The Jews of India: Two Thousand Years Without a Tear

Ask a Jewish historian to name the lands where Jews lived for centuries without persecution, and the list is heartbreakingly short. At its head stands India.

Four communities, one shelter

The Cochin Jews of Kerala trace their arrival to ancient trade routes — by strong tradition, as early as the era of King Solomon’s ships or the centuries just after the Second Temple’s destruction (70 CE). The local rulers welcomed them; a famous set of engraved copper plates (c. 1000 CE) records the privileges granted by the Chera king to the Jewish community leader Joseph Rabban — honors usually reserved for nobility. The Paradesi Synagogue of Cochin, built in 1568, still stands.

The Bene Israel of the Konkan coast (today’s Maharashtra) lived for centuries as oil-pressers in Indian villages, preserving Shabbat rest, the Shema, and kosher-like customs even when cut off from the wider Jewish world. Their neighbors knew them respectfully as Shanivar Telis — “Saturday oilmen” — the ones who would not work on their holy day.

The Baghdadi Jews arrived in the 18th–19th centuries as merchants from Iraq and Syria, building synagogues, schools, and legendary enterprises in Mumbai and Kolkata — families like the Sassoons, whose docks and libraries still serve those cities.

The Bnei Menashe of Mizoram and Manipur, who cherish a tradition of descent from the tribe of Menashe, have in recent decades returned by the thousands to the Jewish people and to Israel.

The fact Jews never forget

Here is what makes India unique. Jewish memory holds a very long ledger: expulsions from England, France, Spain; massacres along the Rhine; pogroms in the East; the Holocaust. In that ledger, India’s page is almost unbelievably clean. In two thousand years, the Jews of India were never persecuted by their Indian neighbors. The one stain on the story came from outside — the Portuguese colonial Inquisition that reached Goa — not from the soil of India itself.

Think about what that means. Without any doctrine commanding tolerance of Jews, Indian civilization simply practiced it — out of its own instinct that the sincere of every community deserve honor. The Torah has a name for nations that shelter the children of Abraham: blessed. God’s founding promise to Abraham was, “I will bless those who bless you” (Genesis 12:3) — and Jews look at India’s spectacular rise in our generation and smile knowingly.

From shelter to partnership

In 1992, India and Israel established full diplomatic relations, and the friendship since then has grown at astonishing speed: agriculture, water technology, medicine, defense, space. Meanwhile a quieter, warmer channel opened — hundreds of thousands of young Israelis traveling India after their military service, welcomed in Indian villages from Kasol to Gokarna. Many of them will tell you that India gave them back their souls; quite a few found their way to our Shabbat table in Dharamsala on the way.

But commerce and tourism are not the destination. The prophets describe the true endpoint of history as spiritual partnership among nations: “For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7). India sheltered the Jewish people through the long night of exile. Now, at dawn, the Jewish people has something to give back — the deepest thing it carries: the covenant of the One God for all humanity.

Two thousand years of kindness are a debt of honor. This website is part of how we repay it.

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Sources: Genesis 12:3; Isaiah 56:7. Historical outline: the Cochin copper plates of Joseph Rabban; community histories of the Bene Israel, Baghdadi, and Bnei Menashe communities. We present dates and traditions with their traditional attributions; scholarly datings vary.