The Last Jews of Kerala

by Edna Fernandes

  Even as he spoke of no tension, I could feel his tension. And little wonder. Earlier that year there had been a brief but brutal skirmish. Israel’s northern settlements had faced rock launcher bombardment from Lebanon, incurring an Israeli retaliation with all its formidable firepower. Yet this bloody confrontation, which the world watched in dismay, was less of an immediate concern to Abraham than the ceaseless paranoia of suicide bombings in the city where he lived. This was the “tension” he spoke of: the crippling dread of an invisible enemy, an enemy who might even look like your friend, who could blow up a bus, a car or a marketplace at any time.

  “For now, Jerusalem’s more calm,” he told me. “But for how long? Before, each month, each week there were explosions of suicide bombs in Jerusalem. Every week. Every week from 2003 to 2005, every week there was news of a suicide bombing. So many Israelis died.”

  He compared this to India, where there was no history of Jews being targeted by fanatics, despite India being home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the world. The synagogue resided next to the police station in Mattancherry, yet the threat was deemed so miniscule that I rarely saw the police officer awake at his post. There, of course, the situation was very different. The Jews had been such a tiny minority group that they did not register on the political radar of militant religious groups from either Hinduism or Islam. There they were not power brokers. Here, the Kerala Jews had to wake up to a relentless struggle for their survival. After thirty years, Abraham was tired of struggling.

  * * * *

  The next day was Shabbat, so Abraham would spend his day at the local synagogue. On Sunday he worked as usual until three. He told me that he had not visited the Wall for six months. He was put off by the journey and the security fears, so I offered to pick him up from work and go there with him. He seemed pleased with the suggestion and agreed.

  He told me that for all Jews the Wall represented sacrifices. After the destruction of the Second Temple almost two thousand years before, the only remaining part was the Western Wall. The ancient Jews had sacrificed their lives to protect it. Today it was a place to remember, a place to supplicate before God.

  He issued me with instructions ahead of our visit, already excited. “The first time people visit they feel they can bring their problems here. Even Hillary Clinton came and put her paper in the wall. You can put your request to God in this place and here you will receive the answer.”

  One could imagine what Hillary had asked for. Abraham told me I should also write a petition to place in the Wall. He told me the Wall was the only reason he came to Israel. It was the reason he had stayed so long. I asked him if he had ever offered a petition at the Wall. “Only twice. Both times, He answered,” he replied.

  On Sunday afternoon I picked him up in the car. The Palestinian driver Nazeeh decided he would use the journey as an opportunity to ask how he could get a job as an ambulance driver as tourism earnings had collapsed since the conflict with Lebanon. The two dipped in and out of Hebrew and English. Abraham told Nazeeh that the rules were very strict, that one would need a clean driving license for at least two years—that meant no tickets, no accidents. This set the usually mildmannered Nazeeh off. He launched into a tirade about the iniquity of such a requirement. As he turned around to me to protest, averting all attention from the traffic flow, he shouted, “It is impossible. Show me a driver in Jerusalem with no tickets and I show you a man who does not drive. Two years is too long. And you’re telling me I must have no accidents in this time? Can you believe this?” he now gestured to me in the rear mirror.

  “The job’s for an ambulance driver. Is it unreasonable to expect a driver who does not cause accidents?” I replied.

  “Perhaps,” he shrugged. “But for Israeli, I am sure there is no problem getting through this paperwork. For Palestinian, always extra demands, bigger headaches. Still, I will try. The old man says what to lose, eh?”

  The old Jew and the young Palestinian seemed to get on well. At one stage they became engrossed in an amusing conversation in Hebrew and laughed uproariously. When asked what they were discussing, Nazeeh looked sheepish and replied untruthfully, “Don’t worry. It’s not so interesting.”

  We arrived at the entrance by Dung Gate at 3:30 PM, near the car park. The huge plaza that stands before the vast Western Wall is accessed only through a high security checkpoint—an airport style walk-through screener to detect weapons or explosive, plus a bag check by Israeli officers. Abraham fished into his bag and gave me a cream silk headscarf to cover the head before going to the Wall. The plaza was thronging with people. There were few tourists, mostly Jewish families.

  The Wall towered before us. The vast structure was built of huge pale gold slabs of Jerusalem stone, some of which were two meters high. In its time, the Second Temple had been a vision of God’s glory on earth. The walls were adorned with white marble delicately veined with lines of red and blue. The ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus describes doors of gold leading into the Hekhal which were further embellished with “golden vines from which depended grape clusters as tall as a man”. A curtain of scarlet, blue and purple linen and embroidered with sun, moon and stars hung above the doors.

  Josephus described the Temple’s supporting walls as “the greatest ever heard of.” The longest of them was the western wall, which measured 530 yards. The stones used for these walls were massive, with some weighing as much as five tons. The sanctuary of the Temple was gilded and from a distance the building was an ethereal vision of white and gold, dazzling onlookers in the sunlight, as if Yahweh himself had blinded them with his presence for a moment.

  Abraham headed towards the men’s section of the Wall, while I went to the women’s on the right. The approach was down a steep path that led directly to the bare stone. White plastic chairs were sporadically set out to allow people to sit and pray, contemplate or just rest. Low level wooden lecterns stood ready with copies of the Torah.

  The women, heads covered in squares of silk, lined up in rows against the Wall, some gently rocking side to side while holding their arms across their chests, others with heads bobbing back and forth, their faces pressed up against the bare stone. Here the Jews come to commune directly with God. Several of the women were weeping, wet cheeks pressed against the pages of the open Torah, forehead and bodies leaning into the Wall as they sobbed their sorrows and entreaties into the sun-warmed stone. Tears coursed down the cheeks of many of the women who prayed here, from old orthodox Jews, dressed head to toe in black with thick dark stockings and sensible shoes to young mothers rocking their toddlers or swaddled newborn in their arms. There were young female Israeli soldiers, their carelessly slung rifles in arresting contrast to their demure and pious demeanor. I watched one beautiful young Jewess, silky black hair swathed in a pink scarf of roses that framed her perfectly made up face as she bowed her head in prayer, rocking on her black stiletto boots, arms wrapped tight around her white fake fur jacket.

  They came. Young and old, black and white. There was no sound discernable apart from the weeping and murmur of passages of the Torah. Lovebirds, sleek with chests blushing a soft pink swooped overhead and settled into cracks in the wall high over our heads, watching the people below. Tiny sparrows whizzed over our heads and burrowed into the gaps to feed their chicks. The lower cracks and crevices between the huge slabs of stone were jammed with countless scraps of white paper, each one containing a personal epistle.

  Some of the pilgrims were so overwhelmed they simply fell prostrate at the foot of the Wall itself. Time passed quickly as I sat and watched the tide of people. They shed tears in a way I had rarely seen, even at other significant places of pilgrimage for other faiths. Why did they cry so? Was it for themselves? Was it a sudden realization of the pain suffered by their people over the millennia, or did they cry for the burden of their history which continued to deny them peace, even here in the Promised Land? It was a place to unload the agonies of past and present, personal and communal.<
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  When a space cleared, I did as Abraham suggested and placed my own petition amidst the thousands of others, as non-Jews are allowed to do. I left to meet up with him. He was slowly making his way across the plaza, a tiny little figure in a green puffa jacket amid this vast sea of white stone.

  “What did you pray for,” I asked. “Did you pray to return to India?”

  “Not India. I prayed for Anil. My firstborn grandchild. I pray that he finds a good girl to marry. He desires marriage above all else for his happiness. That is all.”

  “You prayed for a Cochini Jewish girl?”

  “Not just Cochini. Those days are gone. Any Jewish girl. But she must be soft minded, a good heart. I only ask God, ‘Give him a wife who will not give him headache’.”

  I thought once again of the peppercorn necklace in Anil’s pocket. His quest was now in the arena of the highest power.

  * * * *

  Afterwards, Nazeeh dropped us off at Abraham’s house. Inside, he took us through to the kitchen-living room. His fourteen-year-old granddaughter was sprawled on the floor with her friend, television blaring, as they roared with laughter at an Israeli standup comedian. She barely acknowledged him when he entered, continuing her conversation with her friend as Abraham introduced us and set about making tea and cutting thick slices of cake.

  In sharp contrast to the old fashioned courtesy that the young show the old in India, this young girl ignored him, turning up the TV sound to drown her grandfather’s voice. He limped about the kitchen, refusing my offer to help and insisting on acting the host, in the Indian way.

  The family Chihuahua nipped my shoe and then settled by my feet as I drank tea, eyes fixed on me like black coals smoldering in the snow of his white fur, as if looking for any sign of provocation to attack. As his granddaughter continued to ignore him, guffawing loudly, he repeated emphatically that it was time to leave Jerusalem.

  “I see now this isn’t for me. My son and grandchildren here are not keeping the Sabbath and festivals. Not because of work, they don’t care for our religion. In three decades, I’ve made the journey from Israel to India nineteen times. I’ve more feeling for the grandchildren there, you see.”

  Abraham was surrounded by family in this house. He couldn’t move for family. He worked and lived an active life and at last, he was in the land of his forefathers. He prayed at the Wall which seemed to be his only source of comfort in a city that was a stranger. In his first winter in Jerusalem he had experienced snowfall. It measured twenty centimeters high and he remembered the shock of seeing tiny symmetrical icicles in the shape of flowers. At the time it seemed magical and emblematic of his new life which seemed to offer an air of every possibility. Now when he thought of snow, there was no glitter of delight in his eyes. The coldness of snowfalls in Jerusalem merely made him recall the warmth of Cochin. The unobserved Sabbath reminded him of prayers in the houses of friends in Ernakulam. The drudgery of working life here underscored the life of ease he had forsaken. And every time he watched the news to see pictures of carnage and war, he thought of Jew Town, his friends from the synagogue and the mosque and the temple.

  “As a young man, when I first came here, I told myself, ‘Abraham, this is heaven.’ Now I know. Not heaven.” He broke off a piece of cake, offering it to the dog that licked it up eagerly. Now as he approached his ninth decade, Abraham wanted to overturn his life once more, leave the land of his prophets and make a fresh aliyah back to India.

  “I am more than seventy. I am in my last years and I think nothing of the future,” he told me, head wobbling gently from side to side, palms resting flat on his thighs. “I don’t worry. I really don’t worry any more. I only seek a calm life now, to finish my life with calmness. To die in calmness. In Cochin. This is my wish.”

  * * * *

  Later that afternoon after leaving Abraham I walked through Jaffa Gate, one of the vast gateways that lead into the ancient citadel city, and made my way towards the Tower of David. Its pale stonework glowed in the dying sunshine. I bought a ticket and passed through the gates to gardens of blue lavender that filled an old courtyard suffused with its perfume. I mounted the sequence of steep stairwells that led to the viewing platform at the top which afforded uninterrupted views across the rooftops of Old Jerusalem. The sun was descending and hung low now, a mellow orange disc in pale blue skies. The city lay below, an ancient and intricate labyrinth of gold and shadow that had been the source of spiritual inspiration and suffering. I could see tiny figures thronging the narrow walkways below that threaded together the separate quarters of the city.

  Each was a microcosm of Jerusalem’s heritage, peoples who loved the city and spilled blood for it over the millennia.

  In the middle distance was the Temple Mount, the disputed site that is venerated by both Muslims and Jews, and therein the gold glint of the Dome of the Rock shrine and the silver of El-Aqsa Mosque. The surrounding pathways fed into the heart of the Arab souk in the Muslim quarter, which was congregated with women shopping for provisions, some wearing designer jeans, while others remained cloaked in the anonymity of the burqa with just almond kohl eyes visible, a tantalizing glimpse of their masked vivaciousness evident in scarlet painted toe nails. They haggled with the stallholders without pity for profit, selecting the choicest produce, beating down the prices before gathering up their brown-paper parcels to their bosom. There were handsome clean-shaven youths and bearded old men with sun-withered faces of parchment, earnest in conversation as they walked in pairs, sometimes hands lightly linked in friendship as is the Eastern way. Those on their way to the mosque wore prayer caps as they hurried for namaaz, attired in immaculate white robes that somehow defied the film of dust that engulfed all else. Others dressed in Arab-style headscarves and expensive kaftan robes, their wealth displayed via thick gold rings and bracelets glinting upon fingers and wrists.

  Whole lanes were devoted to spices and condiments, others to brass pots and kitchen ware. In the food market, hawkers hollered out prices in Arabic, proffering buyers a taste of olives and dates or sugar-dusted Turkish Delight shot through with slivers of pistachio or flavored with essence of lemon and rose. Pomegranates were sliced open at a whim to reveal creamy insides studded with seeds the color and clarity of rubies in a Pasha’s jeweled turban. In the meat quarter, halal butchers brandished fearsome bloodied choppers that deftly sliced stacks of mutton ribs or quartered chickens beneath the unremitting scrutiny of fearsome elderly matriarchs, moustaches bristling at the slightest hint of being cheated.

  Along the Via Dolorosa in the Christian quarter, the pathway once taken by Christ as he carried his cross to Calvary is lined now with scores of souvenir shops such as the “Ninth Station Boutique”, many of which are run by Christian Palestinians. As one traces the steps of Christ on his path of suffering, one is assailed by the vision of thousands of religious icons, a myriad of gold-leafed halos in resplendent relief. Wall upon wall of crosses, rosaries and scapulas hung in an array of beads and color, baskets of precious vials of holy water from the River Jordan or earth excavated from Bethlehem and entombed in tiny lockets, promising to ward off a manifold of evils. Pavement galleries depicting the Crucifixion, the Last Supper, Mary and baby Jesus stared out at all who passed, as shopkeepers beckoned passing trade with open palms and the Eastern promise of “Very cheap” or “Very antique”.

  In the lanes that led to the Jewish quarter and Western Wall, the Jews made their way through the uneven warren until they reached the security gates which were protected by armed guards, special walkway scanners and x-ray machines. Orthodox Jews who made Jerusalem their mission, wearing wide brimmed hats and heavy black coats, impervious to the climate; conservative womenfolk in headscarves and wigs grasped tightly the hands of kippah-capped children. They skipped quickly towards their destination, as if running late for an appointment, watched by Palestinian shopkeepers whose eyes burned with a thousand suppressed grievances.

  From high above the old city, the rushing figur
es seemed one and the same, a blur of flowing robes in the colors of the landscape itself. The tableau seemed set in a time that was millennia old, beyond modernity. As the shadows deepened, the fragrance of lavender and incense, shaami kebab and fried onion appeased the senses. In the distance the shimmering white concourse of the Western Wall shone still. And beyond lay the majestic Dome of the Rock, marking the site of a black rock where it is believed Muhammad ascended to heaven on his white steed after completing his Night Journey. The Rock is seen by both Muslim and Jew to be “the center of the world, the entrance to the Garden of Eden, source of fertility”, said Armstrong’s A History of Jerusalem. Who holds the key to this sacred gateway remains a source of strife—any threat to this place from one or the other could ignite the whole of Jerusalem once more.

  From a distance, all one discerned was beauty and it did not seem possible that stones had the power to make a city bleed. If one sat high above the old city and listened during the course of the day one would discern the peel of bells from the Christian quarter, the haunting cry of the muezzin from the Muslim quarter and the triumphal blast of the shofar. Yet unlike Kerala, in Jerusalem the sounds spoke of discord not unity.

  Surveying the eternal city as it surrendered to night, until all that was visible was the stark silhouette of minarets and domes against purple skies, I remembered earlier that day, after dropping Abraham at his house, Nazeeh told me he had appreciated the old man’s manners. It was his city too and yet many Israelis made him feel like he did not belong. He had not felt that with the old man. He was all the more approving when he heard of the Jews’ relations with the Muslims in India itself. It was all a revelation to him. In this city where his forefathers had grown up, Nazeeh constantly fretted for the future of his children. Would they have the chance of a good job; would they have a house of their own; or the chance of peace? Last and most worrisome of all, would a place remain for them in their ancestral land? He had no satisfying answers to any of these questions. Some of these questions had also preoccupied the Cochini Jews and compelled many to leave their interim paradise for Israel.