The Last Jews of Kerala Page 3

  It is this synagogue more than any other that put the Kerala Jews on the map, not just in India but worldwide, a cross between a museum and place of pilgrimage. Non-Jews come to learn of the amazing history. Jews come to pay tribute to one of the oldest of the Jewish Diaspora communities that is claimed by some to trace its lineage back to the ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

  Inside, a young woman with curly short hair and huge dark eyes engulfing a thin sallow face sat at a wooden table with a small metal cash box set before her, alongside a notebook and pen. She was in her midthirties, yet her expression was weary, as if the burdens of an empire were bearing down upon her spare frame. And in some ways they were.

  Her name was Yaheh Hallegua, daughter of Johnny and Juliette Hallegua, the sister of Sammy the synagogue warden. She had the familiar look of the Synagogue Lane women: wan complexion, long drawn out features, fleshy lips and a high forehead. Yaheh held a special place in the community: she was the only woman of marriageable and child-bearing age. The only bachelors were her cousins Keith and his brother Len. For more than a decade the elders had tried to force her to marry and bear a child to continue the Paradesi line. By refusing, she extinguished the dream of a reprieve.

  Yaheh now spent her days at the synagogue selling tickets to visitors for two rupees a time, periodically shrilling instructions at them to cover their bare shoulders, or brusquely turning away those who disrespectfully wore above-the-knee skirts or shorts. She burned on a short fuse, seemingly bored and hugely irritated by the absence of variety in her years of responsibility as mistress of the gate, in charge of the endless cavalcade of tourists who all asked the same things and wore the same inappropriate dress. She retreated from the tedium by closing herself off to all around her, like a house with its shutters bolted tight to hide all signs of light and life inside. The grinding repetition of life in a one-way street was only part of her story. I was to learn later of her warmth and enjoy a smile that was as spectacular as it was unexpected. However, on that first day the expression was sour, the tone taciturn, the conversation cold to the point of inflicting verbal frostbite and it was with great relief that I saw Joy standing in the small courtyard outside the main synagogue itself. Mr. Sunshine was giving the tourists the synagogue spiel, telling the story with the contagious enthusiasm of a father reading bedtime stories to his children. I slipped off my shoes and went in to join him.

  The old synagogue is typical of the Jewish Cochini style: rectangular in shape, with a narrow staircase to the right of the entrance leading to an upper gallery where the women once sat in purdah behind latticework screens. At the front of the central hall is the Ark, a wooden box or cupboard that houses the seven copies of the sacred Torah scrolls, hidden from view behind a silk hanging. Each of the ancient scrolls is contained within a cylindrical wooden casket that is covered with sheets of beaten silver, and atop each casket is a solid gold crown, studded with rubies, sapphires and emeralds, including one Torah crown donated by the Maharajah of Cochin in 1803. In front of the Ark is the tevah, a reading lectern on a small platform from which the Torah is read during services. Narrow wooden benches are arranged in a horseshoe shape around the edge of the synagogue, flanking the Ark on three sides. Light floods in from huge open-shuttered windows and broad dust-filled sunbeams crisscross the blue and white tiled floor.

  The cool plastered walls are festooned with a rainbow of silk wall hangings: red, orange, purple, blue and shimmering gold that reflect the daylight. From the whitewashed, wooden-beamed ceiling hangs a glimmering myriad of Venetian and Belgian crystal chandeliers and lanterns: a mismatch of different sizes, shapes and colors that lend an air of baroque opulence to this otherwise modest structure. These days the lamps are rarely lit to display their full glory, for coconut oil to light the lanterns is expensive, and who would be there to see it apart from a handful of old timers? But on special occasions, such as the festival of Shimni, it remains the special duty of Mr. Joy to light the lanterns, to restore the synagogue to its full majesty. On these rare occasions, with diligent reverence the old Roman Catholic caretaker would mount his wooden stepladder and each chandelier would be carefully lowered, its crystal drops meticulously dusted, compartments filled with sweet-smelling coconut oil and then lit with a taper before being hoisted back into place. The most important lamp of all and the only one kept burning at all times is the ner tamid or “eternal light”, suspended by a chain from the ceiling directly in front of the Ark. Those privileged enough to witness the Paradesi Synagogue in its fully lit splendor can never dispel the vision: one of ethereal brilliance, as if a tiny corner of heaven had fallen to earth for those few hours.

  The floor of the synagogue is paved with hand-painted Chinese willow pattern tiles which were brought to Cochin in 1762. The tiles, each one bearing a unique design, were originally destined for the Hindu temple of the maharajah, but there are various legends about how the tiles ended up adorning the Paradesi synagogue. Gathering his audience around, Mr. Joy crouched low on the ground, fingertips splayed like a black starfish on the cool tiled floor as he gazed up at the circle of faces with shining eyes. Clearly the story of how the Jews secured the precious tiles was one of his favorites.

  “See, how the story of these tiles tells of the cunning of the Paradesi Jews,” he began. “One of the Jewish leaders saw the tiles that had been ordered by the raja. These were special tiles, each one different, each telling a new story, each hand-painted and sent in a special royal shipment from China. This one clever Jew saw the beauty of the tiles and wanted them for his synagogue. But how to persuade the raja not to use them in his temple? This was the problem. So, he told the king that the tiles were made using an ingredient that included the blood of a cow.” He chuckled in delight at the audaciousness of such a scheme.

  The story is recounted in the memoirs of Shlomo Reinman from Galicia, who came to Cochin and settled there in the 1840s after marrying a local Jewess. His writings tell of the king’s horrified reaction when informed that tiles purchased for his sacred temple might be polluted with the blood of the sacred cow. “To think that he should tread upon a floor in which the blood of the cow he worshipped was killed and then mixed,” said Shlomo’s account. The tiles were duly rejected and given away to the neighboring synagogue for its own use, and to this day they remain one of the most remarkable features of the building.

  Down the ages, the Jews gathered eye-catching treasures from around the world to furnish their beloved place of worship: chandeliers from Venice, tiles from China, sumptuous silks from Benares and a carpet from the former Ethiopian President Haile Selassie. The “Haile Selassie Carpet”, as it is known, is unrolled before the Ark on only the most auspicious occasions. It was a gift from the man known as the Lion of Judah when he visited the synagogue during his period of rule, causing a security fracas at the time. When delivered to the synagogue, local police chiefs feared the rolled up carpet harbored hidden explosives and insisted on their men supervising the unpacking and unfurling of the carpet before clearing it for use.

  The Lion of Judah is one of the many great and the good who came to pay tribute to this modest synagogue. To this day, generous visiting benefactors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, give donations to the synagogue to help finance its upkeep. It could scarcely survive without their charity or the patronage of the powerful. Its visitors’ book includes the signatures of giants of history including Jawarhalal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Lord Mountbatten and the Dalai Lama, among others.

  And it has always been so. The White Jews were always a magnet for important visitors to Kerala. Even before the age of mass communication, their story fired the souls of intellectuals, travelers and the faithful who came to see this anthropological curiosity: a Jewish community who were as white as they were Indian. There are numerous historic chronicles on what they looked like, how they lived and indeed the feud that existed with their Black brethren across the waters. All outsiders noted the clear distinction that existed between the White and the Black Jew
s of Cochin, but because of their unusual appearance and their facility with European languages, the focus was always on the White Jews. Lawson gives an eyewitness account in his memoirs:

  “The Cochin Jews are divided into two distinct classes, one known as the . . . White, the other as the Black Jews. The former are the descendants of the first settlers by marriage solely with one another. Their complexion is not exactly European, but it is the pale olive freshness most allied to it and the delicate carnation of the tips of the fingers proves that no native blood flows in their veins. The features are fine if not noble; broad and high forehead, roman nose, thick lips, generally concealed by a most luxuriant, jet-black curly beard.”

  His description of the women was less flattering and somewhat lacking in chivalry: “Whilst the Jew seems to improve in appearance as years creep on, the Jewess ‘fades as the leaf fades’, and at thirty years of age is plainness itself.” The children were described as “leprously white”.

  Other accounts show how visitors were intrigued by this insular people, an alien culture who appeared to have dropped from the sky into the backwaters of India: “Jews, nothing but Jews, a pallid Jewry whose blood has been impoverished by the stifling houses and the Indian climate contrary to all recognized theory,” writes Pierre Loti in his 1903 travelogue “India”.

  He adds: “. . . two thousand years of residence in Malabar have not in any way modified (the) Jewish faces. They are the same people, dressed in the same long robes that one meets at Jerusalem or at Tiberius; young women with delicate features, old wretches with hooked noses, children with pink and white complexions who wear paper curls over each ear just as their brothers do in Canaan.”

  Then as now, visitors were drawn to Synagogue Lane to marvel at the survival of this foreign clan, fascinated by their ability to survive in India alongside the locals, thrive even with the establishment of their own businesses, whilst retaining an unmistakable purity of lineage. Yet there was something else that was sensed by one commentator after another: a faintly perceptible fatalism that ran through the Paradesis like intricate veins of black through white marble.

  Even in the accounts of travelers from past centuries, there was recognition of a foreboding that prevailed over Jew Town. It was a jarring juxtaposition to discover in the midst of paradise, as Loti noted: “The decaying sadness and walled in isolation of this town seemed to assort ill with its setting of sky and palms, after taking this sudden turning one is no longer in India and the mind becomes bewildered, and we no longer know where we are; perhaps in the corner of a Leyden or Amsterdam ghetto that has been transported to a land whose tropical sun has baked and cleft its walls.”

  The writer rightfully placed the architecture of Synagogue Lane as Dutch-style: tall, tightly packed terraced stone houses with narrow windows that were not well suited to the stifling climate of Kerala’s tropical climate. Reading his journal, it seemed that Loti felt almost claustrophobic by the insularity of life in Jew Town. They were in the heart of India, integrated and respected even, yet on another deeper level the Jews remained apart, distinct, a refugee people. For the Jews, Kerala was always meant to be no more than an interim homeland, a sanctuary until they could return to the land of their forefathers, ending their spiritual dislocation.

  In the past a yearning for their homeland may have been the cause of the Jews’ melancholy. But by the new millennium, many of them had returned home, to Israel, leaving the few who remained to languish in a new sadness: ironically, a realization that soon their community would be lost to India forever.

  Among the twelve Jews that remained on Synagogue Lane, the First Couple of Mattencherry’s White Jews was the synagogue warden Sammy and his wife Queenie, daughter of the late Sattu Koder, wealthy businessman and Jewish patriarch. Their children had left long ago for America and the couple now lived alone in a grand house, cared for by a devoted retinue of servants. A few doors down lived Johnny and his wife Juliette. Johnny also helped run the synagogue, dealing with its upkeep and administration, and his younger daughter Yaheh lived with them. Yaheh’s beautiful older sister had left long ago to marry and settle in Israel, where she lived with her husband and three children. “All boys,” her mother joyfully told me.

  Blossom Hallegua lived towards the top end of the lane with her sons Keith and Len. Blossom was now in poor health, bedridden and reliant upon her sons for survival. Blossom’s boys were the last eligible “young men” left in Synagogue Lane, in their late thirties and forties, and both had resisted efforts to marry. Keith had once been a promising local businessman, running his own travel firm, which catered to tourists, but since coming into family money he had retreated more and more from public view and now he was a virtual recluse. During my entire stay I never saw him or his brother once and locals living on the street told me that Keith had become a changed man in recent years, preferring to lock himself away for days on end. He never came to synagogue, he never went to parties much and he rarely went out. “There was a time when we used to sit, gossip, he was fun. But lately, he’s not been . . . the same. There’s something that’s not quite right,” said one of his neighbors, sotto voce.

  Isaac Ashkenazy was another bachelor, although advanced in years and now in his ninth decade. But unlike the Byronesque brooding of his younger neighbors, Isaac was joyful in his solitude. He had never married, resisting all efforts with a violent passion, and he continued to live alone in the old family house called Sassoon Hall. He was an elusive figure, of thoughtful disposition and dressed in immaculate white kurta pyjama. Isaac was the image of Alfred Hitchcock and in true Hitchcock style would make dramatic yet fleeting appearances when least expected, head turning slightly to fix his audience with large, baleful eyes for just a split second before slipping into the shadows of his grand mansion. There was no point knocking on the door, tapping at windows, telephoning even: he refused to be drawn out. When we finally did get round to meeting at a party he turned out to be adorable company: sweet, funny and with a rather giddy sense of humor, giggling like a saucy schoolboy about the need to avoid marriage and predatory women at all costs. “Especially at my age,” as he put it.

  Isaac’s neighbor was Sarah Cohen and her neighbors on the other side were the Salems. Gamy Salem was a Black Jew who had married Reema, a Paradesi. They were Jew Town’s only “mixed” couple.

  This was the last twelve, a number that included Gamy, who was as dark skinned as they come but had honorary “White” status through marriage. I was yet to meet the Ernakulam or Black Jews across the waters, a community that had a completely different dynamic: younger, more integrated and, curiously happier and more reconciled to their shared fate of extinction.

  How was it that this became their shared destiny? There was no plague on their houses, no war, nor famine to drive them into the abyss. Theirs had been a comfortable co-existence with their countrymen. While other Diaspora communities had thrived through adversity, the Cochini Jews had embraced demise in an earthly paradise. In the end, death came not at the hands of others, but one another.

  The question was why? The elders, keepers of history, were as good a place as any to start looking for the answer.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  King of the Indian Jews

  “I traveled from Spain.

  I heard of the city of Shingly.

  I longed to see an Israeli King.

  Him, I saw with my own eyes.”

  —RABBI NISSIM, FOURTEENTH-CENTURY POET AND TRAVELER

  Within days of my arrival, I had become a stalker of the Jews of Synagogue Lane. I invaded their “natural habitat,” lurking amidst the camouflage of the Kashmiri shops while I scanned the horizon for their distinctive markings: white skin and silver heads encased in kippah caps. Once I spotted my prey, the quiet thrill of adrenalin coursed through my body as I homed in silently, mercilessly, until I was there, upon their very necks.

  I targeted the biggest beast in the forest first: synagogue warden Sammy, the ma
n with all the answers, I was told. It proved to be a risky endeavor as I would be the one who eventually received a mauling from the aged community patriarch.

  Sammy was an elusive and mercurial character. Some spoke of him as a prickly yet kindly old buffer who came from one of the oldest and grandest of families of White Jews, who had married the richest Jewess in town, thereby cementing his position in the pantheon of elders. His detractors castigated a proud and arrogant man, prone to outbursts of anger, one privately tormented by the realization that the Paradesi Synagogue would be closed at the end of his lifetime, on his watch. Sammy lived with the knowledge that he would go down in history as the last warden of the last working synagogue in Kerala. His was the inevitable legacy of failure.

  He was not the easiest man to like. But it was easier to understand the source of his volatile moods. Every time a stranger visited, every time he explained the story of his people, an unspoken question hung in the air: why did it end? Behind the glittering façade of success, beyond the decorous glory of the synagogue and the history that stretched behind them like a golden-paved pathway leading to their Jerusalem, there was the realization that the road lying ahead was a wasteland stripped of the hope that only youth can bring to an exhausted generation. For the Jews of Cochin, the future could promise only endings.

  The others had the luxury of hiding behind their lace-draped shutters, screening out reality if they wished, but Sammy was the man in the public eye who dealt with that question every day.

  The pressure upon him was particularly keen at this time of year, which was at the height of the festival season. I had landed on the day of Yom Kippur, the day of abstinence and reconciliation which had seen this small community pray and fast for almost twenty-four hours. The timing was not deliberate, yet it proved far from ideal as the community was stretched—emotionally and physically. Despite most of the community being in their seventies or eighties, they had prayed inside the synagogue for hours on end, much of it standing, after taking no food or water from daybreak to sundown.