The Last Jews of Kerala Read online

  The leader of the Jews is then portrayed in the audience chamber of the raja’s palace, receiving a gift from the kingdom. This marks the real arrival of the Jews in Cochini society, no longer just another class of immigrant trading serfs, but now a favored people in their adoptive land, a chosen few, no less.

  Little of the Cochini Jews’ history is documented, but the story of their special status under the raja is recorded by one key artifact: a set of copper plates engraved with a royal decree. Cochini tradition says the plates were awarded to Joseph Rabban in 379 CE and they represent the clearest evidence of the antiquity of this community. The Paradesi elders says the original plates are kept in the Ark inside their synagogue, but scholars differ in opinion on the antiquity of these particular copper plates, with some dating them as late as 1000 CE.

  The plates state that the Hindu king of Malabar awarded Rabban the village of Anjuvannam and its revenues as well as according him the right to certain privileges of the ruling class, such as riding an elephant, being carried aloft on a palanquin and being shielded by his very own state parasol! The three small rectangular copper plates are engraved in an ancient Tamil language written in the Vetteluttu script. A translation reads:

  “Hail and Prosperity. The following gift was graciously made by him who had assumed the title King of Kings. His majesty the King Shri Parkaran Iravi Vanmar whose ancestors have been wielding the scepter for many hundred thousand years . . . was pleased to make the following gifts: We have granted Joseph Rabban the village of Anjuvannam together with propriety rights, tolls on boats and carts, the revenue and the title of Anjuvannam, the lamp of the day, cloth spread in front to walk on a palanquin, a parasol, a Vaduga drum, trumpet, a gateway, a garland, decoration with festoons and so forth. We have granted him the land tax and the weight tax; moreover we have sanctioned with these copper plates that he need not pay the dues which the inhabitants of the other cities pay the Royal Palace and that he may enjoy the benefits they enjoy.”

  The gift of Anjuvannam is made in perpetuity to Rabban’s successors or as the charter poetically phrases it: “so long as the world and moon exist”.

  The Jews’charter was unique in that it granted them rights that were usually the preserve of the royal family alone, including firing three salutes at daybreak and on the day of a marriage. Naturally, both sides of the Cochini Jewish family wanted to claim Rabban as their own, thereby eulogizing him in word and song. He who hailed from Joseph Rabban hailed from a line of kings.

  In the Malayalam folksongs, recorded by the women of the community in handwritten notebooks and handed down the generations, there is a wedding song that likens Joseph Rabban to a handsome bridegroom. These songs are a musical history of the people, so it is unsurprising that Joseph Rabban, their idealized first man, should feature so prominently. The lyric of one wedding song said on the day of marriage “the bridegroom is like Joseph Rabban, he is like a king.”

  To the Jews of Kerala, Joseph Rabban was everything: founding father. Groom to the bride, Cochin’s Jewish people. And King of the Jews in this realm of the East.

  A link back to this Jewish King of Shingly was proof of purity. The White Jews insisted that they were the true ancestors of this line and I guessed that in a way Sammy saw himself as the natural inheritor of Joseph Rabban himself. Any questioning of this truth, the truth of the Parsadesi Jews, was a questioning of the position of Sammy Hallegua himself, as well as his ancestors.

  But there was a second, even more controversial test of Jewish status for the Paradesi community: color. The white skinned Jews claimed their very pallor was proof of their purity.

  Their people had predominantly hailed from Europe: many of their number arrived in India after fleeing religious persecution during the Inquisition of the sixteenth century. On reaching the Malabar coastline they found another older community of Jews, but one which was darker skinned and fully integrated with the local Cochini people. Some of those European Jews married some of the Jews who originated from Cranganore. But there was evidence of tensions creeping between the Black and White communities early on. David Mandelbaum, an academic who studied the Cochini Jewry extensively in the twentieth century, wrote of how the European Jews on their arrival in India found it difficult to relate to their brethren, who differed in so many ways.

  Keen to distinguish themselves, the Paradesis claimed they had never been polluted by non-Jewish blood. They claimed to have a deeper understanding of the Torah and Jewish knowledge and sought to distance themselves in order to win a higher place in the caste-based society of Cochin. Just as the higher caste members of the Kerala Hindu society segregated themselves from others on the basis of religious purity, so the Paradesis distanced themselves from the Malabari Jews.

  It marked the beginning of a new era of division within the Cochini Jewish family. The Paradesis claimed they were the oldest line of Jews in Cochin—even though many of them hailed from Europe during the Inquisition period and there was evidence that the Malabar Jews were indeed older. The Paradesis were equally quick to insist that they had the purest Jewish blood, evident by their white skin. Their facility with European languages and trade links with the West positioned them well with the royal court, allowing them to easily propagate their version of history not just to the local dignitaries but also to influential visitors. They began to spread the story that the Black Jews, already well established in the region, were not “pure” but the descendants of slaves who had come on the ships of Solomon and then married local Cochini women, thereby polluting the Jewish maternal bloodline.

  The taint of slavery in caste-based Kerala proved devastating and would lead to the decline of the Malabaris in Cochini society. Claims that the Malabaris were somehow lesser Jews naturally outraged the people of Ernakulam and its surrounding villages, who claim they are descended from what was known as the old “southside” synagogue that once existed in Cranganore. They found their beloved ancestral figure Joseph Rabban had been hijacked by the newcomers. To this day the Black Jews claim the copper plates housed in the Paradesi Synagogue were stolen from them way back in their history, although they have no proof of this. More fundamentally, the Blacks found themselves usurped in their own historical narrative—a story that went back to Joseph Rabban and his fateful meeting with the raja in Cranganore, then back further still to the days of King Solomon. The Malabaris believed it was they who hailed from kings. The holy cities of Jerusalem and Cranganore were their inheritance and the betrayal by the Paradesi Jews had now placed all this under threat.

  So the battlelines were drawn, coursing through the brackish green waters that separated Mattancherry and Ernakulam. As the Whites fought ruthlessly for preeminence in Cochini society, the scene was set for the introduction of a policy of color separation, a Jewish apartheid in India that would last for centuries and eventually lead to the decline and fall of both Black and White.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  The End of Shalom

  “May all blessings be upon you;

  May you be blessed with children and shalom.

  Be blessed and multiply in the earth.

  Take possession to divide it, so that you may survive.”

  —A COCHINI BLESSING FROM JEWISH WOMEN’S SONGS FROM KERALA, AS SUNG BY SARAH COHEN AND RUBY HALLEGUA

  Shalom’s funeral had sent ripples of foreboding through this tiny community, awakening the old dread, unsettling the mundane routines of life, its effect magnified because they were so few in number. Each family carried the burden in its own way, fiercely protective and guarded against outsiders who would prey upon their tragedy. Of the twelve White Jews who remained, the majority were in their late seventies or eighties, with only three “youngsters”—those in their late thirties and forties. There were no young newlyweds living on this street, no sulky teenagers consumed with their own selfish traumas, no rascal kids or chubby babies to elevate the elders from the mire of the past.

  This was the strangest th
ing about life on Synagogue Lane: everyone seemed to be in countdown mode. The Jews themselves were counting the number of those still standing, taking mental bets on who might be next, while they counted down the diminishing days of their own existence. The Muslims and Christians on this street were counting their profits or potential profits to be made from this dying and world-famous community. Soon, Synagogue Lane would no longer be home to the White Jews, but an anthropological curiosity, with boarded houses up for grabs to be turned into souvenir shops or cafes for the tourists. The prey and the predator shared Synagogue Lane, their fortunes entwined.

  When one spoke of the Kerala Jews, one inevitably reached for the epithet “last”. The last young Jew, the last young Jewess, the last shohet, the last working synagogue, the last marriage and the last birth on the street, which was so long ago no one could rightly remember.

  Sarah was the “last” of the Cohens, the family that drew its name from the priestly line of the kohanim. But it was even more basic than that, for she was the last of her household: first her parents, then her husband and now her brother had passed away. Hers had been a barren marriage, so the house was empty of heirs and now the subject of the cunning plotting of her servants and hangers-on who all wanted to wrest this pricey piece of real estate from her grasp.

  Strangely enough, when I first arrived, no one wanted to talk to me except for Sarah. My thoughts seemed to resonate with hers, being of the end. Having Shalom taken from her so unexpectedly had brought to the surface reflections about what was left, for her, her people and how it had come to this point.

  Sarah’s house sits at the very top end of Synagogue Lane, near the first Kashmiri tourist shops. The windows of her house were protected with metal grills depicting the Star of David and painted in red, white and a sky blue. During the day the hallway of her house was converted into a shop selling embroidered goods.

  She sat in a chair by the door in a small rectangle of yellow sunlight, her knees set apart, toes idly twiddling on the cool tiled floor. A copy of the Torah was open in her lap, its pages flapping in the breeze as she stared off into the distance. This was Sarah’s favorite spot: sitting inside her doorway, looking out onto the street. It was a prime viewing position and from here Sarah knew she would miss nothing and hear everything. From here she would note the caravan of tourists and passersby on their way to the synagogue at the top of the lane, straining to catch stray gossip like a child netting butterflies.

  The shutter doors of her house were open, leading into a long narrow corridor, a darkened haven from the white heat. Inside were tables and rails laden with folded piles of embroidered Jewish kippahs, white silk tableware for special festivals, embroidered with golden and silver thread. At the back of her store was the more workaday stock, damask and linen tablecloths and napkin sets, embroidered with pink rosebuds and bordered in lace, gingham cotton dresses for small children, with frills and flounces in keeping with flamboyant southern Indian tastes. These and other goods were sold to tourists to bring in a little income now that she had no means of support.

  I had seen and heard about Sarah from books, pictures and stories about the community. Being the oldest surviving lady, she was the grand dame of Cochini White Jewry. Her husband had been Jacob or “Dickie” Cohen, from one of the less well off Paradesi families and a lawyer by training. A community leader, Dickie had been one of the few qualified under Jewish law to teach the younger boys about the faith. He died long ago, taking that tradition with him to the grave. The couple had been at the core of this community back then, a kind of Posh Spice and David Beckham of Cochin: the “it” couple who led the prayers and the partying, the drinking and joking that used to be part and parcel of Cochin Jewish life.

  Today, I found an old woman who was a faded facsimile of that past life, a worn out spirit engulfed by grief. Shalom was given the full traditional burial rites accorded to a member of the white Jewish community. Sarah described the traditions, sometimes slipping into generic descriptions of a Cochini funeral to lessen the pain of returning to that day in September 2006. His body was buried in their special graveyard just a few hundred meters away—a graveyard that once had forbidden the burial of their so-called “Black Jewish” brethren alongside the Whites.

  Despite being in mourning, Sarah seemed to welcome company, crave it even, and invited me to pull up a chair and share her ringside view. As a young woman, she had been a vivacious creature, with a lusty gap-toothed smile that had captivated Dickie all those years ago. I got the sense that theirs had been a passionate relationship. She was a young woman barely into her twenties, he a middle aged man who fell for the kid next door with the sexy figure and head of wild black curls. Sarah had never been a beauty, but had an earthy quality that enabled her to ensnare one of Jew Town’s most eligible men.

  The fierce midday sunlight was a harsh judge as it fell upon her face, making her squint irritably. Her long countenance was lengthened further by crepe-like folds of skin that hung from her jaw-line, her mouth and eyes etched with deep lines that told stories of tremendous happiness as well as pain. Her skin remained a creamy luminescent white despite the intense Kerala heat. She retained her trademark wiry curls, now steel grey instead of black. Grief and time had played mischief with her health and looks, drawing black rings around drooping eyes which had sunken into hollows.

  She was dressed in white, wearing a sleeveless top that exposed fleshy batwing arms and a striped cotton sarong that was tied about her waist. She cradled her right hand in her lap, keen to draw attention to it. A week ago, in careless distraction she had splashed boiling tea on herself, taking off the skin on the back of the hand, leaving it red-raw, with ragged brown edges fraying around the wound.

  “I must not touch it,” she told me, touching it, “or it will bleed.” She bit her bottom lip and then with a sucking motion, she moved her dentures in and out of their sockets, looking at me with big mournful eyes.

  She asked what I was doing in Cochin and as I explained she said the Jews were in the midst of the most important series of autumn festivals. So again, my timing was not fortuitous. I had been warned even before I came that the community was notoriously closed to the point of outright hostility.

  But luckily for me, Sarah wanted to talk. Her conversation was candid, irreverent and invariably indiscreet. She told me it was time the story was told. There was no point delaying as these were the last days and one had to get the story on paper while there were still those left alive to tell it. Already she feared they had become no more than living museum pieces. Every day streams of tourists, Jew and non-Jew, Indian and foreign, paraded this street in gawping huddles, clad in the ubiquitous uniform of vest, hiking shorts and rucksack. One could see the Jews twitching with irritation from behind their lace curtains as they surveyed this defilement of their community. The tourists knew no bounds, poking their heads inside the doorways of the Jews’ houses, scrutinizing the latest exhibit before moving on. Some came in genuine tribute, armed with information about the Jews’ migration to these shores and a fascination with their lasting endurance in India. Others were simply on the Lonely Planet tourist trail. After Synagogue Lane came the local shops, an ayurvedic massage and then lunch at the nearby coffee shop where Brad Pitt once hung out to drink lassi.

  In the old days, the whole town had been theirs—the Jews. No strangers came walking down their street, into their synagogue, let alone their homes. Or if they did, the occurrence was rare and sanctioned. Today tourism had almost become a raison d’etre, with the synagogue already accorded future museum status by the Archeological Survey of India.

  “This was once our place, full of only our people,” said Sarah. “Now after the others left, gone to Israel, gone overseas, or just gone—the Kashmiris, the Muslims, the Christians have come. They’re good people, they take care of us. But they’re not our kind. The old life is gone. Where is it now? Nothing.”

  “What was it like, when you, Dickie and Shalom lived here, when it was al
l Jewish?”

  “On festival nights we’d sing, we’d visit each other’s houses, food would be prepared and shared. The men would drink, tell jokes and old stories. The woman would sing Cochini wedding songs, cook together for the festivals, play cards on tables set out in the street. Now, hardly ever do we sit out. And there’s nobody to talk to. If there’s a party, who’ll come? The old, the dead?”

  Losing Shalom was losing the remaining part of the life shared by her, her brother and her beloved Dickie. Shalom had been the older brother, but more than that, he was a companion and friend. He was the firstborn to the Cohen family in Jew Town, a well-to-do and educated family in the Paradesi community.

  There were four children in the family: first Shalom, then Sarah, then another sister and then a brother whose birth coincided with tragedy. All four kids were born in the house of Queenie, who came from a high Jewish family that held vast estates of land and property portfolios and had business interests across the region. When she married Sammy the two Paradesi dynasties and their riches were united.

  After Sarah’s youngest sibling was born in Queenie’s house, on the day of the baby’s circumcision, the mother was taken ill. “In the evening my mother came home from the synagogue and began violently purging. The doctor was called and he gave her medicine but it didn’t stop. After endless days of purging she died, leaving four small children.”

  Stricken with grief, the father took Shalom to Bombay to live and left the youngest children, including Sarah, to be brought up by their grandparents on Synagogue Lane. So she lost both parents in short succession. Her father remarried and Shalom grew up in Bombay and worked for the family’s printing press. Business was good and the family’s fortunes prospered, but her elder brother and father had become strangers.