The Last Jews of Kerala Read online

  As he took his place on the tevah, the groom looked toward his bride and then recited a love song. Sometimes the congregation would join in. The bride sat on a chair, screened from view by a linen curtain on a circular rail suspended above her head. In the table in front of the Ark was the ketubah, the synagogue registry, pen and inkstand. The Cochini ketubah or marriage contract is quite beautiful, lavishly decorated with flowers, birds of paradise and animals as well as auspicious motifs around a central inscription calling upon God to bless the marriage and make it fertile: “Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons like olive saplings around your table. So shall the man who fears the Lord be blessed.”

  As happy memories flooded the Hallegua household, I heard the love story of the grandparents of the groom we were toasting. “Now that was something,” said one of the ladies softly as she smoothed the skirts of her sari. “Baby and Balfour went through so much to be together. See, they were what you people would call a love match.”

  * * * *

  The year was 1950, the era of conservatism, not just in India but in the West. India was still newly independent, yet entrenched in the ancient social traditions and caste boundaries. America’s civil rights movement was still nascent; Britain was about to witness seismic changes to its cultural landscape as children of the Empire arrived to make a new life. Yet, just as the Black Jews of Kerala had been early pioneers in their battle for racial equality in the sixteenth century, so they would begin the decade of the 1950s by breaking the last taboo among Black and White Jews.

  Balfour was the second son of Ruth and A. B. Salem, the man who did more than anyone to break barriers between the Paradesi and Malabari Jews. Balfour was the one who fought for equality in matters of the heart. A tall man, with slicked black hair and a neat pencil moustache in the style of a silent movie star, he fell in love with Seema “Baby” Koder, who belonged to the White community. She bore the name of one of the great Paradesi clans and she was also a beauty, with expressive dark eyes and a creamy complexion. Baby and Balfour decided they would marry but were coldly informed by the White elders that their marriage could not be held in the Paradesi Synagogue.

  Undeterred, they left for Bombay where they married in a Baghdadi Jewish synagogue with only A. B. Salem and his oldest son Raymond in attendance. The bride’s family refused to come and the wedding was boycotted by other Cochini Jews who had migrated to Bombay. Their love affair was deemed a scandal which flouted centuries of tradition that decreed that Black and White Jews should never intermarry.

  Raymond took the official wedding photograph of the couple. It showed Balfour dressed in a smart white double-breasted suit, with dark cravat and pocket handkerchief and white loafers, looking every inch the sophisticated dandy. A small smile played beneath his moustache as he lent an arm to his bride. Baby wore an ornate lace gown, with a long tulle train. Her hair was pulled back into a loose chignon and held in place with a headpiece of white flowers and lace. Cradled in her arms was a bouquet of white flowers and palm fronds to remind her of home. She was perfect, yet it was not her vestal beauty that struck me while examining the old photo, but the look of defiance written in the soft curves of her face. As if she knew what was coming.

  Back in Cochin, the elders reacted with utter disbelief and rage. Keen to scupper the union, a visiting rabbi was consulted on the legality of the marriage, yet he harked back to the sixteenth century rabbinical ruling which said marriage was permissible provided all the proper ceremonies had been carried out.

  The couple initially moved to Madras in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Balfour got work as an engineer there and Baby attempted to broker reconciliation with her family through a series of letters. Her family rejected her entreaties. Indeed, the rest of her community decided that if she ever stepped foot in Cochin she should be barred from the Paradesi Synagogue.

  As months passed the pain of separation become intolerable. The couple were displaced from their family, their synagogue and yearned to come home. Baby’s parents were also missing their daughter and with the approach of Yom Kippur, they relented and invited her to visit.

  It should have been a happy homecoming. Yet she was oblivious that the Paradesi elders had passed a motion to bar her from entering the synagogue. As far as they were concerned, she was no longer a White Jew, but a person of no status in their eyes. She was now one of the others. She arrived in time for Yom Kippur but was told by her family and in-laws to avoid the synagogue. The Paradesi elders had already decided that if she arrived to pray, they would stage a walk-out and hold services in Sassoon Hall, a private house a few doors down. In preparation, some of the Torah scrolls had already been taken to the private residence in preparation.

  Many would have found such a boycott difficult to bear. But the steely look in Baby’s eye hinted she was tougher than anyone imagined. On the day of Shabbat, she walked boldly into the Paradesi Synagogue to take her place upstairs. There was an immediate walkout of both men and women, while one man ordered her to leave. These were people she had grown up with, so the pain and degradation of their rejection must have been deep. Her resolve remained undiminished and she remained in her seat, insisting on her right to pray in the synagogue. They left her to it, unwilling to share the synagogue with what they saw as a tarnished woman. Baby remained where she was and only when she had finished praying did she get up from her seat and leave. It was the Kerala Jews’ Rosa Parks moment.

  She stood by her principles. Yet for the sake of harmony and perhaps her family, when she visited the Paradesi Synagogue in the future, she did not go upstairs, but sat on a bench downstairs at the back. In old age, she confided to friends and family of the loneliness of those first days of married life and her return to Kerala. After time, the couple relocated to Cochin and many families continued to cut them out of their society. The pettiness of some of her neighbors was vicious, with a few families even refusing to attend any party that Balfour and Baby were invited to. Yet some did accept the marriage and over time life almost returned to normality.

  The Salems continued to trail-blaze. Where Balfour went, his younger brother Gamy followed. Gamy and Reema married seven years later in Bombay. But when it came to going to synagogue, Reema simply took a seat downstairs and at the back, explaining that she did not have her sister-in-law’s pugnacious spirit.

  One account of the story, Kashrut, Caste and Kaballah by Katz and Goldberg, tellingly refers to how the young Gamy was so angered by the discrimination of the elders that he boycotted synagogue services for many years. To this day Gamy seemed to have little love for religion, having suffered at first hand the bigotry that was practiced in its name. His sisters went further, marrying outside the Jewish community altogether. Esther married a Hindu and Malkah a Christian.

  The prejudice continued to plague the following generation. Baby and Balfour’s first son Leslie was banned from being circumcised in the synagogue itself because he was of mixed blood. Instead, the Paradesi elders suggested the ritual take place in Sassoon Hall. The couple was incensed by the suggestion that the ceremony be held in a private house and instead chose to have him circumcised in one of the Malabari synagogues. The stubborn Paradesi elders refused to acknowledge this alternative arrangement and like characters in some black comedy, they remained seated in silence at Sassoon Hall, hosting a circumcision banquet in the absence of the child and his parents.

  It took a full generation for equality to arrive in matters of love. When Leslie grew up and in turn married Glennis Simon, another White Jewess, things had moved on considerably from the time of his parents’ wedding. Everyone, Black and White, came to celebrate the marriage in 1978. The last taboo had been irrevocably destroyed.

  But by then it was too late to make any difference to the community’s future. After millennia of Jewish refugees coming to Kerala’s shores, the tide of migration had turned back towards Israel. Within a decade or so, most of the community was gone. Balfour, Baby, Leslie and Glenn
is were among those who moved to Israel. Balfour died there but Baby lived to see her grandson’s wedding day in the land of their ancient forefathers. Their way, the way of all Jews coming together, turned out to be the future. This was what Israel was meant to be. The time of the old Paradesi prejudices was over. Yet the taste of victory was bitter upon their lips.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  “A Wife Who Will Not Give Me Headache”

  “My rabbi said, ‘Settle, settle. What about a woman like Mrs. Blitzstein? She may not be a great beauty, but nobody is better at smuggling food and light firearms in and out of the ghetto’ . . . Pity my dilemma, dear reader. Never to find all the requirements one needs in a single member of the opposite sex.”

  —WOODY ALLEN

  After the exodus from Kerala, those left behind faced stark choices, particularly the few youngsters that remained. There were no people in their teens or twenties in the Paradesi community, but among the Malabaris there were some: Babu’s girls, another three daughters in the old Jewish village of Parul and the Abraham boys, Anil and Solomon.

  Solomon had already left Cochin for Chennai where he worked. I met Anil at the wedding celebration at Johnny’s house. He and his brother spent most of the night watching cricket, whooping with delight, but later that evening as we chatted he offered to take me around Cochin the next day to show me the old villages of Parul and Chennamangalam.

  Anil was the eldest son of Samuel Abraham, who had moved to Israel before coming home again, disenchanted with what he discovered there. Anil’s maternal grandfather was the leading elder of the Malabar Jews, Isaac Joshua, who was fiercely protective of his community’s legacy. Anil grew up in the heart of this influential family, built on devotion to one another and to the faith. At the Shimni/Simhat Torah celebration a few evenings before, I met Anil for the first time. While the Paradesi Synagogue had been dressed for the occasion and dazzled, the Ernakulam place of worship was simply lit and furnished with a few garlands of fresh jasmine. In some ways it reflected the respective personalities of the communities themselves. That night I watched a young man who had inherited his grandfather’s combination of great seriousness and purpose with an ability to find humor in everything. He was a natural optimist and seemed to infect everyone with his easy manner. He had the potential to take over from Isaac Joshua, I thought, if there was anything left to lead by that time. After the prayer ceremony, Anil had assisted his grandfather and father in preparing for the blessings at the dinner table before we sat down to a Simhat Torah feast for the Malabaris and their friends, with forty of us—Jews and non-Jews—around the table. Here, Anil was at his most contented—in the synagogue anteroom, eating fire-breathing curry, singing old Hebrew songs as his raucous grandfather thumped the table to keep time. After a few drinks, as everyone melted into conviviality, he would cast a shy glance towards the girls at the other end of the table, slowly passing a hand over his hair, smoothing it down.

  Over the years the family had constructed a very happy and comfortable life in a suburb near Ernakulam. They had a successful business now and Anil was working as a tour guide. It earned him top dollar rates and the only thing left was to find a wife and settle down.

  In any other society his options would be good. He was in his late twenties, from a respectable family and with a well paid job. His two biggest attributes were his likeability and his integrity. He lived part of his childhood in Israel until the family came back. But unlike many others, Anil had no desire to leave India again. His heart was bound to Kerala. As we walked along the riverbank not far from the historic Jewish village of Parul, he told me of his dilemma. He loved it here. The food, the people, the land. The smell of pepper that grew in long curling strands on the trees all around us. Walking through ankle-deep grass along the river banks, sheltered by the shade of tall slender palms and pepper trees. Watching the narrow-boats dotting the river, as fishermen draw nets like water-spangled cobwebs from the water. When Anil felt pressured, “when I need to breathe” as he put it, he would climb into his car and drive for thirty minutes to a spot like this, where little had changed in a hundred years. He stretched out his hand and snatched a strand of green peppercorns from a nearby tree, like a tiny beaded necklace in his palm.

  Anil was truly a man of Cochin. In a world where everyone seemed to want more, he told me he had enough. Nothing could match what he had been born to. And yet, for all this, he was seriously considering going to Israel to find a bride. It was all that was missing. I asked him about the prospects for marriage here and he shook his head, rubbing the peppercorn necklace between finger and thumb, the friction releasing its pungent smell from the small green beads. His family had exhausted all options, not just in Kerala where they were few, but even as far as Bombay, which was home to the Bene Israel Jews.

  “I don’t wish to go, you understand. But I must look at my choices. Here there’s no chance to find a wife.”

  When I asked him what he looked for in a bride, he didn’t say she must be pretty, or rich or educated. His requirements were fairly uncomplicated.

  “A Jewish wife who will not give me headache,” he said, and then laughed, as if embarrassed, as if he’d wished for the ridiculous.

  * * * *

  He slipped the necklace into his pocket and we got back into the car to drive to the old Parul synagogue. Once it had been the most beautiful of all the eight places of worship in Kerala. The beautiful carved wooden Ark, engraved with flowers and leaves and topped with a crown, had been dismantled and taken to the Israel Museum years ago. Like the Paradesi synagogue, from its ceiling was suspended a myriad of glass lanterns of different colors, yet Parul’s structure was unsound and the Jews could not muster funds to save it. Anil hoped that by showing all this to visiting Israelis and Jews from around the world, he could raise awareness and perhaps someone would offer to fund their restoration.

  According to Jussay’s The Jews of Kerala, Parul was the second oldest synagogue after the ones in Cranganore, supposedly containing two Torah scrolls brought from Shingly after the destruction by the Moors in the sixteenth century. Jussay relates a story about how the synagogue fell into disuse after the Jews of Parul, angered by the Christians, offered incense in mockery of Christian worship. For this act of sacrilege, they were punished with the plague, he said. Their synagogue fell into disuse and the ner tamid or Eternal Lamp was hung in the street as a sign of contrition. It was rebuilt in 1616 by Jacob Castiel, leader of the Jewish community in Cochin.

  The Parul Jews had further run-ins with some Christians who tried to disrupt their worship by loudly banging drums outside the synagogue during Shabbat. Frustrated, the Jews turned to the Viceroy of India who was visiting Travancore at the time. The Jews gained an audience with the Viceroy who was sympathetic and he ordered the erection of two stone pillars at the road entering Jew Street to bar traffic. The Jews hailed this as a victory.

  We pulled up outside Jew Street, just in front of its famous pillars. A white goat was tied to the synagogue’s entrance gates, which were locked. Anil went to talk to the neighbor who warned him that the place had become infested with cobras and that there were so many they were infiltrating his house through the broken boundary walls.

  We went to the gate and unlocked it, passing the goat on our way. Lying between us and the synagogue itself was a vast overgrown garden. The grass was almost waist-high in places, brown and tangled bushes engulfed the pathway which was no longer visible. If one looked carefully at the ground, one could discern pale gold translucent husks of old snake skins. The synagogue lay some fifty yards ahead. Nobody came here anymore, so no one knew what state it was in. In a few years, with the entire community gone, would this be the fate of all the synagogues?

  The goat bleated in fear, warning us not to go any further. Anil told me the neighbors also had warned against it. “They killed two cobras in the last week alone. Both came through the crack in the synagogue wall,” he said. Now the goat was pulling wild
ly at its tethers, slipping and sliding as it attempted to move away from the gate. I wanted to see inside, but not enough to make that walk. “If you’re ready to meet your relatives and your maker, we can go see it,” joked Anil. “Although, I’m not quite ready yet.”

  We heeded the goat’s counsel in the end and padlocked the gate again. Mightily relieved, the goat settled back into his spot and watched us leave. All the houses in Parul’s Jew Town were now in the hands of Hindus and Christians. No Jews were left and the synagogue was the only reminder of what once was.

  Now, he was taking me to meet his grandmother’s brother who lived not far from the other Jewish village of Chennamangalam. This particular village had done much better in the lottery of preservation. It won a grant from the Indian government to restore the synagogue. Next to the synagogue was the oldest Jewish tombstone in Kerala, dated 1269. It was inscribed in Hebrew with “Sara bat Israel” or Sara, daughter of Israel. This was one of the oldest proofs of the antiquity of the Jewish community in Cochin. The synagogue’s foundations were said to date back to sixteenth century. But Chennamangalam had another claim to fame. It was also a symbol of religious tolerance. One story of the village said a former maharajah wished to have each of the four major faiths represented in this place and so designated four points for the construction of a synagogue, a Christian church, a Hindu temple and a mosque. It was said that at the axis that formed the center of these cardinal points, he built a palace.