Bezalel left his village of Chennamangalam, the village that was home to four great religions, with the aim of living the Zionist dream. He fervently believed in Zionism, indeed, the Cochini Jews had grown up with it branded on their consciousness even before the horrors of the Second World War. They lived in a place where the Jews had never been persecuted. They never encountered the cold fear that so many of their brethren lived with elsewhere in the world. They had lived alongside Hindu, Muslim and Christian for millennia in India, free to be Jewish as well as Indian. And yet the Zionist dream lived on in the hearts of men like Bezalel. It harked back to the days when the Second Temple was broken and the Jews were driven out. They never forgot that Cochin, or “Little Jerusalem” as they sometimes called it, was only a facsimile of that past life.

  Cecil Koder, one of the old Cochini residents, wrote a poem in the 1930s that summed up their feelings:

  “It is our sincere ambition,

  To be freed from foreign domination.

  Palestine is our inspiration,

  To build our home, a Jewish nation.

  For God is always on our side,

  He is our sincere guide,

  Then why should we fear,

  When we have Him near,

  In days of sorrow and darkness.

  We have passed through darker situation,

  And won for us thrilling adm
iration,

  Jerusalem is our destination.

  The home and hope of our salvation.

  Now we make an open declaration

  To every anti-Jewish nation,

  All their baseless, ruthless persecution

  Will never bring our ruination.”

  The words seemed grimly prophetic of what was to come in Europe. What struck me reading the poem was the sense of unwavering determination. The source went way back, to the beginning. For men like Koder and Bezalel, Zionism was not born of their experiences in India; the Jews had been well loved by the Indians. It was a matter of righting the wrongs of a broader history. “It was pure Zionism,” Bezalel said as he explained his motivation to come here, “to build the country.”

  At the start of the 1940s there were around two thousand Jews in Cochin. After the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the migration began in earnest in 1950 and within a few decades there were fewer than fifty Jews left in Kerala. The primary reason to go was to return to the land of their forefathers. But they were also driven to leave by poor economic prospects. Their economic decline began once the British Empire made the port cities of Bombay and Calcutta central to their trading business, reducing Cochin’s importance. In 1947 India won its independence from Britain and as a new secular democracy the old system of colonial rule and princely states bestowing privileges on favorites became a thing of the past. Kerala was now part of the new India and the special privileges that had been enjoyed by the Jews from the time of Joseph Rabban were abolished.

  The Cochini Jews lost out on trade, then the nascent Indian government further impeded their business with a ban on the import of luxury goods. The state Communist government also nationalized key industries and businesses, such as the ferry service in Kerala which had been a profitable Jewish-owned concern. In 1957 private land estates were seized, nationalized and redistributed among the population, including that of the old Jewish land barons. This was followed in 1979 by the nationalization of the Jewish-run electric company.

  The old certainties were gone forever. The young looked around them in India and saw that the economic and political privileges that had taken centuries to build were now stripped away. Not that the Jews were specifically targeted in any way. It was all part of a wider political dynamic underway.

  Then there was the issue of marriage. Even by the fifties, intermarriage between Black and White was taboo. This reduced the choice of marriage partners for the young and the pressure to conform to the way of the elders continued to be suffocating. Whenever the Black and White Jews came together, their past joined them like a difficult and unwanted guest at the dinner table.

  The prospect of a new country, a Jewish homeland which needed people to build an infrastructure, industry, communities from scratch was appealing to many of the Cochini Jews, particularly those with little money, land or prospects in India. Israel also represented a new beginning in another key way. It was a country for all Jews, regardless of color or ethnicity. The Black Jews in particular, saw a chance for a future unencumbered by the prejudices of the past. For all the above reasons—Zionism, faith, economics, marriage and freedom—many Jews decided to quit Kerala forever.

  Some of the older guard feared the “new exodus”, as they termed it, was evidence of the old curse on the Kerala Jews reasserting itself. Those left behind lamented that their past sins were being paid for as they watched loved ones pack up and go. The answer to this fatalism may be to look at what happened to the Cochini Jews once they settled in Israel.

  It proved to be a renaissance of sorts. Today, there are 5,000 Jews in Israel with Cochini blood. Their numbers are spread all over the country, from the northernmost border with Lebanon to moshavs deep in the Negev as well as pockets of communities in Haifa and Jerusalem. As Bezalel told me, this blossoming of the Kerala Jews in Israel sprang from the dust beneath their feet when families like his arrived in the 1950s.

  * * * *

  “It was totally barren, there was nothing,” said Bezalel, gently grazing his grey stubble with black fingernails. “We lived in a small wooden structure of twenty-six square meters for each family. That was the only thing. In three years we built the first proper house with the help of the Jewish Agency. And in 1958 I married Batzion in this village. She’s from the Mattancherry community,” he told me.

  Such were the foundations of a new life. In the first years of marriage, the couple purchased land and experimented with a new agricultural business. At the time there were sixty families in the moshav, most of whom were North African Jews. Gradually, more Cochini families came to settle here and the two communities bonded.

  “They didn’t know where we came from. They didn’t know of India’s ancient culture or its history of Jews, so at first they kept their distance. After some years we settled and it came to the point where we, the Cochinis, were the first to lead the whole village towards development.”

  Bezalel proved to be a natural leader and businessman. He started by growing flowers for export. It was a new venture and would have been risky even in the most benevolent of climates. In the midst of the desert, in a country fighting for its very survival, it seemed a hopeless enterprise. He began with gladioli. By the sixties, Bezalel had achieved the proverbial-like miracle of selling flowers to Holland and won first prize for exporting gladioli from the Israeli prime minister. The central government spotted the wider potential and in 1966 approached him to develop a modern greenhouse industry in the Negev.

  “Naturally, I agreed. I went to study greenhouse techniques in London and Holland. When I came back we started the first modern climate controlled greenhouse in this village. The first in the country,” he told me. His eyes sparkled as he recollected the experiment. By growing his gladioli and then selling them overseas, he was playing his part in the Zionist dream of establishing a viable country, with its own industries, pioneering technologies and innovation. Soon, his ambitions moved a gear up. He was ready to move from gladioli to roses.

  “It took five years. Then I decided this was a nice area for growing of roses for export. At first I met with skepticism. It was several years before people understood this was a profitable business and then they started to copy.”

  The export horticultural business developed from these modest beginnings. Neighboring moshavs observed the Shahar experiment and followed suit. By then, Bezalel was exporting roses and gladioli to Holland and met increasing demand by building vast greenhouses that ringed the settlement. By this stage the government and export ministry were lending their help and finance to develop the infrastructure to get the industry off the ground. “Within ten to fifteen years Israel became the third largest exporter of flowers to Holland. I was part of that effort,” Bezalel explained.

  Indeed, flowers became one of the biggest agricultural exports for Israel within the coming decades. The trade that began in Bezalel’s back yard had escalated to a scale he never imagined. But decades later his work was partly undone by a combination of technological advance, hyper-inflation and war with Lebanon, which broke out in 1984.

  The war’s effect was crippling. Conflict with neighbors was an alien concept for the Kerala Jews who had enjoyed peaceful relations for millennia in India with all faiths, including Muslims, apart from very brief periods in history when they came under attack from the Moors and Portuguese.

  Inflation rocketed out of control in Israel and the economy was hit hard. People defaulted on loans and as war raged on its northern border, the government struggled to stabilize an economy that was in freefall.

  “Many businesses collapsed, many went bankrupt, many committed suicide,” Bezalel recalled flatly. Things then improved after a few years as stability returned and exports picked up a little. But by the 1990s, his business faced a new enemy: globalization. Israel’s flower growers were priced out of the market by new, cheaper producers from third world countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe where the cost of production was a faction of Israel’s.

 
; “We pay twenty-six dollars a day for a worker and in Africa it is a dollar a day. We have very big payments for water, electricity, for heating or cooling the greenhouses. In Africa they don’t have these costs. So they reduced the price. The market price has therefore gone down so much we can’t compete. Now everywhere in the Negev you are seeing empty greenhouses; this is the reason. Nobody can compete with that.” I had seen the redundant greenhouse tents myself, their billowing, white canopies flapping in the red dust winds.

  I asked him what he was doing now. Bezalel still grew his roses on one and a quarter acres but said this summer that too would end. His new business was grapes as well as ginger and tapioca—staples of his native Kerala. “The Brazilians are dying for that. Maybe next year we’ll try new crops.”

  Bezalel was a survivor and therefore suited to this life. He and his family had all adjusted well to the Israeli way. Of his children one had married a Jewish Canadian, one a Bulgarian, and another daughter married a South African. They lived nearby and she ran a Cochini catering business in one of the disused greenhouses catering to Israelis and tourists who wanted to taste Kerala cuisine. Her business was successful and a link to their old heritage.

  His family had never had a problem integrating like other Kerala Jews who came here. Bezalel never felt uncomfortable in Israel like some of his old countrymen such as Babu who had been driven to tears when thinking of his experience here.

  “What was it like when you first came to Israel?” I asked him. “You came from a country where the Jews had lived for almost two thousand years with no persecution and total security. Here the situation is so different.” The Kerala Jews had gone from a life of peace to one of almost perpetual insecurity and conflict, a struggle for survival in their yearned for safe haven; where once Muslims had been friends, now they were potential enemies of the state. It was deeply disturbing, this constant “suspicion of the stranger, the dark face” as Babu had put it.