Indian Jews

The 'modern' Western world was introduced to Indian Jews in 1665 when Menasseh Bene Israel of Amsterdam petitioned Oliver Cromwell's government to permit Jews to return to England from where they had been expelled in 1290, citing the tolerant maharajas of Cochin as examples of pragmatic and tolerant leadership to be emulated in England. Over the next 350 years, books, magazine and newspaper articles, travel diaries, and a variety of government and commercial documents have explored Indian Jewish experience, often sensationally. Over the past half-century, modern scholarship has applied historical, sociological, anthropological, political, cultural, literary, and folkloristic perspectives, and all the while Indian Jews themselves have narrated their stories to ever-fascinated audiences.

This bibliography, compiled over three decades of research, is designed to assist students and scholars who wish to explore India's rich and varied Jewish heritage. It is organised by communities. First are general works on Indian Jewry, followed by: sections on the Cochin Jews; the Bene Israel of Maharashtra; the little-known Mughal Jews; the 'Baghdadi' communities of Indian port cities; the Ashkenazim, many of whom but not all were refugees to India from Nazi-dominated Europe; and finally, recent Judaising movements of north-east India and in Andhra Pradesh.