A statue isn’t merely a decoration or a tribute, it’s a claim about what history means. When Rome erected statues of conquered kings, it was saying: your memory belongs to us now. When revolutionaries pull down statues, they are not merely destroying stone. They are contesting the ownership of the past. When a new nation chooses which figures to honor in bronze, it is making its most fundamental argument: this is what we came from, this is what we are, this is what gives us the right to exist.

Israel’s Consul General Yaniv Revach, standing in Mumbai on the occasion of Shivrajyabhishek Din (on June 06), the coronation anniversary of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, announcing plans to install a grand statue of the Maratha king in a major Israeli city, was therefore doing something far larger than diplomacy. He was making a claim about time. About the kind of time that matters. About which memories are real.

But buried in this diplomatic moment is a deeper philosophical puzzle, one that no one seems to be asking: what happens when two civilizations, whose entire structures of time are fundamentally different, begin to speak to each other in the language of shared memory?

The Actual History and Its Honest Limits

Most commentary on this event begins at the present. That is its fatal error.

The Bene Israel, the ancient Jewish community of the Konkan coast, are among the oldest continuous Jewish settlements outside West Asia. Their oral tradition holds they arrived after a shipwreck near Navgaon, close to Alibag, with some accounts dating the event to around 175 BCE, which, if accepted, makes them contemporaries of the Maccabean revolt, the very resistance narrative that stands at the heart of the Israeli founding mythos.

For roughly two thousand years, this community lived embedded in the fabric of Konkani life: pressing oil, observing the Sabbath, speaking Marathi, absorbing Hindu customs while preserving Jewish ones. They were called Shanivar Teli, Saturday oilmen, because they would not work on the Sabbath, a fact that speaks to a remarkable social accommodation: their Hindu neighbors simply absorbed it as a community characteristic.

However, there is another characteristic of such civilizational readings of the past: they tend to generate new alignments of memory and meaning in the present, often stretching the historical record into areas where certainty becomes difficult to sustain. After the announcement of the plan of Shivaji’s statue in Israel, some interesting articles have appeared claiming Bene Israel served in Shivaji’s army.

Did the Bene Israel really serve in Shivaji’s forces? The honest answer is: probably, but not certainly. The scholarly record is careful here. Benjamin J. Israel, in his authoritative The Bene Israel of India: Some Studies (Orient Longman, 1984), acknowledges that Bene Israel, apparently, served in the army and navy of the Marathas, before they started enlisting in the East India Company’s army. There is one named individual: Aaron Churrikar, described as a commander of a Maratha naval fleet, whose family reportedly held the position until 1793, sourced from Rev. J. Henry Lord’s The Jews in India and the East, a 19th-century missionary account rather than primary Maratha historiography. Mostly records draw on community tradition rather than archival Maratha records.

What is unambiguous is that the Bene Israel were present in the Konkan during the rise of the Maratha state, deeply embedded in the social fabric of the region in which Shivaji built his kingdom. Whether or not individual Bene Israel fought under his banner in any documented sense, the community shared the geography, the language, and the lived world of the civilization Shivaji was reconstructing. That is a real historical fact, even if the military claim requires the qualifier “possibly.”

Two Sovereignties, One Grammar

To understand why Shivaji........

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