When I trace the historical threads of my country, India, I often return to a rock on the Konkan coast, about 48 kilometers south of Mumbai, near a small village called Navagaon. Local tradition says fourteen people once stumbled ashore here: seven men and seven women, the only survivors of a shipwreck. They had lost everything. They lost their belongings, their holy books, and their connection to the world they had known. What they had not lost was memory. They remembered the Shema. They observed the Sabbath. They practiced circumcision. They also pressed oil, abstaining, always, on Saturdays.

The local Marathi-speaking people gave them a name that said everything about how they were received. They called them Shaniwar Teli, the Saturday oil-pressers. It was not a slur, just an observation. These strangers who would not work on Saturdays were curious, yes, but they were neighbors first.

This is where the Jewish story in India begins. It begins, unlike almost everywhere else in the world, without persecution.

The Community That Time Forgot and India Kept

The Bene Israel, as they came to be known, are believed to have arrived on the western coast of India around 175 BCE. They were possibly fleeing the persecutions of the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes. This was the same crisis that gave the Jewish world Hanukkah. Tellingly, the Bene Israel had no tradition of Hanukkah when they were rediscovered centuries later. They had left before the Maccabean revolt happened.

For roughly 1,700 years, they lived in the villages of the Konkan in near-total isolation from the wider Jewish world. They had no Torah scrolls, no synagogues, and no rabbis. What survived was skeletal but stubborn: the Shema, the Sabbath, circumcision on the eighth day, dietary restrictions, and a handful of festivals. The surrounding Hindu society absorbed them without erasing them. They took on Marathi names, local dress, and regional food. They became, in every visible sense, Indian, while remaining, in every essential sense, Jewish.

Modern genetic research has confirmed what oral tradition preserved. A 2016 study by researchers from Tel Aviv University, Cornell University, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that the Bene Israel show substantial Middle Eastern Jewish ancestry. This is consistent with an admixture event approximately 19 to 33 generations ago, roughly 650 to 1,050 years back. The DNA holds what the history books could not.

It was only in the second half of the 18th century, when Jewish traders and scholars from Cochin and later from Baghdad made contact with them, that the Bene Israel were formally reintroduced to mainstream Judaism. The first Bene Israel synagogue, Sha’ar Harahamim, or the Gate of Mercy, was built in Bombay in 1796. It still stands in the Mandvi neighborhood of Mumbai.

At their peak in 1948, the Bene Israel numbered around 20,000. Today, fewer than 5,000 remain in India, with the great majority having made aliyah to Israel.

Kochi: Where a Raja Gave Jews Land Next to His Palace

If the Bene Israel story is one of quiet survival, the Cochin Jewish story is one of documented, royal hospitality.

The oldest written evidence of Jews in Kerala dates to around 1000 CE. This was a set of copper plates inscribed in old Malayalam, issued by the Hindu ruler Bhaskara Ravivarman II of Cranganore to a Jewish leader named Joseph Rabban. The plates granted the Jewish community extraordinary privileges. They received exemption from taxes, the right to collect tolls, and ceremonial honors usually reserved for royalty: the use of lamps, umbrellas, drums, and trumpets.

These are not the documents of a tolerated minority. These are the documents of trusted partners.

When the Cochin Jews eventually needed a new synagogue, their original one in Cranganore was lost to flooding and later to Portuguese aggression. The Raja of Cochin gave them land. The Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568 in the Mattancherry neighborhood of Kochi, sits directly adjacent to the Mattancherry Palace. The Hindu ruler’s palace and the Jewish house of prayer share a wall. That architectural fact is a civilizational statement.

The Paradesi Synagogue is today the oldest functioning synagogue in the entire Commonwealth of Nations. Its floor is laid with hand-painted Chinese tiles, no two identical. Its walls hold Torah scrolls adorned in gold and silver. An oriental rug gifted by Emperor Haile Selassie lies inside. In 1968, when the community celebrated the synagogue’s 400th anniversary, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi attended in person.

When the Portuguese arrived and brought the Inquisition with them, the Maharaja protected the Jews under his jurisdiction. When the Portuguese attacked in 1662 and burnt the synagogue, it was rebuilt within years under royal patronage. This was not tolerance in the passive sense or a reluctant permission to exist. This was an active shelter.

The Long Detour: 42 Years of Diplomatic Silence

None of this warmth translated easily into modern statecraft. When I study the early decades of the Indian republic, the official hesitation stands in sharp contrast to our ancient history.

When Israel declared independence in 1948, India’s official response was hesitation. India voted against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. Despite recognizing Israeli sovereignty on September 17, 1950, Nehru explained the delay with unusual candor: “We would have done it long ago, because Israel is a fact. We refrained because of our desire not to offend the sentiments of our friends in the Arab countries.”

It was a pragmatic calculation. India needed Arab oil, Arab support on Kashmir at the United Nations, and Arab goodwill for the Non-Aligned Movement it was trying to build. Israel, increasingly close to the United States, fit awkwardly into Nehru’s ideological framework. An Israeli consulate was permitted to open in Bombay in 1953, but full diplomatic ties were withheld.

For forty-two years, the two countries maintained what historians have called a policy of recognition without relations. It was an odd diplomatic limbo that remained warm in private but cold in public. Even during this period, Israel quietly supported India. During the 1971 war that created Bangladesh, Israeli arms manufacturer Shlomo Zabludowicz supplied India and the Mukti Bahini with mortars, ammunition, and military instructors.

Full diplomatic relations came finally on January 29, 1992, when Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao announced the opening of embassies in Tel Aviv and New Delhi. The Cold War was over, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and India needed new strategic partners. Israel, it turned out, had been waiting patiently for decades.

What India Knew That Europe Forgot

As an Indian writer looking at this shared past, I find a profound lesson in what my country never did.

In the two millennia during which Jews lived on the subcontinent, there were no pogroms. There was no Inquisition directed at Indian Jews by Indian rulers. There were no yellow badges, no ghettoes, and no state-sponsored violence. The Bene Israel were never forced to convert. The Cochin Jews were never expelled. India, at nearly every moment in its long encounter with Jewish communities, offered something that most of the world withheld. It offered simple human normalcy.

Yonatan Varsulker, a Bene Israel man whose parents emigrated from Pune to Israel in 1961, put it plainly in an interview years later: “My parents did not experience any antisemitism in Pune. Jews across India experienced very good relations with their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. They believed we were blessed and hired us to work for them.”

That is not a diplomatic statement. That is lived memory.

I.S. Hallegua, one of the last members of the Paradesi community in Kochi, once said of the Jewish experience in Kerala: “The globetrotter coming to Cochin will recall that the Jew was harassed, ill-treated, forcibly converted, and denied the commonest rights… This globetrotter then comes to know that there is only one country, India, and in particular one small Indian state, Kerala, which received the Jew, protected them, and granted them all social rights, the freedom to follow their faith, and the ability to earn and live comfortably from the 1st century until today.”

The Konkan rock at Navagaon is still there. So is the Paradesi Synagogue. So, in quiet corners of Mumbai and Pune and Kochi are the last of the communities that never needed a reason to stay. They only, eventually, needed a dream that called them elsewhere.

India did not save the Jews of India from persecution. India simply never persecuted them. In the long, violent history of Jewish life in the diaspora, that is not a small thing. To me, that is everything.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)