The Bene Israel before the nineteenth century

Before the eighteenth century, the Bene Israel—the largest of India's three historic Jewish communities—was one of the many endogamous Marathi-speaking jatis (caste/birth-groups) residing in the coastal region of western India known as the Konkan. Locals called the community Shanwar Teli (Saturday Oil-pressers) because they did no work on Saturdays and were associated with the manufacture of oil. The nomenclature for the community expanded in the eighteenth century to include such appellations as Israel Lok (Israel people), Israel Teli (Israel Oil-pressers), and Native Jew Caste. Despite the expanding nomenclature, the community primarily referred to itself as ‘Bene Israel’ or B'nai Yisrael (‘Children of Israel’). When eighteenth-century Cochin Jews and Christian missionaries ‘discovered’ the Bene Israel as a lost Jewish community, they neither possessed Jewish texts nor knew Hebrew, except for Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad (Deuteronomy 6:4, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God the Lord is One’).Footnote ¹ Despite the absence of Jewish texts, the Bene Israel retained a vestigial Judaism that in practice and understanding was greatly inflected with local Konkani traditions.Footnote ² Unlike Cochin Jews and some other Indian communities that trace their origins outside the subcontinent, no documentary evidence exists from before the eighteenth century that recounts the arrival or existence of the Bene Israel in India.Footnote ³ According to oral tradition, told in the early nineteenth century to Cochin Jews,Footnote ⁴ Christian missionaries,Footnote ⁵ and Christian and Jewish travellersFootnote ⁶ and recorded and publicized by Haeem Samuel Kehimkar at the century's end,Footnote ⁷ the ancestors of the Bene Israel fled the Land of Israel—sometimes described as uttarekadil pradesh (‘land/province to the north’)—and were shipwrecked at Navgoan on the Konkan coast sometime between 2,200 and 1,700 years ago.Footnote ⁸ Seven men and seven women survived the shipwreck, but all Hebrew and Jewish texts were lost. Ultimately the Bene Israel settled throughout the Konkan north of the Savitri River. From the ‘shipwreck’ until the eighteenth century, the Bene Israel remained a distinct community unknown to the Jewish and Christian world.Footnote ⁹

Eighteenth-century contact with Cochin Jews and Europeans in conjunction with the expanding British presence in western India helped to transform the Bene Israel and brought knowledge of them to the broader world. We know from a letter dated 8 February 1738, for example, that Cochin Jews were aware of the Bene Israel at least since then and that they could recite the Kiryat Shema but did ‘not call themselves Jews, nor understand that name, but Bene Israel, children or descendants of Israel’. This letter, penned by the Danish missionary John Anton Sartorius, is the first definitive description of the Bene Israel.Footnote ¹⁰ Thirty years later, Ezekiel Rahabi's 1768 letter to Tuvia Boaz of the Dutch East India Company noted that Cochin Jews were instructing the Bene Israel in Judaism. In this letter, Rahabi, himself a Cochin Jew, described the Bene Israel as ignorant of Judaism except for the Shema and Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath). However, he also mentioned that Cochin Jews had sent them teachers ‘to improve their religious knowledge’ and that one Bene Israel had travelled to Cochin to study Judaism for four years and, after ‘mastering our laws and regulations’, returned to his community to teach them what he had learned.Footnote ¹¹ These eighteenth-century encounters prompted a religious revival characterized by the Bene Israel's effort to align and modify their religious practices to accord with more conventional expressions of Judaism.Footnote ¹²

At the same time they were learning Judaism from Cochin Jews, the Bene Israel also took advantage of new employment opportunities that accompanied the growing British presence in western India, especially in the East India Company's Bombay Army.Footnote ¹³ These opportunities led a number of them to leave their ancestral Konkan villages and settle in the burgeoning city of Bombay. Before the nineteenth century there were probably no more than 100 Bene Israel in any one of the more than 100 Konkan towns and villages where they traditionally resided.Footnote ¹⁴ Their move from the Konkan to Bombay City marks a watershed in their history, as for the first time large numbers of Bene Israel were residing in a single location: Israel Mohallah (Israel quarter) in the Mandvi district of the ‘black town’. All in all, Bene Israel contact and study with Cochin Jews, the growing British presence in western India, and the lucrative rewards some received for service in the Company's army laid the foundation for the 1796 construction of Shaar HaRahamim (Gate of Mercy), the first Bene Israel synagogue, and the community's ultimate embrace of normative Judaism.Footnote ¹⁵

Although Cochin Jews were largely responsible for teaching the Bene Israel conventional Jewish liturgy and forms of worship, the Bene Israel learned Hebrew and Biblical knowledge primarily from nineteenth-century American, Anglican, and Scottish Protestant missionaries. With a focus on Hebrew language instruction and employing previously neglected sources, this paper examines the Bene Israel encounter with Protestant missionaries. It investigates the missionaries’ rationale for teaching the Bene Israel Hebrew and the method, nature, and content of that education. Of the missionaries, Michael Sargon and John Wilson are especially noteworthy and receive particular attention. The Bene Israel perspective in the encounter is also elucidated, and I seek to show that they were not passive sponges absorbing all they were taught but rather active participants who took from the missionaries what they wanted most: Hebrew language knowledge and familiarity with the Bible. Indeed, the Bene Israel wilfully underwent Christian education for their own interests, and while these interests sometimes overlapped with those of the missionaries, they were certainly not the same. Ultimately, the instruction they received from missionaries did not convert them to Christianity but strengthened and transformed their Judaism. This instruction, moreover, provided them with the tools and knowledge that they used for purposes the missionaries neither intended nor imagined: criticizing Christianity and embracing Rabbinic Judaism. After discussing the life and work of Joseph Ezekiel Rajpurkar, a figure who epitomizes the ways in which missionaries helped the Bene Israel attain Jewish knowledge and how that education ultimately freed them from Christian tutelage, the paper concludes by situating the Bene Israel experience within the broader context of and scholarship on Protestant missionaries in colonial India.

American and Anglican missionaries and the Bene Israel

Williams College graduates and Congregationalist ministers Gordon Hall (1784–1826) and Samuel Nott of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were the first Protestant missionaries permitted to establish a permanent station in Bombay. Arriving in Bombay in 1812 they were not allowed to begin missionary work until 1815.Footnote ¹⁶ In that year they opened their first school. By 1823, they maintained 26 schools in Bombay Presidency that were attended by over 1,000 pupils, including 116 Bene Israel.Footnote ¹⁷ Considering that they travelled to India to evangelize among the ‘heathen’, teaching Jews was an unforeseen mission. Once in Bombay, however, the Americans gladly seized the opportunity to convert the Jews. For almost two decades, Bene Israel constituted a significant minority of their student population. This fact, for Hall, was not at all surprising because they were ‘so ignorant’ of the Old Testament while American missionaries knew ‘their scriptures’ well. Indeed, as Hall noted, the Bene Israel were ‘more inclined to read our books than the Hindoos’ because the ‘Old Testament is exceedingly interesting to them, as it relates so much to the history of their own nation’. For Hall, this study was particularly important because the ‘Hebrew Scriptures require the Jew to execrate every appearance of idolatry’. This Biblical requirement was also the reason why American missionaries preferred ‘Jews as teachers’ to ‘any other class of natives’.Footnote ¹⁸ In accounts of their work, they stressed how their Bene Israel teachers maintained a ‘considerable interest in giving religious instruction’ and forbade ‘heathenish customs in their schools’.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result, during the 1820s and early 1830s, Bene Israel comprised the majority of the teachers in American Konkan schools.Footnote ²⁰

In 1817, within two years of the commencement of missionary operations in Bombay, the Americans opened their first ‘Jewish school’, the Boston Jewish School. By 1821 they had also established four other Jewish schools in the Konkan. Ironically, just three years later, most students in what the Americans referred to as ‘Jewish Schools’ were not Jewish (that is, Bene Israel).Footnote ²¹ Nevertheless, the Boston Jewish School in Bombay, Salem Jewish School in ‘Pane’ (probably Pen), Portland Jewish School in Panvel, Andover Jewish School in Revdanda, and Pittsfield Jewish School in Alibag continued to be called ‘Jewish schools’ because Bene Israel students attended them and they were funded by New England Christian organizations dedicated to the conversion of the Jews.Footnote ²² Like most other Marathi-medium missionary schools the Bene Israel attended, Bene Israel teachers were largely responsible for day-to-day instruction. The instruction was rudimentary: the Bible, Marathi reading and writing, and basic arithmetic. But we know from Gordon Hall, Samuel Newell, and Horatio Bardwell's May 1817 letter that for a brief time their Bombay Jewish School's Bene Israel schoolmaster also taught his students how to ‘read and write Hebrew’.Footnote ²³ The nature of this Hebrew instruction was probably limited to reading and writing the Hebrew script, not Hebrew vocabulary and grammar. As Hall reported in March of 1819, the ‘senior Jewish schoolmaster. . .reads Hebrew, but does not understand a word of it’.Footnote ²⁴

American missionaries did not commit to teaching Hebrew until 1825. In a July 1825 letter, the Americans described how they had long wanted to create a school in the Bombay area where the Bene Israel could study Hebrew.Footnote ²⁵ Significantly, the Americans reported that the Bene Israel themselves encouraged them to establish a school where their children could learn Hebrew.Footnote ²⁶ The absence of Hebrew knowledge amongst the Bene Israel—their primary native instructors—was one explanation for why they had not yet established such a school. Circumstances changed in 1825 when Michael Sargon, a Cochin Jew who converted to Christianity, visited Bombay to investigate the feasibility of establishing a Hebrew school for the Bene Israel under the auspices of the Madras Jews Society. Sargon's visit inspired the Americans to start teaching Hebrew to ‘several Jewish boys’.Footnote ²⁷

In July of 1828 American missionaries opened a Hebrew school in Alibag on the Konkan coast called the Alibag Hebrew School or simply the Hebrew School. One reason why the Americans chose to establish their only Hebrew school in Alibag was because the Madras Jews Society had already established a Hebrew school in Bombay City. Another reason given for situating the school in Alibag was the fact that the local Bene Israel were especially ‘solicitous to have a school among them for instruction in Hebrew’. A Bene Israel named Samuel, who had laboured for the Americans as a teacher and school inspector since 1820, was put in charge of this school.Footnote ²⁸ In the months preceding the opening of the Hebrew School, Samuel, while employed by the Americans, was reported to be studying Hebrew.Footnote ²⁹ At the end of 1829 the Hebrew School, financially supported by the Boston Jew Society, had 30 Bene Israel students, 12 of whom were able to ‘read the Hebrew Scriptures with considerable fluency’, although they ‘imperfectly’ understood what was read.Footnote ³⁰

The American missionaries’ Hebrew School existed for almost ten years. The 1830s, however, witnessed a decline of American interest in the Bene Israel and a scaling down of their operations in Bombay City and the Konkan. The growing presence of Anglican and Presbyterian (Scottish) missionaries may have hastened the American withdrawal from the region. Before the 1820s, Americans possessed a virtual monopoly over Protestant missionary education in Bombay City and the Konkan. By the 1830s, however, they were only one of at least four missionary organizations ensconced in the area. And while Protestant missionary bodies in the presidency generally cooperated with each other,Footnote ³¹ there was some competition for Bene Israel enrolment.Footnote ³² It is uncertain whether the influx of British missionaries into the presidency contributed to the decline of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission's operations in Bombay City and the Konkan. Whatever their reasons, in December 1831, the Americans had established their first station in the Dekhan, a region where few Bene Israel lived. Shortly thereafter the American missionaries transferred most of their India operations to the Dekhan and closed all their ‘Jewish Schools’, apart from the Alibag Hebrew School. But when a ‘financial panic’ struck the United States in 1837, the budget for India was reduced by 75 per cent, and the Hebrew School also closed.Footnote ³³

Loosely affiliated with the Anglican Church Missionary Society (hereafter Church Missionary Society), the Madras Jews Society, a branch of the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews (hereafter, the London Society), was the second missionary body to take an interest in and open schools for the Bene Israel. When funding for the Madras Jews Society ceased, its one agent in Bombay, Michael Sargon (1795–1870), joined the Church Missionary Society. From the 1830s until 1860, Sargon almost single-handedly led the Anglican missionary effort amongst the Bene Israel.

A scion of a Pardeshi Footnote ³⁴ Cochin Jewish family, Michael Sargon was born in Cochin and attended a school run by his parents where he studied Hebrew and English. He eventually relocated to Madras where he lived with Thomas Jarrett, an East India Company civil servant, who persuaded him that the ‘Messiah had actually appeared in the person of Jesus Christ’. While working with Jarrett to print the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew, Sargon became a Christian and was baptized at St Mary's Church in Madras on 21 January 1818.Footnote ³⁵ With support from Jarrett, Sargon returned to Cochin on 22 April 1820 for the first time since his conversion. His goal was to spread the Gospel among his Jewish brethren. Nearly a year later, the Madras branch of the the London Society, commonly known as the Madras Jews Society, was formed. During its early meetings the Madras Jews Society resolved to recruit an English clergyman ‘well versed in Hebrew’ as a missionary to Cochin's Jews. In the meantime it decided to begin operations by dispatching Sargon to Cochin to establish a Jewish school under Christian principles—a mission he accomplished.Footnote ³⁶ While he would labour amongst Cochin Jews for only a few years, he spent almost three decades teaching the Bene Israel in Bombay.Footnote ³⁷

It is not known when Sargon first learned of the existence of the Bene Israel. His account of his first days in Cochin after his conversion may help to answer this question. On 25 April 1820, whilst distributing Hebrew copies of the Gospel of Matthew, Sargon met Solomon Gindil, a Jewish merchant recently returned from Bombay, who told him that missionaries there were doing the same thing he was doing in Cochin: distributing Christian tracts to Jews. According to Gindil, Bombay missionaries

If Sargon did not know of Jews in Bombay before, he certainly knew of them now. The synagogue Gindil mentioned had to be Shaar Harahamim as it was the only synagogue in Bombay at that time. The Jews Gindil described, therefore, were almost certainly Bene Israel. Jarret and Sargon soon reported that Bene Israel sepoys of the Bombay Native Infantry were stationed in Cochin and worshipped in the Pardeshi synagogue in Jew Town. In 1822 Sargon was sent to Cannanore to obtain more information on the Bene Israel from the few who were stationed there. After communicating this information to Jarrett, the Madras Jews Society dispatched Sargon to Bombay to explore the possibility of opening schools there for the Bene Israel.Footnote ³⁹

Michael Sargon relocated to Bombay City in 1826 and established a Madras Jews Society school there as early as August of that year.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1829, in addition to its Bombay school, the Madras Jews Society maintained schools in the Konkan at Ashtami, Paligaum, Revdanda, and Panvel, attended by 165 Bene Israel students.Footnote ⁴¹ Three of the schools were in locations where the Americans maintained ‘Jewish Schools’. Although I have found no document that connects the Andover Jewish School in Revdanda to the establishment of the Madras Jews Society school there, material does exist that connects the Bombay and Panvel schools to the older American missionary-run Jewish Schools in those places. An American missionary report noted that Bene Israel students were leaving the Boston Jewish School in Bombay to attend Sargon's newly founded Bombay school. According to the Americans, the opportunity to study Hebrew was the reason for their flight.Footnote ⁴² Four years later David Allen reported that the teacher and one-quarter of the students at the Portland Jewish School in Panvel were Jews, but it previously had a much larger Jewish student-body. ‘The decrease has been caused’, Allen declared, ‘by the establishment of a [Madras Jews Society] school in the village for teaching the Hebrew language, to which most of the Jews prefer sending their children’.Footnote ⁴³ This trend reveals an important aspect of the Bene Israel experience with Protestant missionary education: the Bene Israel were especially keen on missionary education when Hebrew was part of the instruction. As a matter of fact, missionaries reported time and again that the Bene Israel themselves requested Hebrew instruction.

Hebrew and Bible study was the core curriculum at the Madras Jews Society's Bene Israel schools, Hebrew being the predominant focus of instruction. Whereas Bible instruction was a central part of Christian education, Hebrew, at best, was taught as a supplementary course of study in missionary schools in India. The Hebrew Old Testament and part of the New Testament in Hebrew were the only texts used in the schools.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the time, reading materials in the presidency's other missionary schools were almost entirely in Marathi. In fact, during the period that the Madras Jews Society's Bene Israel schools were in existence, a number of Marathi-language reading materials appeared that were expressly designed to teach Christianity and elementary knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁵ The outcome of this predominantly Hebrew-based pedagogy is uncertain. In one report Sargon described how he was pleased with the progress of Hebrew study at his Bombay and Panvel schools, although there is no indication as to what constituted ‘progress’. The Scottish missionary-run Oriental Christian Spectator—a periodical edited by John Wilson—criticized the exclusively Hebrew nature of the Madras Jews Society's schools because the language was ‘understood in a very slight degree by a very few of the people; and the necessity then of instructing the children in Murat, thee. . .is very desirable’.Footnote ⁴⁶

With the 1832 dissolution of the Madras Jews Society, Michael Sargon secured employment with the Church Missionary Society. As a result, all Madras Jews Society schools closed except the Bombay Bene Israel School, which was incorporated into the Church Missionary Society.Footnote ⁴⁷ Church Missionary Society literature refers to this school by a number of names but primarily as the Barkote Bene Israel School and the Barkote Hebrew School. The Bombay Church Missionary Society clearly valued its Bene Israel school, as is demonstrated in 1846 when it closed all its schools except two: the Robert Money School (its English-medium institution) and the Barkote Hebrew School.Footnote ⁴⁸ By the 1850s, however, in addition to the Barkote Bene Israel School, Sargon was supervising as many as seven other Church Missionary Society Marathi-medium schools.Footnote ⁴⁹ Of all the schools he oversaw, the Hebrew Bible was only used in the Bene Israel school. At the Barkote Hebrew School, the Old and New Testaments were read in Hebrew and Marathi in rotation. But apart from the Hebrew instruction and Bible reading in Hebrew, students at this school appear to have received the same essential instruction as the students at the other Church Missionary Society Marathi medium schools. Sargon, however, would use the Barkote Bene Israel School for another purpose: on Saturdays he would hold meetings at the school to discuss the Bible with his current and former Bene Israel students, their parents, and European, Baghdadi, and Cochin Jews.Footnote ⁵⁰

According to Haeem Samuel Kehimkar (1830–1909), the Bene Israel deeply respected and appreciated Michael Sargon. As a matter of fact, Kehimkar, who may have been one of Sargon's students, wrote more affectionately about him than any other Christian evangelist who laboured amongst his community. He also downplayed the Christian nature of Sargon's work and claimed that he ‘only spoke on Christianity when he was forced to do so’.Footnote ⁵¹ Significantly, in his Sketch of the History of the Beni-Israel and his History of the Bene Israel of India, which are often used as the main sources of information on the Bene Israel before the twentieth century, Kehimkar discusses Sargon not as a part of the Christian missionary effort amongst the Bene Israel but rather as part of the nineteenth-century Cochin Jewish effort to teach his community Jewish liturgy and rituals. This interpretation of Sargon as essentially a Jewish rather than a Christian missionary has been recapitulated in twentieth-century scholarship.Footnote ⁵² However, previously unexamined letters written by Sargon paint a much more Christian portrait of his work. They portray an individual who earnestly and wholeheartedly sought to improve the lives of the Bene Israel through educating them in the Old Testament and New Testament to the point where they rejected the ‘insignificant ceremonies and rules assigned by the tradition of the Rabbies [sic]’ and realized for themselves that Jesus of Nazareth was their Messiah.Footnote ⁵³

Neither American missionaries nor Sargon reported the conversion of a single Bene Israel to Christianity. Nevertheless, they did teach the Bene Israel the Bible and, at least, how to read Hebrew. Although Kehimkar exaggerated Sargon's unwillingness to promote Christianity, his claim that Sargon maintained a close relationship with the Bene Israel cannot be discounted. When factionalism divided the Bene Israel, the community sought Sargon's help to heal the division.Footnote ⁵⁴ Perhaps being a Jew, even a converted one, was a quality that attracted the Bene Israel to Sargon. In addition, Gordon Hall argued that his knowledge of the Old Testament impressed the Bene Israel.Footnote ⁵⁵ If this was the case, they surely would be attracted to Sargon for the same reason. In short, the fact that Sargon was a Jewish convert to Christianity who intended to convert his brethren in turn did not seem to discourage the Bene Israel from attending his schools.Footnote ⁵⁶ Rather, the Jewishness of Sargon, his Jewish knowledge, and the fact that he taught Hebrew seemed to have made his schools more attractive to the Bene Israel. It is apropos, then, that as Sargon aged and became increasingly ill, the Bombay Church Missionary Society eliminated his non-Jewish responsibilities, leaving him only to the superintendence and instruction of the Barkote Bene Israel School.

Sargon—technically not a Church Missionary Society ‘missionary’ but a lower ranking ‘catechist’—was a great boon to the Church Missionary Society effort to educate and evangelize the Bene Israel. Although their missionaries took note of the Bene Israel from their early years in Bombay, they made no systematic effort to work amongst them before Sargon joined their ranks. His Bene Israel labours on their behalf represent a Jewish example of a proselytizing strategy common to many missionary bodies but especially evident in the Society's Bombay Mission: converts from a particular community would be employed to evangelize amongst their community; thus, Brahmin Christians, Christian Muslims, and Christian Jews would proselytize amongst their respective communities.Footnote ⁵⁷ From this perspective, Sargon, as an Indian Jewish Christian, was almost the ideal individual to spread the Gospel amongst Bombay's Jews. The Church Missionary Society missionary, G. M. Valentine, explicitly argued that because Sargon was a Jew he was more acceptable to the Bene Israel than a European missionary.Footnote ⁵⁸

Old age and ill health finally forced Sargon to retire in 1860. His retirement appears to have led to the closing of the Barkote Bene Israel School because, after 1860, the school disappears from the Church Missionary Society's archival record. But this does not mean that its missionaries no longer taught Hebrew to the Bene Israel. An 1881 article in the Bene Israel periodical, Israel Dharmadip, expressed regret that Reverend Thomas Carss had retired as principal of the Church Missionary Society's Robert Money School because he taught Hebrew to some in the community.Footnote ⁵⁹

Nineteenth-century Cochin and Baghdadi Jews and the Bene Israel

As mentioned earlier, we know from Ezekiel Rahabi's 1768 letter that Cochin Jews, at least for a time, were instructing the Bene Israel in Judaism. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, contact between the two Jewish communities seems to have diminished. Shirley Isenberg has argued that subsequent to Rahabi's 1768 letter ‘we hear nothing more about’ Cochin Jews teaching the Bene Israel Judaism until 1826, when they began migrating to Bombay.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although this is not exactly the case,Footnote ⁶¹ it is without question that in contrast to the large numbers of Jews from the Ottoman Empire and Persia (collectively known as ‘Baghdadi Jews’) who immigrated to Bombay City, nineteenth-century Cochin Jews immigrated to Bombay not to escape persecution or pursue business opportunities but rather to serve as ‘Jewish missionaries’ to the Bene Israel.Footnote ⁶² And apart from Michael Sargon, these Cochin Jews—including Judah David Ashkenazi, Hyam Joseph Hallegua, Shelomo Salem Shurrabi, Abraham Sargon, and Judah Kindil—were not Christian converts, but observant Jews who lived and died amongst the Bene Israel. They and other Cochin Jews in Bombay City and the Konkan—at around the same time Protestant missionaries were teaching the Bene Israel Hebrew and the Bible—were instructing the Bene Israel in Jewish liturgy and forms of worship, discouraging them from ‘idolatrous’ practices, translating Jewish texts into Marathi, labouring as Bene Israel hazzanim (cantors), shochetim (kosher slaughterers), and mohelim (circumcisers), and helping them to establish synagogues.Footnote ⁶³ Yet, there is no evidence that, other than for the purposes of reciting prayers and passages from the Torah (Pentateuch), Cochin Jews in Bombay Presidency, apart from the Christian convert M. Sargon, taught the Bene Israel Hebrew.Footnote ⁶⁴ From a Jewish perspective, the average Jew neither needs nor is expected to understand Hebrew. The ability to recite Hebrew, on the other hand, is considered essential for all Jews to fully participate in Jewish religious life. This might necessitate the ability to read the Hebrew script phonetically; but there is no corresponding necessity to understand the Hebrew language. In Judaism, the emphasis is on orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Cochin Jews’ emphasis on instructing the Bene Israel in Jewish liturgy and Jewish rituals, rather than the Hebrew language, can be seen in the Marathi texts they wrote that were published in the mid-nineteenth century. Hyam Joseph Hallegua's 1846 Marathi translation of the Haggadah is similar to other Haggadahs in that it contains instructions on how to conduct a Passover Seder.Footnote ⁶⁶ A more interesting and less well-known text is David Yahuda Ashkenazi's 1854 Israelanche Panchang (Calendar of Israel).Footnote ⁶⁷ In the Marathi preface to this work Ashkenazi explained that he wrote the text to inform the Bene Israel of the dates and significance of Jewish holidays and how one should observe the holidays. He also noted that he included in his text the location in the ‘shastra’ (Tanach)Footnote ⁶⁸ of the weekly parashah,Footnote ⁶⁹haftorah,Footnote ⁷⁰ and maftir Footnote ⁷¹ as well as descriptions of Jewish observances that both the shastra and Shulchan Arukh Footnote ⁷² describe and require. Solomon Reinemann, a nineteenth-century Jewish traveller, attributed Bene Israel knowledge of Jewish holidays to Ashkenazi's Israelanche Panchang.Footnote ⁷³

It is significant that both Hallegua's Haggadah and Ashkenazi's Israelanche Panchang were written and translated into Marathi with the assistance of the Bene Israel Hyam Isaac Galsurkar. This does not mean that Hallegua and Ashkenazi taught Galsurkar Hebrew. In fact, in his preface to the 1846 Haggadah, Galsurkar admitted that he did not know Hebrew. He also revealed that Hallegua used a Christian missionary translation of the Book of Exodus to compose the Haggadah.Footnote ⁷⁴ Eight years later, in the preface to Israelanche Panchang, Ashkenazi noted that Galsurkar still did not know Hebrew.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although Bene Israel assisted Cochin Jews in composing and translating Jewish and Hebrew texts into Marathi, these were nevertheless, as Walter Fischel rightly observed, ‘values created for them, not by them’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Only after Scottish missionaries had taught the Bene Israel Hebrew would they begin to translate and compose Hebrew and Jewish texts themselves.

Baghdadi Jews, who were present in Bombay in much larger numbers than Cochin Jews, played, at most, a minor role in the Bene Israel's Hebraization. While John Wilson maintained that the Bene Israel ‘imitated’ the ways in which both Cochin and Baghdadi Jews practiced Judaism, he attributed more direct influence to the Cochinis.Footnote ⁷⁷ Although such imitation may suggest close ties between Bombay's Baghdadi and Bene Israel communities, it is important to keep in mind that the late 1830s witnessed the beginnings of Baghdadi hostility towards and distancing from the Bene Israel in part because the latter, according to the Baghdadis, had ‘adopted the customs of the natives of India’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Despite their small numbers, Cochin Jews worked amongst the Bene Israel in much larger numbers than did Baghdadis. No Baghdadi Jew who served the Bene Israel as a hazzan, schohet, or mohel is named in nineteenth-century Bene Israel sources. In fact, whereas Bene Israel sources praise and name numerous Cochin Jews who worked among them, the Baghdadi contribution to Bene Israel Hebraization is not only ignored, but also explicitly denied. H. S. Kehimkar, for instance, argued that the ‘revival of religion among the Bene-Israel is solely to be ascribed to the efforts of the white Jews from Cochin. . .[the] Arabic Jews, on the other hand, came for the purpose of extorting money from the ignorant Bene Israel’. In another passage, he argued that early nineteenth-century Baghdadis in Bombay ‘took no steps to effect any improvement among the Bene Israel’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Likewise, the Bene Israel periodical, Bene Israelite, declared that particular Cochin Jews ‘and these Jews alone and none others deserve the credit for having revived the religious principles and ceremonies in the Bene Israel community’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Reverend John Wilson and the Scottish missionary encounter with the Bene Israel

Scottish missionaries, especially John Wilson (1804–1875), played a crucial role in the Bene Israel's transformation from a Konkan community with a rudimentary understanding of Judaism into an Indian-Jewish community whose religious practices and knowledge were roughly analogous to other Jewish communities. Born in the southern Scottish burgh of Lauder, Wilson received his early education at the local parish school. At the age of 14 he enrolled at Edinburgh University, where he received a comprehensive education and obtained teaching experience. He continued his education at Edinburgh's Divinity Hall, where he studied Hebrew. These experiences laid the foundations for his missionary, scholarly, and educational work in India. In 1825, he volunteered as a missionary for the Scottish Missionary Society, which, until 1829, operated as the Church of Scotland's de facto missionary organization. After completing his theological studies in 1828 he was ordained and received permission from the East India Company to work as a missionary in its Indian territories. In August 1828, Wilson married Margaret Bayne—an important missionary in her own right—and left Scotland for India. They arrived in Bombay harbour on 13 February 1829 and made their way to the southern Konkan, where they studied Marathi. They would spend nine months in the Konkan before finally relocating to Bombay City—John Wilson's home for almost 50 years.Footnote ⁸¹

John Wilson was first and foremost a Christian missionary. His vocation as a Christian evangelist, however, was combined with a scholarly bent and indefatigable energy that made him nineteenth-century Bombay's most esteemed linguist, Orientalist, and educator. With tremendous drive and ability, coupled with a conviction that the religions, customs, and languages of Bombay's peoples had to be known before they would be converted, Wilson acquired a breadth of knowledge about India few contemporaries could match. He considered knowledge of the vernacular and classical languages of India's peoples as especially important for the missionary to master.Footnote ⁸² In Bombay, perhaps the most religious heterogeneous and polyglot city of the time, this meant that he had to master several classical and vernacular languages. He would quickly attain a fluency in Marathi and, before long, would also master Gujarati, Hindustani, Persian, Sanskrit, Avestan, Pahlavi, Portuguese and Hebrew.Footnote ⁸³ This linguistic knowledge enabled him to communicate, teach, debate, and inquire into the history and life of Bombay's manifold communities and religions. The products of his Orientalist and ethnographic investigations were usually first presented to the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society—an organization he joined in 1830, presided over, and in which he remained active until his death in 1875. He authored works on Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, caste, Bombay Presidency's aboriginal and tribal peoples, and translated Zoroastrian texts and ancient Indian inscriptions.Footnote ⁸⁴ He also authored the first scholarly account of the Bene Israel: ‘Abstract of An Account of the Beni-Israel of Bombay’. This essay, originally presented to the Society and first published in the January 1840 issue of the Oriental Christian Spectator, has served as the basis for almost all subsequent research on the Bene Israel.Footnote ⁸⁵

Reverend Wilson not only wrote about the Bene Israel and Bombay's other communities, he taught them too. He helped found several Scottish missionary schools throughout Bombay Presidency. From the middle of the 1830s until Wilson's death, Bene Israel children attended Scottish missionary schools in large numbers. As early as 1836, 250 Bene Israel—about one-quarter of school-aged Bene Israel children in Bombay City—were studying at Scottish missionary schools.Footnote ⁸⁶ By 1838 the Church of Scotland's Bombay mission maintained schools ‘exclusively for the seed of Abraham’ in Alibag, Ambepur, Revdanda, and Panvel.Footnote ⁸⁷ Two decades later, six of the 17 Marathi medium schools under the aegis of the Free Church of Scotland's Bombay Mission were ‘Beni-Israel Schools’.Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1858, Bene Israel students accounted for almost half the children attending Scottish vernacular schools.Footnote ⁸⁹ In addition to his Scottish educational institutions, Wilson was also involved with Bombay University, where he held the posts of Vice-Chancellor, Dean, and Examiner of Sanskrit, Persian, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindustani, and Hebrew.

Although the conversion of Jews had been a prominent feature of Scottish theological thought since the Reformation,Footnote ⁹⁰ and Jewish missions comprised an important part of nineteenth-century Scottish missionary enterprise,Footnote ⁹¹ there is no evidence that Wilson expected to work amongst the Bene Israel before he settled in Bombay City in November 1829. The Scottish Missionary Society sent him to India as a missionary to the ‘heathen’ gentiles, not to the Jews. As an avid reader of missionary periodicals, though, he may have known of the existence of the Bene Israel prior to his departure for India. Just six months before he left Scotland for India the Scottish Missionary and Philanthropic Register published a letter from James Mitchell of the Scottish Missionary Society noting his encounter with ‘Jewish families’ in the Konkan, near where Wilson was to be stationed.Footnote ⁹²

An examination of the Scottish Missionary Society Archives, John Wilson's published writings, and George Smith's extensive 1878 biography reveal no mention of the Bene Israel by Wilson or his wife before a brief reference in a letter dated 28 January 1830.Footnote ⁹³ It is not until early 1831, in a report on the presidency's Scottish mission for the previous year, that Wilson first writes about the Bene Israel in some detail.

Here we find not merely evidence of the cold reception he initially received from the Bene Israel, but also that before he began to work closely with them they had already begun to reform their religious practices and discontinue ‘heathen’ customs.

In a few years, however, the relationship between Wilson and the Bene Israel was an altogether different character. Wilson himself recorded this change.

Significantly, as this passage suggests, the improved relationship between Wilson and the Bene Israel is associated with his new emphasis on teaching Hebrew and specifically the appearance of his Hebrew grammar.

Once settled in Bombay City, Wilson took active steps to ‘attain to greater proficiency’ in Hebrew—a language he had studied at Edinburgh University. In a letter probably written towards the end of 1830, he recounted how he had spent an hour every morning for three months studying Hebrew with a rabbi—a man his wife, Margaret, referred to as her husband's ‘Hebrew Pandit’. Both stated that he was studying Hebrew to become more ‘useful’ to the Bene Israel.Footnote ⁹⁶ Bearing in mind that he was studying Hebrew at a time when the Bene Israel were relatively indifferent to him and not attending his schools, yet valued Hebrew and were studying it in American and Anglican missionary schools, it is likely he recognized Hebrew lessons attracted the Bene Israel to Christian instruction. As one Scottish missionary observed, the Bene Israel ‘loved the study of Hebrew’.Footnote ⁹⁷ For Wilson and the Bombay Scottish missionaries, it is clear that the language had a related evangelical but altogether more specific use: Hebrew would facilitate the conversion of the Bene Israel to Christianity.

If the Bene Israel learned Hebrew, the Bombay Scottish missionaries argued, they would then be able to read their ‘scripture’ in its uncorrupted original language and realize that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah mentioned in the prophecies of the Hebrew prophets. This view is succinctly expressed in an 1841 letter penned by one of Wilson's Scottish missionary colleagues.

Here the purpose of the Christian missionary effort to teach the Bene Israel Hebrew is clearly outlined as the first step in a calculated conversion strategy that utilized a language they valued but did not understand and a text they cherished but did not know.Footnote ⁹⁹ Once they learned Hebrew the Scots believed they would understand their own scripture and would realize that Jesus fulfilled Judaism and, ultimately, convert to Christianity.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Spurred by Wilson's enthusiastic embrace of the Bene Israel as the object of missionary labour, Scottish missionaries would soon eclipse their Anglican and American brethren as the most significant Christian influence on the Bene Israel. Americans and Anglicans would continue to educate them, but by the mid-nineteenth century the Bene Israel's ‘improvement’ and Biblical and Hebrew instruction became inextricably linked to Scottish missionaries and especially to John Wilson. As one Scottish missionary explained in 1858: ‘The American, the English, and the Free Church Missions, have all laboured amongst them—the greatest share of the work, for a good many years past, falling to the last-mentioned agency’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Despite receiving Hebrew instruction from American missionaries and Michael Sargon, the Bene Israel's knowledge of Hebrew was minimal before Scottish missionaries began teaching them. Even after several years of Scottish instruction, Wilson reported that a ‘good number of youth in Bombay, and some of the villages on the neighbouring coast, read Hebrew fluently without, however, being able to understand the meaning’.Footnote ¹⁰² This situation was unacceptable to the Bombay Scottish missionaries. For them, learning to read the Hebrew script without understanding what was read was futile and possibly even counterproductive because the Bene Israel would remain ignorant of their shastra—understood and translated as ‘scripture’—and therefore ignorant of Christianity's fulfilment of Judaism.Footnote ¹⁰³ Overcoming the Bene Israel's ignorance of their religion through reading and comprehending the ‘true meaning’ of their own shastra was why Scottish missionaries urged them to study Hebrew in the first place.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ To the Bombay Scottish missionaries, knowing one's own religion meant knowing the content of one's religion's shastras. In the 1830s and 1840s, knowledge of Hebrew was especially important for the Bene Israel to learn because the Old Testament did not exist in readable Marathi translation.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, Scottish missionaries taught the Bene Israel Hebrew vocabulary and grammar with the explicit aim of enabling them to read, understand and translate the Hebrew Bible into Marathi.

Reverend Wilson's 1832 Ibri Bhashaiche Vyakaran (Rudiments of Hebrew Grammar) was expressly written to help the Bene Israel attain this goal.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Wilson's grammar was the first Marathi-Hebrew text ever printed and for 50 years, functioned as the primary text to teach the Bene Israel Hebrew. Ibri Bhashaiche Vyakaran is similar to Hebrew grammars of the period in that it contains Hebrew passages from the Old Testament.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ What is distinctive about Ibri Bhashaiche Vyakaran is the space dedicated to these passages: almost a quarter of the text contains Old Testament Hebrew passages printed alongside a Marathi translation—a feature likely explained by the fact that at the time of its publication Genesis was the only Old Testament book translated and printed as a readable Marathi text.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Under the guidance of the Scottish missionaries and armed with Wilson's Ibri Bhashaiche Vyakaran the Bene Israel began to study Hebrew comprehensively and translate it into Marathi.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This led Wilson to predict that his Hebrew grammar would

In 1833, soon after this was penned, Joseph Wolff an eccentric German-Jewish traveller and Christian convert witnessed Scottish missionaries instructing the Bene Israel.

By giving the Bene Israel the capacity to read their ‘scripture’ in its original language, Wilson thought he was enabling them to know what they did not know before: their own religion. Once this knowledge was attained, he believed in the fullness of time they would realize that Jesus fulfilled Judaism, and convert to Christianity. This was no fantasy; it was precisely the route that Joseph Wolff himself had followed.Footnote ¹¹²

In February 1836 Wilson toured Alibag and the territories ruled by the Raghoji Angria and met with and scrutinized several Bene Israel teachers and students affiliated with the American Hebrew School. His unpublished account of this tour—entitled, Short Account of a Visit to Alibagh, including Notices of the Beni-Israel—is, in fact, his very first essay on Bene Israel life, customs, and history. Like previous references to them, he reported that a ‘considerable number of the Israelites’ could read Hebrew, but only a few could ‘translate from it into their vernacular Marathi’. However, he observed that Alibag's Bene Israel were using his grammar to learn how to translate Hebrew into their mother tongue. Some, as he enthusiastically noted, even committed Ibri Bhashaiche Vyakaran to memory. What pleased him even more was that one young Bene Israel was creating his own Hebrew-Marathi dictionary by copying down Hebrew words from Joseph Samuel Frey's Hebrew dictionary next to blank spaces ‘to be filled up with Marathi renderings’. This aspiring lexicographer asked Wilson for assistance and the Scotsman happily complied. The very fact that a Bene Israel was arduously attempting to learn Hebrew gratified Wilson; he considered it as ‘proof. . .of the zeal of the remnant of Jacob to understand the Law given to their fathers’.Footnote ¹¹³

Although John Wilson is the missionary most associated with the Bene Israel, John Murray Mitchell (1815–1904), John Stevenson, Robert Nesbit, and James Aitken, Scottish missionaries, also taught the Bene Israel Hebrew and the Bible. Of these, Mitchell was the most important. A graduate of Aberdeen's Marischal College, Mitchell arrived in Bombay in 1838 and survived Wilson by 30 years. In contrast to Wilson, he proceeded to Bombay with the anticipation that he would labour amongst the Bene Israel.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Like Wilson before him, Mitchell authored a text specifically designed to teach the Bene Israel Hebrew and taught Hebrew at the General Assembly's Institution.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In 1842 he was teaching Hebrew to 20 Bene Israel, some of whom had ‘nearly finished an outline of the Grammar, and are able, with little help from a Lexicon to read any prose portion of the Hebrew Scriptures’. This signified for Mitchell that the Bene Israel sought to comprehend the meaning of their scripture rather than merely seeking to ‘pronounce the sounds of their sacred volume’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

For the Scottish missionaries, the Bene Israel's zeal to learn Hebrew and understand their ‘religion’ showed that they were Janus-like simultaneously advancing religiously and recovering their ‘ancient faith’ through the method the Scots championed: reading their shastra with comprehension. As Mitchell cheerfully noted, ‘every Israelite. . .desires to possess a copy of the Old Testament, both in Hebrew and in his vernacular language, Marathi’, which meant that they sought ‘to understand the meaning of the word of God, and do not rest satisfied with a mere utterance of the sound of the venerable Hebrew Scripture’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Significantly, Mitchell reported that the Bene Israel gladly purchased the Hebrew Old Testament but, to his knowledge, were not reading the New Testament they received gratis.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The Bene Israel proved not to be passive recipients of the evangelical Christian enterprise: in fact they were highly selective consumers who accepted and sought out what they wanted from the missionaries and disregarded the rest.

The Scots were relative latecomers to the Christian effort amongst the Bene Israel, but after Wilson published his Hebrew grammar and the Scottish missionaries began teaching Hebrew, a singularly warm relationship developed that lasted for almost 50 years. The Scots possessed a real fondness for the Bene Israel. George Smith was right when he argued that the Bene Israel were ‘very near to Wilson's heart’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Scottish missionaries delighted in reporting that the Bene Israel were not only willing to receive Christian instruction but also ‘more willing to receive instruction in the doctrines of Christianity than any other community of their brethren throughout their world’. As ‘fellow-subjects’ who constituted the largest body of Jews in any British overseas territory, the Scots argued that the Bene Israel, who comprised the vast majority of Bombay Presidency's Jews, had a special and compelling claim to British Christian concern. They also believed that the Pauline injunction that the ‘Children of Abraham’ should be ‘beloved for the fathers’ sake’ (Romans 11:28) necessitated a concern for the Bene Israel.Footnote ¹²⁰ In addition, the conversion of the Jews was an important goal for the Scots because it would effectuate gentile conversion.Footnote ¹²¹ However, for Wilson, the Bene Israel need not even convert to Christianity to facilitate the conversion of the gentiles because the very existence of the Bene Israel could be used as a demonstration of the Bible's veracity.Footnote ¹²² The Bene Israel, for their part, welcomed Scottish Christian instruction because, apart from the New Testament, the instruction the Scots afforded to them—Hebrew, Old Testament, and English—was what they wanted to learn.

The attainment of Hebrew knowledge: Joseph Ezekiel Rajpurkar and the results of the Bene Israel encounter with Protestant missionaries

Disappointed that the Bene Israel did not convert to Christianity, Scottish missionaries nevertheless expressed great satisfaction that under Christian guidance the Bene Israel had advanced ‘in every sense’ but especially in their understanding and practice of the ‘religion of their fathers.’ According to the Scottish missionary Robert Nesbit, Christian instruction had transformed the Bene Israel into ‘a very different people from what they were’ and improved the ‘form of their religion, [and] the standard of their morality’.Footnote ¹²³ Indeed, Mitchell believed that their schools did more good for the Bene Israel than any other community.Footnote ¹²⁴ One feature of this ‘improvement’ was the Bene Israel effort to expurgate ‘heathenish’ practices, particularly idolatry. ‘So far as the purging out of idolatry is concerned’, Mitchell argued, ‘we have seen that the work among the Bene Israel have been largely blessed’.Footnote ¹²⁵ This was not Christian conversion, but it was a ‘change to the better’ that signalled a movement towards Christianity.Footnote ¹²⁶ As Nesbit argued:

In stark contrast to their earlier ‘ignorance’, the Bene Israel were now freely doing what the missionaries encouraged them to do: reading the Old Testament rather than the Talmud—the Talmud being the purported foundation of Rabbinism not Judaism.Footnote ¹²⁸ Accordingly, Protestant missionaries achieved a limited Christianization. Although very few Bene Israel actually converted to Christianity, and only one during Wilson's lifetime,Footnote ¹²⁹ a conversion did occur; not to Christianity, but to another form of the Bene Israel's Judaism. But because the Bene Israel purportedly rejected ‘Talmudical writings’, one missionary argued that they had been ‘re-possessed of their ancient faith in one of the purest forms in which it exists at the present day’.Footnote ¹³⁰ While this conversion began under the guidance of Cochin Jews decades before Christian missionaries arrived on the scene, it was unquestionably fostered by American, Anglican, and Scottish missionaries.

The Scottish missionaries’ opinion regarding the effects of Christian education on the Bene Israel should not be seen as self-congratulatory hyperbole. By the mid-nineteenth century the Bene Israel had acquired a ‘vast abhorrence of idolatry’ and had largely eliminated what Christian missionaries, Cochin Jews, and, ultimately, the Bene Israel themselves considered as non-Jewish ‘heathenish’ customs. According to Wilson, they had become ‘much freer from idolatrous practices than the mass even of the Mohammedans in India’.Footnote ¹³¹ This ‘vast abhorrence of idolatry’ is captured in an incident a Bene Israel schoolmaster related to J. M. Mitchell. In the early 1830s, to the ire of some in the community, some Bene Israel in the Konkan still ‘cleaved to Heathen ceremonies’ and participated in the Naga Panchami festivities. The community was determined to end this and entered the home of every Bene Israel ‘known to retain any Heathen symbols’ and ‘broke into pieces’ all idols that were found.Footnote ¹³² Years later, whilst touring the Konkan, Bene Israel teachers, soldiers, and telis told Mitchell that they had once worshipped Hindu deities—such as Ganpati and Naga (serpent)—and participated in Naga Panchami festivities, but not any more; now such practices were ‘not tolerated’.Footnote ¹³³ At the end of the century iconoclasm amongst the Bene Israel no longer occurred because these so-called heathenish customs had all but disappeared from the community.Footnote ¹³⁴

John Murray Mitchell was the last surviving Scottish missionary who worked closely with the Bene Israel. In 1899 he published an account of his Bombay life that contained an invaluable, but previously neglected, chapter on the Bene Israel that concluded with a brief discussion of institutions where they could study Hebrew: Bombay University and the Israelite School.Footnote ¹³⁵ While Wilson instigated Hebrew study at Bombay University and helped to secure the funds for the David Sassoon Hebrew Scholarship, after his death it became almost entirely independent of missionary influence.Footnote ¹³⁶ The Bene Israel themselves were responsible for establishing Hebrew as a subject of study at the Israelite School. H. S. Kehimkar, a Bene Israel graduate of the Church Missionary Society Robert Money School, founded this school in 1875, the year Wilson died, and in 1881 it began to receive financial support from the London-based Anglo-Jewish Association. For Kehimkar, the need to study Hebrew was a principal reason to establish the school. He argued that Hebrew instruction was vital because government schools taught Bombay's other communities’ classical languages—such as, Sanskrit, Persian, and Latin—but neglected Hebrew, which meant ‘Jewish or Israelite children’ could not ‘cultivate the study of their own classical language which they cherish with reverence’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Even Bene Israel girls were taught Hebrew at the Israelite School,Footnote ¹³⁸ which was not the case in the contemporary Scottish Missionary Beni-Israel Girls’ School.Footnote ¹³⁹ The Israelite School is a landmark in Bene Israel history as it represents an effort on their part to extricate themselves from what was hitherto welcomed: Christian instruction.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The Bene Israel, once dependant on missionaries for Hebrew and Biblical instruction, now maintained sufficient Jewish knowledge and connections to free themselves from Christian missionary tutelage.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed a sharp reduction in missionary interest in and work amongst the Bene Israel. The Anglican, J. Henry Lord, of the Society of St John the Evangelist and the Parochial and Foreign Missions to the Jews, who had laboured amongst England's Jews before relocating to India, was the last missionary to publish on and wholeheartedly devote himself to the Bene Israel. But the relationship he and other late-nineteenth century Christian missionaries (including Nilakanath Goreh, Baba Padmunji, and Ganpatrao Navalkar) had with the Bene Israel was much more contentious than the relationship earlier missionaries like Hall, Wilson, and Sargon had maintained with them. Notwithstanding J. H. Lord's observation that in contrast to the ‘bitterness and open hostility’ of other Jews to Christian missionaries the Bene Israel treated missionaries with courtesy,Footnote ¹⁴¹ his brother, the Society for Promoting the Gospel missionary J. Douglas Lord, reported in 1884 that some Bene Israel opposed his work and even ‘hated’ him,Footnote ¹⁴² which was a far cry from Wilson's 1841 claim that his mission was ‘on the very best terms’ with them.Footnote ¹⁴³ This more adversarial relationship was a consequence of the Bene Israel's newfound confidence as Jews, their strong ties to Anglo-Jewry, and, most importantly and perhaps ironically, the Hebrew, Biblical, and English education they had received from Protestant missionaries during the first 75 years of the nineteenth century. ‘Strange to say’, J. H. Lord observed, ‘it is from among Dr. Wilson's old pupils that several Bene-Israel are now to be found who have become pillars of revived Judaism amongst their Brethren’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Whereas during the first half of the nineteenth century missionaries reported that the Bene Israel were more disposed than any other Jews ‘to listen to the doctrines of the messiah’,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ the Scottish missionaries’ former pupils and other Bene Israel were now engaging in activities that would have been unheard of earlier: participating in disputations with Christians, challenging Christian interpretations of the Bible and the accuracy of their Marathi translations of the Bible, and criticizing Christianity as irrational and contradictory.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Much of this criticism was voiced in Bene Israel Marathi and English-Marathi periodicals that proliferated from the late 1870s onwards. These periodicals not only routinely criticize J. H. Lord and other missionaries,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ but they also entreat the Bene Israel to more thoroughly educate themselves in Judaism and Hebrew to prevent ‘ignorant’ Bene Israel from converting to Christianity, better equip the community to defend Judaism against Christian attack, and continue the restoration of Judaism amongst the community.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Bene Israel periodicals, inspired by Hindu and Parsi religious reform movements, encouraged the Bene Israel to publicize the ‘greatness of Judaism’ as Dayananda Saraswati promoted the greatness of the Aryan religion.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Thus, the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the Bene Israel voicing, for the first time, a vigorous defence of Judaism and self-consciously throwing off the yoke of Christian missionary instruction—an education they no longer required. Accordingly, an 1899 issue of Israel Mitra declared: ‘The debt which the Bene-Israel community owes to Christian missionaries like the late Rev. John Wilson, is not little, but we believe the community has now passed the stage when it could be helped by them’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The life and work of Joseph Ezekiel Rajpurkar (1834–1905), born in Bombay a few years after John Wilson began his work, encapsulates the Bene Israel experience with and ultimate emancipation from Christian missionaries. His father, Ezekiel Joseph Rajpurkar, was a teacher and superintendent of Scottish mission schools. At a time when military service was the predominant Bene Israel path to distinction and advancement, the Rajpurkars—one of the three families of hereditary Bene Israel kajis—were distinguished for their learning, educational work, and dedication to Judaism.Footnote ¹⁵¹ According to Solomon Reinemann, E. J. Rajpurkar and his brothers

After attending Scottish mission schools J. E. Rajpurkar entered the Free General Assembly Institution where he studied English, Hebrew, and other subjects with John Wilson, Robert Nesbit, and John Murray Mitchell. In 1856 he completed his studies and took a position as a teacher at Bombay's David Sassoon Benevolent Institution—a school for Baghdadi Jewish children—where he taught Hebrew, Judaism, and English. Five years later he became its headmaster, despite the fact that for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Bombay Baghdadi Jews distanced themselves from the Bene Israel and questioned their ‘Jewishness’. Rajpurkar would hold the position for almost 40 years.Footnote ¹⁵³ Late nineteenth-century Bene Israel did not fail to notice the irony of a Bene Israel teaching Baghdadi Jews Jewish knowledge.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

While Rajpurkar's position at the David Sassoon School marks a watershed in Bene Israel-Baghdadi relations, his stature as a Hebrew scholar signifies the end of Bene Israel dependence on Christian missionaries. In short, Rajpurkar was late nineteenth-century Bombay's most accomplished Hebrew scholar. One contemporary Jewish traveller claimed he was the ‘greatest specialist in the grammar of the holy tongue in all the lands of Persia, India, Yemen and Babylon’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Among his publications is a text on Hebrew abbreviations that J. H. Lord maintained ‘might usefully find its place in the Library of any English Hebraist’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ His mastery of Hebrew led him to assist the British and Foreign Bible Society in revising its Marathi translation of the Pentateuch.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Although he received instruction in Hebrew from the Scottish missionaries, Rajpurkar himself claimed that his Hebrew knowledge was ‘self-acquired’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ While he clearly surpassed his Scottish teachers in Hebrew knowledge and scholarship, the claim that his knowledge of Hebrew derived solely from his own exertions should be regarded with suspicion because we know he studied Hebrew at Bombay's Free General Assembly Institution.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Such an assertion—most likely originating in the Bene Israel effort to deflect the charge from other Jews that they were not ‘pure’ Jews—conforms to a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bene Israel trend to distance themselves from the missionaries and de-emphasize the Christian role in their community's religious ‘improvement’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Rajpurkar, the first Bene Israel Justice of the Peace, authored the entry on the Bene Israel in Funk and Wagnalls’ 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, and spearheaded Bombay Jewry's response to the blood libel charge that appeared in an 1882 Bombay periodical.Footnote ¹⁶¹ For many years he served as Senior Warden of Shaar HaRahamim Synagogue and Secretary to the Israel Lokancha Sudronshodak Mandali (Bene Israel Improvement Society), a socio-religious reform organization responsible for publishing a number of his writings.Footnote ¹⁶² Bene Israel organizations celebrated Rajpurkar for his dedication to disseminating Jewish and Hebrew knowledge to the community.Footnote ¹⁶³ To that end, he authored numerous Marathi publications including translations of Hebrew liturgy, translations and expositions of rabbinic literature, and books on Jewish history.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In these publications, he entreats the Bene Israel to learn more about Judaism. The community's attainment of Jewish knowledge would also avert Bene Israel from converting to Christianity. In 1871 Rajpurkar used his Biblical knowledge to convince the one Bene Israel who converted to Christianity during Wilson's lifetime to renounce his conversion.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Five years later, he published Israelache Dharmamattavishaye Shastrateel Pramane, a defence of Judaism's legitimacy and sufficiency based on scriptural references, which specifically contended that the Messiah had not yet appeared.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

J. E. Rajpurkar was not the first Bene Israel to use the Hebrew education received from Scottish missionaries to teach other Bene Israel Hebrew,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ but he was the first one to write a Hebrew grammar. In 1882, over five decades after Reverend Wilson wrote Ibri Bhashaiche Vyakaran, Rajpurkar published Ibri Laghu Vyakaran (Elementary Hebrew Grammar). He wrote Ibri Laghu Vyakaran in part because Wilson's grammar was out of print and difficult to obtain. But his principal motivation for writing a Hebrew grammar and the reasons he entreated the Bene Israel to study Hebrew were similar to the purpose of John Wilson's Hebrew grammar: to enable the Bene Israel to understand the ‘true meaning’ of the Tanach.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Yet, its ‘true meaning’ was not the same for Rajpurkar as it was for Wilson. For Wilson, understanding its true meaning was to realize that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah—a view Rajpurkar repudiated. In fact, Rajpurkar contended that the absence of Hebrew knowledge allows the ‘Pavitra Shastra’ (‘Holy Tanach’) to be misinterpreted, which would not be the case if one knew Hebrew.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Apropos, the different interpretation Jews and Christians had of the Bible is said to have been one reason why Rapurkar strove to master Hebrew.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

While he differed from Wilson on some points of Biblical interpretation, Rajpurkar resembled Wilson in the positions and honours he obtained from Bombay University. In 1871 he became the second Hebrew examiner at Bombay University; Wilson was the first. Eight years later he was made a University Fellow. His attainment of these positions and his Hebrew publications and translations literally marked the end of Bene Israel reliance on Christian missionaries for Hebrew instruction.