The Jews of Cochin: Malabaris and Paradesis

The Jews of India, whose history stretches back two millennia, represent one of the smallest religious groups on the subcontinent. Today there are estimated to be only about five thousand (out of a population of over a billion). More than ten times as many Jews of Indian origin now live in Israel (where they constitute about 1% of the Jewish population), the vast majority of them having settled, or been born, there since 1948. Others are found scattered in Britain and North America. Yet the history of the Indian Jews, unlike that of their European counterparts or of the Middle Eastern Jews after 1948, was not one marred by anti-Semitism, political persecution, or Arab–Israeli conflict. It was of communities uprooted by a maelstrom of nationalism, religious sentiment, and economic pressures. This section of the paper shall briefly consider the experience of one of these communities – the Cochin Jews.

The origins of the Jewish community in and around the port city of Cochin, like those of the far more numerous local Syrian Christians and Mappila Muslims, lie in the ancient maritime trading links between the Malabar Coast and West Asia. Some Malabar Jewish traditions trace the arrival of the first Jews to the reign of King Solomon in the tenth century BCE, while others mention the establishment of a settlement in the first century CE and refer to a flourishing Jewish principality or guild called ‘Anjuvannam’ in Cranganore (present-day Kodungallur, Shingly in Jewish references), north of Cochin.Footnote ³ The accounts of travellers such as the twelfth-century Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela corroborate the existence of well-established Jewish settlements in Malabar for over a millennium.

Suffering internal dissension and attacked by both the Moors (Muslims), commercial rivals of the Jews and allies of the powerful Zamorin of Calicut, and the Portuguese, by 1565 the last Jews left Cranganore to come under the protection of the Raja of Cochin, establishing synagogues in several coastal towns and villages.Footnote ⁴ The community enjoyed a considerable revival in its fortunes during the ascendancy of the Dutch East India Company in Malabar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, despite a relative decline under their British successors, a few Paradesi (Malabari, ‘foreign’) Jewish families, notably the Halleguas and the Koders, continued to play an important part in the commercial life of Cochin until after Indian independence.

The Paradesi, though numbering no more than 180 according to the 1901 Census and constituting less than a sixth of Cochin’s Jewish population,Footnote ⁵ became much better known to the outside world, owing to their greater familiarity with European languages and their commercial and social contact with the Dutch, British, and other westerners who visited Cochin from the seventeenth century onwards. While they claimed descent from the Jews of Cranganore, there is substantial evidence to suggest that most, if not all, the Paradesi families still extant in the twentieth century only arrived in Malabar after the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497), coming from places as far afield as Spain itself, Germany, Syria (Rahabi or Roby, Aleva or Hallegua), Iraq (Cohen, Koder) and Yemen (Simon). Although the two royal copper plates given to the Jews are in the possession of the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherri, the fact that the synagogue, built in 1568, is predated by several Malabari Jewish synagogues tends to support this conclusion.

In justifying their separation from the Malabari Jewish majority, with whom they did not intermarry or worship, Paradesi apologists asserted that the Malabaris were descended from slaves and were not meyuchasim (Hebrew, ‘of attested Jewish lineage’). The Malabaris, claiming that they were the true descendants of the original Cranganore settlers and that the copper plates in the Paradesis possession must be either stolen or copied, rejected this.Footnote ⁶

The extant scattered contemporary references to Jews in Malabar prior to the sixteenth century make no mention of internal distinctions. For instance, Benjamin of Tudela wrote ‘The inhabitants are all black, and the Jews are also. The latter are good and benevolent. They know the law of Moses and the prophets, and to a small extent the Talmud and the Halacha.’Footnote ⁷ The first source for the existence of differences is a Hebrew letter of inquiry addressed to Rabbi David ben Solomon ibn Zimra in Cairo, dated about 1520, which says that, of nine hundred Jewish heads of households in Cochin, a relatively poor minority of a hundred meyuchasim did not intermarry with the rest who were ‘devout and charitable … observe the Torah and are rich and intimate with royalty and the princes’. It claimed that it was ‘out of jealousy and hatred’ that the meyuchasim called the latter slaves.Footnote ⁸ Ibn Zimra responded that the two groups could intermarry, provided that the non-meyuchasim underwent a symbolic conversion to remove any doubt about manumissions and conversions. However, the establishment of the Paradesi Synagogue on land granted by the Cochin Raja in 1568 entrenched the separation of the two groups.

Significantly, the 1520 letter did not mention distinctions based on colour. Even though the hierarchical ancient Aryan Vedic classification of Indian society was based on varna (Sanskrit, ‘colour’), it was the Portuguese who, from the fifteenth century, applied the Spanish–Portuguese word casta (‘pure’ or ‘chaste’), used by the Spanish to refer to race, to describe the social divisions they encountered on the subcontinent.Footnote ⁹ This perception confused the idea of ‘purity’ with that of ‘race’ – a connection reflected in the Spanish obsession with limpieza de sangre (Spanish ‘purity of blood’) following the expulsion or forced conversion of Spain’s Jews (1492) and Muslims (1502).Footnote ¹⁰ As Louis Dumont has pointed out, in Brahmanic prescriptions ‘The idea of race does not govern separation; rather it is the ideal of separation, purity, which governs among other things the separation which is elsewhere distinguished as “race”.’Footnote ¹¹

Such subtleties were lost in the subsequent European description (accepted by the Paradesis) of the Paradesi and Malabari groups as ‘White’ and ‘Black’. However, that such a conflation was inaccurate is shown by the fact that, when Moses Pereyra de Paiva, a Portuguese Jew from Amsterdam, conducted a census of the Paradesi Synagogue in 1686, his list included several Aleva families from Aleppo in Syria who were not considered branco and families said to be of Cranganore origin and brancos (Portuguese, ‘pure whites’). Clearly, the division between Paradesi and Malabari Jews was not simply either a matter of race or colour, or of ancient lineage or descent from recent Sephardic immigrants.

Nevertheless, over the next three hundred years the Paradesi were able to use a combination of mutually reinforcing factors to their advantage. These included their undisputed meyuchasim status; their contacts with European colonial powers, first the Dutch, and then the British; and the patronage of the Cochin rajas who valued their diplomatic and commercial skills in dealings with the Europeans. In contrast, the Malabaris, possessing none of these assets and in a state of flux following their departure from Cranganore, suffered a decline in their condition, particularly during the period when the Dutch were established in Cochin (1663–1795). Although their economic position in the early nineteenth century was compared favourably to that of the Paradesis, who had fallen upon hard times with the waning of Dutch power,Footnote ¹² the latter’s fortunes appear to have revived by the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³

The meshuchrarim: a minority’s minority

The Paradesi–Malabari division was not the only one among the Jews of Malabar. In defiance of Jewish law (Halakah), within both groups those who considered themselves meyuchasim discriminated against others whom they regarded as meshuchrarim (former household servants or slaves converted to Judaism – an 1854 proclamation abolished slavery in Cochin). A. B. Salem belonged to the section within the Paradesi community who suffered from such discrimination. Not allowed to sit on the benches inside the main hall of the Paradesi Synagogue, they had to sit on the floor of the forecourt and could not be called to recite prayers or read a portion of scripture (except once a year on Simhat Torah – the end of the annual cycle of the public reading of the Torah). They also could not marry meyuchasim, join them for meals and other social occasions, or be buried in the Paradesi cemetery.Footnote ¹⁴

The origins of the meshuchrarim is still the subject of controversy but, given that they formed a small minority among the Paradesis (numbering only thirty in the late 1950s), the most plausible view is that they were descended from unions between Paradesi men and non-Paradesi women.Footnote ¹⁵ What follows is the account given by Ruby Daniel, a distant cousin of A. B. Salem, who firmly rejects the label of meshuchrarim.Footnote ¹⁶

Solomon Hallegua, called Shelomi Mudaliar (the title of mudaliar or headman of the Jewish community, first granted by the Cochin Raja in the mid-sixteenth century, had passed to the Halleguas at the end of the seventeenth century), married Hannah, the daughter of a Paradesi Jew and a servant woman. However, this was not accepted by the other Paradesis, even though Hannah had been granted a bill of manumission in 1826 that stipulated that her sons would be counted in the minyan, the quorum for synagogue prayers.Footnote ¹⁷ It was the offspring – a son, Avo or Abraham, and four daughters – of the union between Solomon Hallegua and Hannah, and their descendants, who were referred to as meshuchrarim by the Paradesis.

Solomon Hallegua later took a second Paradesi wife, by whom he had another son. Despite managing the family estate after his father’s death, Avo was disinherited in favour of this half-brother when the latter came of age. Not granted equal rights in the Paradesi Synagogue, Avo led the meshuchrarim in boycotting the synagogue and praying in a private house. Denied permission to build another synagogue in Jew Town by the Cochin dewan (Persian, ‘prime minister’), Sankara Warrier, to whom the Paradesis had appealed,Footnote ¹⁸ in 1848, Avo’s group moved to British Fort Cochin to establish a separate synagogue and cemetery. There, helped by Christian missionaries, they flourished, acquiring a degree of education and a measure of prosperity until struck by a cholera outbreak that decimated the community. The few survivors either left Cochin or, after the death of Avo in poverty, returned to the Paradesi Synagogue where they were allowed to resume their subordinate position on payment of a fine.Footnote ¹⁹

Avo’s descendants continued to struggle for religious equality. In 1882, Paradesi attacks on a great-nephew of Avo who had become a chazzan (Hebrew, ‘prayer leader’) for the Bene Israel caused the Bombay Jews to make inquiries and brought Rabbi Asher Abraham Ha-Levi, a disciple of the head of the Baghdad yeshiva (Hebrew, ‘religious school’), on a mission of inquiry to Bombay and Cochin. Ha-Levi sought to persuade the Paradesis to end their discrimination against the meshuchrarim Footnote ²⁰ but they disregarded both his response and a ruling by the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem that echoed Ibn Zimra’s 1520 adjudication.Footnote ²¹

In the process of successfully becoming an accepted (and relatively high status) group within Kerala society, the Cochin Jews, like their Syrian Christian and Mappila Muslim neighbours, had clearly taken on caste-like characteristics. This is manifest in the treatment of the meshuchrarim, the observance of endogamy by the different groups, and the way in which they both appeared to regard themselves – and were seen by the rest of Kerala society – as a jati (Hindi, ‘birth group’). While some aspects of Judaism (for example, the importance placed on ritual purity) served to aid the Cochin Jews’ accommodation as a high status group within Kerala society, others were less helpful. The fact that Jewish law did not permit discrimination between different classes of Jews, whether they were meyuchasim or had undergone conversion or manumission according to the law, was purposely overlooked.Footnote ²² For the Paradesis, in addition to helping them retain their claim to ‘purity’ and high status in a caste-based society, such discrimination and separation was also seen as essential if they were to maintain their valuable identity as ‘White Jews’ in the eyes of race-conscious European colonialists.

The emergence of A. B. Salem

The rise of Abraham Barak (A. B.) Salem to prominence in the affairs of Jew Town, and in the politics of the princely state of Cochin, paralleled and reflected both the breakdown of the old Kerala society in which the Jews had been accommodated over the centuries, and the twilight of four and a half centuries of European power on the Malabar coast.

Salem was born in 1882, the son of Belukka, a daughter of the Paradesi rebel Avo. According to an account put about by Paradesi Jews, he was illegitimate, being the offspring of an incestuous relationship between his mother, a married woman, and her sister’s husband, a certain Barak.Footnote ²³ While this is a matter of controversy, what is clear is that he was brought up in poverty and it was largely through his mother’s efforts that he succeeded in obtaining an education.Footnote ²⁴

Scrupulously observant of Jewish religious law even as a young man, when Salem sat his Intermediate level exams at Maharaja’s College in Ernakulam, Cochin’s twin town, in 1899, he successfully petitioned Madras University to be exempted from taking a paper on the Sabbath.Footnote ²⁵ He then sought an audience with the dewan of Cochin, P. Rajagopalachari, persuading him to grant a scholarship that allowed him to pursue his studies in Madras where he successfully acquired his B.A. in 1902 before going on to obtain a degree from the Law College.Footnote ²⁶ Although a scion of the wealthiest Paradesi family (and distant cousin of Salem), Isaac Ben Elias Hallegua, had become the first Cochin Jew to graduate in 1884Footnote ²⁷, Salem was the first of the meshuchrarim to do so (he was also the first Cochin Jew to gain a law degree).

Cochin at the turn of the century was still a small, quiet port far removed from the bustle of cities like Bombay, Madras or Calcutta (until the completion in 1902 of the extension of the railway from Shoranur in British Malabar to Ernakulam, going to Madras meant a hundred-kilometre journey by bullock cart to catch the train). In this context, Salem’s university education meant far more than the acquisition of academic qualification. It widened his horizons to worlds far beyond the confined – and for a meshuchrarim with ambitions, suffocating – atmosphere of Mattancherri’s Jew Town. Among those he came into contact with in Madras were men later to became national figures, such as John Matthai, a Syrian Christian economist from Travancore who became independent India’s second Finance Minister, and C. Rajagopalachari, the Madras Congressman and close associate of Gandhi who became the first Indian Governor-General of India in 1948.Footnote ²⁸

When Salem returned to Cochin, it was as an officer of the state government. After serving for two years with the special staff of an investigation into Madras fisheries (1905–7), he was appointed Officer on Special Duty for the Investigation of Cochin State Fisheries, producing two short reports in 1909.Footnote ²⁹ He subsequently became a licensed vakil (Hindi, ‘advocate’) at the local District and Sessions Court and then at the Cochin Chief Court in Ernakulam.Footnote ³⁰ His nomination in 1910 to act as president of the newly established town council in Mattancherri was an early sign of the public recognition that he received beyond the Jewish community.Footnote ³¹

An energetic and charismatic personality who was a good orator in Malayalam and English, Salem was a well-known figure in Cochin politics for a quarter of a century. While reasonably successful as a lawyer, he was able to devote more of his time to public activities because of his marriage to Ruth, a great-granddaughter of Avo.

One of Avo’s breakaway group (and a cousin of Salem), Ruth’s mother had not returned to Jew Town but remained in Fort Cochin and married a Catholic.Footnote ³² Ruth, who converted to Judaism, was a qualified physician and the income from her medical practice gave Salem the latitude to take on labour cases and pursue his political inclinations with greater freedom than he might otherwise have enjoyed.Footnote ³³ At a time when most married Paradesi women, in common with those of other Kerala communities, did not work outside the home, this was unusual. The couple also did not show any distinction in the education of their three sons and two daughters.Footnote ³⁴ While the eldest of their three sons followed his father’s example in becoming an advocate, both their daughters emulated their mother and became doctors (of the remaining two sons, one became a engineer and the other retired as the principal of a polytechnic).

In the names given to his children, Salem showed his interest in the Jewish past – and present. His third son, Gamliel, bore the name of a first-century rabbi and teacher of the law who, though a Pharisee, had been noted in the New Testament for his tolerance (Acts 5:34–40), and his second, born in 1922, was called Balfour in honour of Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary who, in 1917, committed Britain to ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.Footnote ³⁵ Of his two daughters, the elder was named Malka (Hebrew for queen) and the younger, born in 1918, bore the name Venetia Esther – after Venetia Stanley, the English noblewoman who had converted to Judaism upon her marriage to Edwin Montagu, then Secretary of State for India, and Esther, the Biblical heroine who married the Persian king Ahasuerus (Xerxes) and saved her people from being massacred.Footnote ³⁶

Photographs of Salem show a figure that commanded attention – a short, thickset, balding, bearded man with a broad forehead and striking deep-set eyes, wearing a dark, western suit. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as the militantly rationalist journalist (and fellow legislator) ‘Sahodaran’ Ayyappan, a leader of the outcaste Ezhavas, he manifestly maintained his identity as a Jew, habitually wearing a yarmulke (a Jewish skullcap). While not fluent in spoken Hebrew, he was enough of a student of the language to serve on Madras University’s Board of Studies for Hebrew and Syriac and to tutor children in Jew Town.Footnote ³⁷ According to his youngest son, his strong devotion to his faith was an important factor in holding him back from wholly committing himself to politics.

The Paradesi Jews’ unwillingness to accept the unimpeachably Jewish antecedents of Salem and other so-called meshuchrarim, along with the personal stigma of his alleged illegitimate birth, might well have influenced him in his religiosity. Barred from using the Paradesi Synagogue for his wedding in 1915, he travelled across the subcontinent to Calcutta to wed Ruth in the Baghdadi Jewish Magen David Synagogue there.Footnote ³⁸ His 1929 guide to the Paradesi Synagogue was dedicated to his mother, who died shortly afterwards while he was attending the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress. It contained a lengthy excursus on the virtues of the non-Jewish Ruth the Moabite that includes, given the background of his mother and his wife, this telling passage

Salem the politician

While taking an active interest, until the 1920s Salem did not play a prominent role in the nascent political activity in Cochin, a relatively liberal princely state ruled by a succession of benevolent elderly rajas. In the 1910s, local politics, as expressed through the Mahajana Sabha (Malabari, ‘All-People’s Association’) launched in 1916, was a genteel affair dominated by upper-caste Hindu landowners, merchants, and lawyers, often belonging to families associated with the ruling house. Salem was on familiar terms with many of the leaders of the Sabha through his public activities in the municipal council and courts but, being neither wealthy or from a leading family of one of the major communities in the state (the upper-caste Nairs, the Syrian or Latin Catholic Christians, and the outcaste Ezhavas), he remained in the background until his election to the Legislative Council in 1925.

The temper of politics only began to change with the Gandhian non-cooperation movement in British India in the years immediately after the First World War. In 1919, the Mahajana Sabha submitted a scheme for constitutional reform proposing a partially directly elected council for the state, a proposal acceded to by the Maharaja in the following year.Footnote ⁴⁰ Local committees of the Indian National Congress were also started in Cochin at this time and, in early 1921, serious rioting and communal clashes took place in the town of Trichur after a meeting addressed by the Madras Congressman (and Salem’s old acquaintance) C. Rajagopalachari.

This delayed the introduction of a legislative council, but four years later Salem made his formal entry into politics, elected to the new Council from the Special Jewish Constituency. There were also separate constituencies for Muslims and Ezhavas, but not for the much more numerous and influential Syrian Christians who, along with high-caste Brahmins and Nairs, were returned from territorial constituencies, albeit on a restricted franchise (in 1934, the electorate was expanded from just under 26,000 to 64,000 – out of a population of 1.2 million).Footnote ⁴¹

Assisted by the fact that he represented the smallest religious group in a political environment where members belonging to the larger castes and communities were constantly jockeying for position, Salem’s abilities as a debater and organizer were soon recognized. Two years after publishing a pamphlet demanding the introduction of responsible government in the state,Footnote ⁴² in August 1926 a draft constitution that he had drawn up, signed by twenty-eight of the thirty elected non-official members of the Legislative Council, was presented to the dewan, T. S. Narayana Ayyar.Footnote ⁴³ Six months later, when a legislative grouping known as the Progressive Party was formed to press for a form of responsible government in the state, he became its Whip.Footnote ⁴⁴

Salem’s activities were not confined to the Cochin Council chamber. He put up a noticeboard outside his house to post political news and comment and also regularly gave public speeches at an open space in Ernakulam that became known as ‘Salem Kunnu’ (Salem’s Hill).Footnote ⁴⁵ During the latter half of the 1920s, he regularly addressed or presided over sessions of the new Travancore Labour Association and the Quilon Labour Association in the neighbouring princely state of Travancore, joining radicals belonging to other communities such as the Nair journalist Sardar K. M. Panikkar, ‘Sahodaran’ Ayyappan and T. K. Madhavan (both leaders of the Ezhava social reform movement, the SNDP Yogam), and E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, the fiercely rationalist founder of the Dravidian ‘Self-Respect’ movement in Madras.

Influenced by these experiences and his work as a lawyer, Salem helped pioneer labour activity that gathered strength in Cochin in response to the hardships of the Depression of the early 1930s. He helped form the Cochin Port Labour Association in 1928Footnote ⁴⁶ and two years later successfully championed the cause of lightermen and other port labourers who went on strike for better wages, handling negotiations with their employers.Footnote ⁴⁷ In June 1931, in the midst of another strike, this time by workers at a British-owned coir matting factory protesting at a cut in wages, Salem was elected the President of a new Cochin Labour Association. However, on this occasion, the strike failed when the company threatened to relocate.Footnote ⁴⁸

Salem’s campaigning on behalf of labour formed only part of his frenetic public activity during this period. Four months after he participated in the All-India States’ Subjects Conference, held in conjunction with the annual session of the Indian National Congress in Madras in December 1927, the first Kerala States’ Subjects Conference was held in Ernakulam, presided over by R. K. Shanmugham Chetty, a wealthy banker and industrialist –and a Swarajya Party member of the Indian Legislative Assembly – who later (1935–41) served as dewan of Cochin.Footnote ⁴⁹

When a dozen Congressmen from the princely states formed the new Indian States’ Peoples Party during the Lahore Congress session in December 1929 presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, Salem was appointed one of the three secretaries.Footnote ⁵⁰ A resolution that he introduced at the States’ Peoples Conference in Bangalore in August 1930 echoed the Lahore Congress resolution demanding purna swaraj (Hindi, ‘complete independence’), making special reference to the Indian States. Delegates also supported another resolution that he moved, calling for the immediate establishment of responsible government in the Indian States.Footnote ⁵¹

Salem’s strength of feeling about the cause of Indian freedom is evident in a short guide to the Paradesi Synagogue published before the visit of the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, to Cochin at the end of 1929. Devoting three of the twelve pages on the Jewish Passover to the theme of nationalism and freedom, he described Moses and Aaron as the ‘Gandhi and Nehru of ancient Egypt’, pointedly adding ‘Such is the rugged course of the struggle for self-rule and the temptation to run into the story of the great struggle for Freedom of modern times that is taking place on the banks of the Ganges, sacred to the Hindu, is suppressed …’.Footnote ⁵² Two years later, in May 1931, Salem had the opportunity to welcome Nehru when, accompanied by his wife and teenage daughter (Indira), he came to Cochin and visited the Paradesi Synagogue.Footnote ⁵³

In the months following Gandhi’s initiation of civil disobedience in March 1930, Salem came close to following his heroes to prison. One of the main channels of expression for nationalism in Cochin and Travancore was through the promotion of temperance. The upsurge of nationalist activity in 1929–30 led to an intensification of such activity, especially in Shertallai in northern Travancore, just to the south of Cochin. An area badly affected by economic depression, it was also a centre of the drink trade, where poor people had been exposed to radical notions of equality and opposition to authority as a result of the temple entry movement in nearby Vaikom in the mid-1920s, and the nascent trade unionism in Alleppey.Footnote ⁵⁴ Intelligence reports identified Salem as one of the main agitators, but when, in September 1930, the local Travancorean District Magistrate prohibited him from making speeches in the area, he obeyed, in contrast to others who defied and were arrested.Footnote ⁵⁵

Salem preferred to stick to the legal route in pursuing his causes. In August 1930, in order to press home the strength of feeling behind the non-official members’ four-year-old campaign for responsible government in Cochin, he successfully organized the Legislative Council’s rejection of budget appropriations for many departments. The members’ demands included an Act defining the government’s responsibility to the legislature; an Executive Council; an elected Deputy President, and non-official President, of the Legislative Council; and the right of members to ask supplementary questions. In his response, dewan Narayana Ayyar, who had to use his extraordinary power of certification to allow the business of government to carry on, expressed the view that constitutional reform ought to be slow, calling upon the non-official members to ‘give up pursuing a dubious and thorny path’ that led nowhere.Footnote ⁵⁶

The policy of obstruction formed an element in a campaign against the unpopular Brahmin dewan, and the reigning Maharaja’s consort, by a former Raja of Cochin who had abdicated in 1914 after differences with the Paramount Power.Footnote ⁵⁷ After the dewan was replaced by C. G. Herbert, a British Indian Civil Service officer whom he found a ‘firm & matter of fact man’, Salem suspended the policy.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, within six months his career as a political leader in Cochin suffered a setback from which it never recovered.

Salem had first won election to the Council from the Special Jewish Constituency, after Samuel S. Koder (1869–1941) vacated the seat after also being returned from the Mattancherri constituency. Koder was a third-generation Paradesi and one of Cochin’s wealthiest businessmen, who had become the Warden of the Paradesi Synagogue and generally recognized as the leader of the Paradesi community. He had won election in Mattancherri with the support of Popatlal Govardhan Lalan, a wealthy Gujarati merchant. In May 1931, Koder reclaimed the Jewish seat while Popatlal defeated Salem in Mattancherri by the large margin of some four hundred votes.Footnote ⁵⁹ Salem subsequently filed a complaint before the Ernakulam District Magistrate alleging that Popatlal and his allies, all members of the local municipal council, had prevented him and some other voters from freely casting their votes.Footnote ⁶⁰ Two months later, after again suffering defeat at the hands of a wealthy merchant, this time a Syrian Catholic, in a by-election in the Chalakudi constituency, he ruefully reflected, ‘Such is the end of two contests in the election of 1106 [Malayalam Era] to the Cochin Legislative Council. The lack of money is the cause & nothing else!’Footnote ⁶¹ Salem felt betrayed by the other Paradesis, particularly Koder who, while keeping aloof from his nationalist politics, had long collaborated with him in a number of commercial ventures (as shown in the following section).Footnote ⁶²

When the new Council convened, a Nair politician, Dr A. G. Menon, assumed the leadership of the Progressive Party and became the body’s first elected non-official Deputy President.Footnote ⁶³ Salem, to whom Menon initially turned to draft his speeches in the chamber, could not hide his frustration at being forced to observe proceedings from the sidelines and eventually wrote an open letter to Menon and the other Progressive Party Council members telling them that they were letting opportunities slip in the campaign to gain responsible government.Footnote ⁶⁴

In 1938, dewan Shanmugham Chetty finally conceded a measure of responsible government. This worked along the lines of the dyarchy that had operated in the British Indian provinces prior to the 1935 Government of India Act, a number of government departments concerned with developmental activities being put under the charge of a minister chosen by – and responsible to – the elected majority in the reformed Legislative Council.Footnote ⁶⁵

Even though the Jewish Constituency was abolished (Samuel Koder’s son, Shabdai Samuel, was nominated to represent Jews), Salem eventually succeeded in being returned to the reformed Council from Mattancherri in December 1939 after having petitions challenging the outcome of both the June 1938 election and a subsequent by-election upheld. Unlike in 1931, on this occasion he enjoyed the solid support of the Paradesis, with the elder Koder rising in the synagogue to call on all to vote for him.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, while he retained the seat until the next elections in 1945, repeatedly speaking out for a fully responsible government as a member of the Cochin Congress group,Footnote ⁶⁷ he did not hold the position of prominence he had enjoyed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Others belonging to the major communities in the state – Nairs, Syrian Christians, and Ezhavas – led the various parties within the legislature (the Cochin Congress, the Cochin State Congress, and a new Progressive Party), and the State Praja Mandal, launched in 1941 to spearhead popular agitation for responsible government.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the course of the 1930s and early 1940s, the growing strength of the communist movement throughout Kerala had also radicalized trade unionism and labour politics, the other main area in which Salem had once been active and maintained an interest (he served twice as president of the Cochin postal workers’ union between 1937 and 1945).Footnote ⁶⁹ The younger generation of political activists regarded him as a marginal and idiosyncratic figure from the past, prone to giving humorous speeches about local politics in his strongly accented Malayalam on Salem’s Hill or from a rickshaw travelling about town.Footnote ⁷⁰ When he stood in the 1945 election in a constituency (Narakkal) dominated by Catholic voters, he came bottom of the poll with just 36 votes out of the 1684 cast.Footnote ⁷¹

Full responsible government in Cochin, a cause for which Salem had campaigned for two decades, was finally achieved after Indian independence. Yet, when the Praja Mandal gained an overwhelming victory in elections in 1948, held for the first time on the basis of universal adult franchise, he was not among the victorious candidates. The Congress ministry that was formed after the poll also failed to include a Jew among the nominated Council members, a decision that drew a strong protest from Shabdai Koder, the President of the South Indian (formerly Malabar) Jews Association and the nominated member in the pre-independence Legislative Council.Footnote ⁷²

Salem the Jewish reformer

The vicissitudes of Salem’s political career reflected the ambiguities of his position. Belonging to an underprivileged minority among Cochin’s Jews, he had an instinctive sense of affinity with the underdog that, combined with his abilities and qualifications, allowed him to emerge as a kind of popular tribune. Committing himself to causes such as Indian nationalism, democratic government, and the rights of labour enabled him to connect his own personal struggle for recognition and just treatment by his Paradesi peers to what was happening in the wider world.

While associating closely in his business activities and social life with prominent Paradesi Jews, Salem sustained his campaign for synagogue reform for more than four decades. According to a relative, Salem showed greater flexibility in his struggle for rights in the Paradesi Synagogue than other so-called meshuchrarim, even trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade the others to sign a petition that admitted that they were meshuchrar.Footnote ⁷³ His methods also showed the influence of the example of Gandhi and of the knowledge he had of campaigners for social and religious reforms in other communities in Kerala, most notably for the right of outcaste Hindus to enter temples.Footnote ⁷⁴

He emulated his grandfather in periodically boycotting services in the synagogue and observing them at home, and engaged in fasts and other forms of passive protest within the synagogue. In 1932, he finally succeeded in getting benches assigned to the male meshuchrarim at the back of the main hall and in gaining them the right to be included among those called to read from the Torah on weekdays. Salem was overjoyed:

Ten years later he was also permitted to read from the Torah on the Sabbath for the first time.Footnote ⁷⁶

However, this fell short of equal treatment. Visiting Cochin in 1952, Louis Rabinowitz, the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, noted how, on the Sabbath, the meshuchrarim were only called to give the fifth reading, regarded as least honourable by the local Jews, and also how, while they could now bury their dead in the Paradesi cemetery, this was ‘in a place of dishonour, against the wall, separated from the main portion of the cemetery by a stinking, stagnant pond’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Rabinowitz was appalled to be asked whether, in the light of the antecedents of Salem and his wife, the marriage that had taken place two years earlier of Salem’s second son, Balfour, to Seema ‘Baby’ Koder, a meyuchasim Paradesi, could be regarded as valid. Barred from the Paradesi Synagogue, the couple’s wedding had taken place in a synagogue in Bombay and they had also had to have their son, Leslie, circumcised in a Malabari synagogue.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even Shabdai Koder (1907–94), who liked to appear liberal-minded and had succeeded his father as the Warden of the synagogue, asked ‘Is this child legitimate? The paternal grandfather of the child is a mamzer [Hebrew, ‘bastard’], the grandmother a convert, born out of incest.’Footnote ⁷⁹ While another of Salem’s sons, Gamliel, followed Balfour in marrying a Paradesi, resentment at such prejudice may have played a part in causing his two daughters to abandon their Jewish faith to marry non-Jews – Malka wedded a Kerala Syrian Catholic and Venetia, a non-Malayali Brahmin.Footnote ⁸⁰

Shabdai Koder’s harsh reaction was particularly surprising given the way in which Salem and the Koders had been socially intimate and cooperated in a whole range of activities over four decades. When a ferry and transport company was started in 1920 linking Cochin with Ernakulam and small islands nearby, Salem served as its secretary and Samuel Koder was its managing director. Koder had become the major employer for Paradesi Jews, having built up a major import–export business with a chain of department stores in the Cochin area, as well as in Trivandrum, the capital of Travancore.Footnote ⁸¹ Over the next decade, Koder and Salem worked together in other ventures to provide civic amenities, including the provision of piped fresh water and electricity to Mattancherri. When the Cochin Electric Company was formed in 1926, Koder was again the managing director, with Salem becoming the legal adviser. These collaborations left a bitter legacy – in 1944, Salem lost a case for wrongful dismissal as the legal adviser to the Electric Company, while in the following year he won another maintaining his claim to shares in the Ferry and Transport Services, which the Koders held that he had forfeited.Footnote ⁸²

Such social intimacy and commercial collaboration ameliorated rather than eliminated social discrimination. A visitor to Cochin in 1937 noted how, at a family celebration, several leading Paradesi men ate separately with Salem so that the other guests might not leave because of his presence.Footnote ⁸³ The distinction between the Paradesi and the so-called meshuchrarim persisted well after Indian independence and the emigration of most Cochin Jews to Israel.Footnote ⁸⁴ When Salem died in 1967, he was buried in the meshuchrarim section of the Paradesi cemetery and, even two or three decades later, older Paradesis such as Shabdai Koder were noticeably reticent when it came to discussing his achievements.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, the last vestiges of overt discrimination were put to rest in 1978 when the remaining Paradesis in Cochin joined together in celebrating the wedding of Balfour Salem’s son Leslie to a granddaughter of A. I. Simon, a die-hard opponent of Salem, in the Paradesi Synagogue.Footnote ⁸⁶

Salem the Zionist

Following the pattern of reformers in other Kerala communities, as Salem fixed more of his efforts on asserting his rights as a Jew, he also began showing a greater interest in Jewish communal organization and Zionism. This was another sphere of activity that brought him closer to like-minded Paradesis and a factor that contributed to the gradual amelioration of the discrimination faced by the so-called meshuchrarim.

In 1929, when Salem wrote his guide to the Paradesi Synagogue, he scarcely disguised his Indian nationalist and democratic sympathies in discussing Jewish themes such as the Passover. The depth of his involvement in Congress activity at this time might appear at odds with the interest he was to take in the Zionist cause over the next two decades, but the shift serves to highlight the interaction between an individual’s changing personal circumstances and his awareness of changes in the wider world. Salem’s political marginalization after his electoral defeat in 1931, and the sentiments that prompted his journey to Palestine two years later, inclined him towards a new emphasis on his Jewish identity. From a wider perspective, the plight of his co-religionists facing persecution in Nazi Germany, and the violent conflict between Jews and Arabs provoked by the Zionist settlement of Palestine, also seemed to provide him with a complementary focus for his political energies.

At the time there was no sustained Zionist activity in Cochin. While as early as 1901 a prominent Paradesi Jew (N. E. Roby) had written to Theodor Herzl about collecting funds for the Zionist movement in India, and in 1903 a local Zionist organization was formed,Footnote ⁸⁷ no Jewish communal organization existed prior to the 1930s, when a number of small societies sprang up and engaged in Zionist campaigning and propaganda. These included the Malabar Jews Association, the Cochin Zionist Association,Footnote ⁸⁸ the Habonim (a Zionist youth group),Footnote ⁸⁹ and the Malabar Zionist Movement.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Malabar Jews Association was launched in June 1932 with Samuel Koder as President and his son Shabdai as the Secretary and Treasurer; Salem became Vice-President.Footnote ⁹¹ Like other such communal bodies, proliferating in Travancore and Cochin at this time, the Association pressed for educational scholarships and concessions and better representation of Jews in the public service.

Salem saw no contradiction between his commitment to Indian nationalism and a growing interest in Zionism that culminated in his five-month stay in Palestine in 1933, the first ever visit by a notable Cochin Jew. In fact, he even argued that Indian independence was ‘the key to the solution of the Jewish State in the Holy Land’.Footnote ⁹² However, this was not a view shared by most Indian nationalists, who were disturbed by the colonial aspect of Zionism and its territorial claim based upon religious identity. For instance, Nehru, replying to a letter from the editor of the Jewish Tribune shortly after the beginning of the Arab Revolt against the British mandate authority in Palestine, wrote

In a subsequent letter, Nehru criticized the narrowness of nationalism in Palestine, both Jewish and Arab.Footnote ⁹⁴ From a more religious standpoint, Gandhi deprecated what he saw as Zionism’s betrayal of the true spirit of religion. Writing in The Harijan in November 1938, he held that Biblical Palestine should not be seen as a geographical tract and that it was wrong for Jews ‘to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb’.Footnote ⁹⁵

The depth of Salem’s involvement in Congress activity in the early 1930s might appear at odds with his developing interest in Zionism but it is a telling demonstration of what an individual chooses to see and adopt as the basis for his actions. On the one hand, Salem was an anti-colonial Asian nationalist with an instinctive sympathy for the underdog, evinced in his efforts to organize Cochin’s rickshaw pullers, coir workers, boatmen, and port labourers. On the other, he was undeterred from wholeheartedly embracing Zionism even by first-hand exposure to the suspicion and resentment felt by the Palestinian Arabs’ majority at the threatened appropriation of their homeland by European Zionist settlers. The pull of religious sentiment (one of Salem’s first acts after arriving in Palestine in February 1933 was to bury the remains of his mother, who had died three years before, on the Mount of Olives) and what seemed the modern pioneering character of the Zionist enterprise overcame any reservations he might have had.

While he did meet a few prominent Arabs and even had discussions about possible business cooperation, much of his time was spent in the company of Zionists and the view of Palestine that emerges from his diary reflected the standard Zionist narrative of Jewish progress and dynamism contrasted with Arab sloth and misery. Take this entry:

After dinner that evening, he went to a ball at the King David Hotel; on the following day he attended the eighth anniversary celebrations of the Hebrew University and listened to addresses by Chaim Weizmann, the elder statesman of Zionism and future president of Israel, and Professor Judah Magnes, the Vice-Chancellor.

On his return to India, Salem said he had imagined Palestine ‘flowing with milk and honey, as a land for the bearded and as a land where one can find the right place to worship God’ but found that ‘everything there was being carried on the principles of the West’, thanks to the magnificent work of ‘development and reconstruction’ being done by the Halutzim and Haluzmoth (Hebrew, ‘men and women pioneers’).Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet, despite obtaining a Palestine immigration certificate for his family, starting an Indo-Palestine Company, and calling on Jews in India to ‘go forth and have a stake in the land of their fathers’,Footnote ⁹⁸ he did not emigrate. According to one of his sons-in-law, this was because he thought he would be a nonentity in Palestine and could do more in public life in Cochin where he was well established.Footnote ⁹⁹

In fact, in the late 1930s the Koders were more conspicuously active in the Zionist cause, with Shabdai Koder starting the Habonim, a Zionist youth group.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Salem did start an Indo-Palestine Company that engaged in desultory import–export trade and sent periodic political reports to Leo Herrmann, the secretary of the board of Keren Hayesod (the Foundation Fund), established by the Jewish Agency to raise funds for settlement and industry in Palestine. Concerned about Indian attitudes on Palestine, especially after the outbreak of the Arab revolt there in April 1936, he unsuccessfully approached Keren Hayesod to provide a monthly contribution towards the cost of employing a stenographer and producing publications to combat negative opinions about Zionism.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, Salem’s most significant contribution to Indian Zionism came after the establishment of Israel.

Salem and the Cochin aliyah

By the late 1930s, the idea of migrating to Palestine had become a live one, at least in Jew Town in Mattancherri. In March 1937, a propagandist for the Youth Aliyah movement in Palestine and one of several Zionist emissaries who visited Cochin at that time, wrote: ‘I shall never forget the night I spent with members of the “black” and “white” Jews of Cochin, who ceaselessly asked questions about Palestine, and finally came forward with a rather fantastic scheme of transplanting their whole community to Palestine, lock, stock and barrel.’Footnote ¹⁰²

The reasons why the Jews of Cochin decided to emigrate to Israel were not straightforward. Certainly religious fervour and the appeal of aliyah (Hebrew, ‘ascent’) were important – an early immigrant, Ruby Daniel, says that the first reason was that Israel was kadosh (‘holy’)Footnote ¹⁰³ – but there were also economic, social, and political factors.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The majority of the Malabari Jews were relatively poor – small shopkeepers, itinerant traders, agriculturists, fishermen, carpenters, etc. – and devout, and it was this group that resolved to emigrate en masse in the period of flux following the establishment of Israel and the coincidental disappearance, after more than five centuries, of the kingdom of Cochin. However, many of the much smaller Paradesi community, especially those who were comfortably off, only left in dribs and drabs over the next four decades as their economic position declined with the introduction of land reform and nationalization measures by successive communist state governments. Greater competition for employment and, as their numbers declined, the difficulty of finding marriage partners, were also important in the case of these later migrants, who went not only to Israel but also to English-speaking countries – the United States, Britain, and Canada.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

A few Cochin Jews left earlier but the mass migration of the Malabaris was delayed until 1954–5, when Salem played a central role in facilitating their migration. Many of them had disposed of their land, as well as other communal synagogue property, to raise money for a Cochin Aliyah Fund to charter a ship to take them to Israel. They were prevented from leaving by representatives of the Jewish Agency.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Agency blocked their departure on medical grounds, citing the prevalence of filariasis, or elephantiasis, a non-contagious, mosquito-borne disease causing gross enlargement of the limbs. The Malabaris then approached Salem to be their emissary to Israel. He arrived there in May 1953 and, after making representations to President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a noted scholar of the Jewish Diaspora, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, returned early in 1954 with a doctor charged with examining those suffering from filariasis. Clearance was then given for the Malabaris to enter Israel. As an expression of their appreciation, they presented Salem with a ring and gold medal.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

After being instrumental in facilitating the mass migration of the Malabari Jews, Salem gradually retired from public affairs. Full responsible government in Cochin, a cause for which Salem had campaigned for two decades, was finally achieved with Indian independence and the integration of the princely states into the new Indian Union. Politics had moved on with the arrival of the universal franchise, and the growing strength of the communist movement in particular transformed the scene in Cochin and throughout what became the new state of Kerala in 1956. For the Jews in Cochin, their position as a tiny peripheral minority in the new Indian democracy had already been accentuated when the state merged with its much larger neighbour, Travancore, in 1949.

Though Salem chose to remain in Cochin, in the new era of radical democratic politics he was a peripheral figure and there were few takers for his brand of paternalist sympathy for the less fortunate.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ No longer really active in the wider political arena, he made representations to the state government about exempting Jewish students from taking exams during the Sabbath and joined in submitting a memorandum to the Backward Classes Commission about how the needs of the Jews in Travancore-Cochin had been neglected.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ His final foray into the electoral arena, as a Congress candidate in municipal elections in 1956, ended in defeat by a communist.Footnote ¹¹⁰ His repeated representations, in writing and in person, to Prime Minister Nehru and other Indian leaders through the 1950s to be appointed India’s envoy to Israel also bore no fruit.Footnote ¹¹¹ (India granted recognition to Israel in 1950 but only established full diplomatic relations in 1992, a quarter of a century after Salem’s death.) Salem was forced to curtail his activities after a stroke and in 1959 stopped keeping a diary, a practice he had maintained for four and a half decades.

The vicissitudes of Salem’s political career reflected the keenly felt ambiguities of his position and the powerful influence of the two nationalisms that shaped it. Belonging to an underprivileged minority among Cochin’s Jews, in committing himself to Indian nationalism and Zionism, as well as to causes such as democratic government and the rights of labour, he sought to project his personal struggle for recognition and just treatment by his Paradesi Jewish peers into his public activity. Yet the combination of religion and nationalism that uprooted the Cochin Jews also pushed him to the periphery of the political world he craved to make his own. The nationalisms that he imagined so vividly transforming his world did so in ways that left him politically – and his community, geographically – out of place.

Over the past half century, the Jewish immigrants from Cochin have established themselves and, after a difficult start, some have even flourished in Israel. Yet the Israel they made their new home was not the Jewish state of their pious imagining but, as Salem himself had predicted in 1933, a state of the Jews run along western lines. Today, some Cochin Jews in Israel express ambivalence about their situation, one Malabari Jewish immigrant saying, ‘We like to live here as if we were in Cochin’Footnote ¹¹² (the agricultural cooperative he lives in, Moshav Nevatim in the Negev, serves as the main focus for the Malabari Jews, with a Cochin Jewish Heritage Center promoted as a tourist attractionFootnote ¹¹³). Although the Cochin Jews of Moshav Nevatim remained aligned politically to the Israeli Labour Party long after many other Oriental Jews had gravitated to either one of the religious parties or Likud,Footnote ¹¹⁴ some of those belonging to a younger generation embraced the ultra-Zionist settler movement with the family of at least one being among those ejected in the unilateral Israeli evacuation of the settlements in the Gaza Strip in August 2005.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Salem’s life and the disappearance of the Cochin Jews

Salem died on 20 April 1967, four days short of what would have been his eighty-fifth birthday. At the end of the following year, elaborate celebrations marked the fourth centennial of the Paradesi Synagogue, the focus of so much of his campaigning activity as a Jew. The event, chiefly organized by Shabdai Koder and attended by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, emphasized the part that Cochin Jews had played in the life of the society within which they had dwelt for over a millennium.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet Salem, the best-known public face of that integration in contemporary times, was scarcely mentioned. Today a small road, named after him, by the side of the Paradesi cemetery commemorates his place in Cochin history.

Approaching the parallel stories of Indian nationalism and Zionism through the prism of the experience of A. B. Salem and the Cochin Jews highlights the role that nationalism played in reinterpreting the significance of religious identity. This was particularly evident in the Zionist case. Elie Kedourie noted how ‘In Zionism, Judaism ceases to be the raison d’etre of the Jew, and becomes, instead, a product of Jewish national consciousness’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Hans Kohn, one of the twentieth century’s chief theoreticians of nationalism and a disillusioned Zionist who abandoned Palestine for the USA, concluded that Zionism ‘had nothing to do with Jewish traditions; it was in many ways opposed to them’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Yet for some religious Jews, such as Salem and his Cochin Jewish compatriots, the attraction of Zionism eventually translated into equating their faith with commitment to Israel. On his return from Palestine in 1933, when Salem repeated the customary Jewish High Holiday greeting, Leshana Habba Birushalayim (‘Next Year in Jerusalem’), he wrote ‘The inspiration that simply fills the heart of our people in all lands on hearing this call has a new significance to one who has seen with his own eyes the beginnings of the fulfillment of the inspired vision of this great, yet, still small voice of the yearning of a world-wide people’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

At one level, Salem’s story vividly illustrates how the prioritization and translation of kinds of identity into the public sphere is fluid and contingent upon a variety of circumstances, personal as well as the outcome of changes in the wider world. At another, his story and that of the Cochin Jews of which it forms a part appears strikingly atypical of the post-1948 migration of Jews to Israel. In the absence of the hostility and suspicion engendered in Muslim lands by the establishment of Israel, a well-integrated minority was uprooted by the attraction of a powerful external factor – the emergence of a new nation state that they had no part in bringing into being but that claimed their religious loyalty and held out the idea of a new life of opportunity if only they responded to the call of aliyah. It is a story that highlights the exclusive and majoritarian pressures unleashed by modern conceptions of national identity and democratic politics. The Cochin Jews had survived for over a millennium as part of a composite society under the Hindu rajas of Cochin and their Chera predecessors. Yet, less than a decade after the emergence of a secular, democratic Indian republic and the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine, the community found itself on the verge of oblivion. Confronted with a choice of maybe seeing their Jewishness subsumed in a mass democratic India or opting for the opportunity – and risk – of a professedly Jewish Israel they knew little of, they chose the latter. A community that numbered over two thousand half a century ago had, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, diminished to barely sixty.Footnote ¹²⁰