Abstract
This article conceptualises diasporas and homelands not only through the lens of hybrid identities but also as complex locations which represent an intricate picture of oscillation between different points in time and space, which shift in response to broader political and global changes. Our case study is the Bene Israel (literally ‘Children of Israel’ in Hebrew) Indian Jews in Aden, who originated on the Konkan coast south of Bombay (today Mumbai), from the time of the British conquest in 1839 until their evacuation from Aden in 1967. The article begins with a survey of the history of the Jews in Aden during the modern period. It documents their origins, community development and demography in an attempt to understand questions of multi-oriented diasporas and shifting identities for these Indian Jews. The article shows that the members of the Bene Israel diasporic community who resided in Aden vacillated between nostalgia for a historic homeland in the biblical kingdom of Israel to affiliation with the British Raj, which ultimately evolved to identification with a wider Jewish diaspora. Until India got independence, while most Bene Israel, like other Indians, regarded Aden as the diaspora and Bombay as the homeland, in time, the majority of these Indian Jews opted for a new homeland in the State of Israel, in which India, previously the motherland, became a diaspora.
This article will document oscillating identities among the Bene Israel Indian Jews in Aden (today a governorate of Yemen) from the time of the British conquest in 1839 until their evacuation in 1967. 2 Aden is situated in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, near the eastern part of the Red Sea. The British exploited its strategic location as a gateway between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, and turned it into a thriving maritime hub connecting Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While a significant body of research on the Bene Israel has been published, no academic paper has been written specifically on this group in this location. In fact, the existence of a Bene Israel community in Aden has often been denied or hidden both by scholars and by other Adenese Jews. Nevertheless, as this article shall show, at their peak at the turn of the twentieth century, there were as many as 3,000 Indian Jews stationed in Aden, the majority of whom were Bene Israel, constituting one-fifth of the total number of Indian Jews (13,919) in the Bombay Presidency. The Bene Israel Indian Jews lived in multi-oriented diasporas, while negotiating shifting identities in different global landscapes.
Research into diasporas and diasporic communities has been prolific. ‘Diaspora’ was traditionally used with reference to the Jewish diaspora and subsequently to the Armenian diaspora. Since Abner Cohen coined the term ‘trade diasporas’ to describe the networks of a socially interdependent nations of spatially independent communities, 3 there have been studies of entrepreneurial diasporas, migration diasporas, aesthetic diasporas, diasporas of terror and diasporas of despair, 4 and even ‘diaspora’ diasporas. 5 Diaspora is conceptually distinct from trans-nationalism, which refers to migrants’ durable ties with their homeland, since they can also refer to states of mind or imagined identifications. 6 Vertovec has distinguished between a diaspora characterised by a common identity and co-responsibility, as a type of consciousness; a social form relating to ways of life, political orientations and economic strategies; and a mode of cultural form referring to the production and reproduction of trans-national social and cultural ties globally through media and communications. 7
In most studies of diasporas, the concept is marked by a type of duality or binary opposition. The discussions throw us back to Clifford’s statement that ‘the empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes a solidarity and connection there’. 8 Diaspora thus becomes a type of consciousness imputed by a duality, 9 probably as a result of Clifford’s assumed dichotomy between ‘home’ and ‘away from home’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. It is a truism that diaspora or diasporas are always dependent upon a homeland. 10 The homeland is a centre—imagined or real—from which the imagined or real periphery stems. 11 Both diasporas and homelands are multi-oriented, and both are characterised by ‘super-diversity’. 12
As we shall see in this article, diasporas do not just stand in binary opposition to homelands and are far more complex in reality. It is not simply a question of hybridity, but a more complex picture of oscillation between different points in time and space. It embraces, but goes beyond the conceptualisation of a ‘third space, which enables other positions to emerge’, 13 and encompasses the ambivalence of identifications. Diasporas and homelands can oscillate, and the people within them can oscillate too in terms of their identification, membership and affiliation, and in relation to other people far away and other centres elsewhere.
This article draws on anthropological fieldwork carried out with the Bene Israel, first in Britain in the early 1970s, where I interviewed several Jews from Aden who had recently arrived, and thereafter while living with the Bene Israel for three years in the town of Lod in Israel. Thereafter, I visited India frequently and continued researching and writing about the Bene Israel in pursuit of what has been called ‘Anthropology at Home’. 14 The oral history about the Bene Israel has been elicited from informants over a long period of time in different global locations. In addition to verbal statements, I have also consulted narratives which were recorded by ‘native’ historians in books, notebooks and pamphlets obtained from members of the community over the years. Different archives have been accessed for information on the Bene Israel of Aden, including the India Office Records (IOR) of the British administration in Aden in the period 1839–1967, files of the High Commission for Aden and British colonial reports available at the British Library in London, many of which are today online, 15 as well as the Haffkine archives at the National Library of Israel (NLI). 16 Over the past year, for the purposes of this article, interviews have been conducted with Adenese Bene Israel and other Adenese Jews in Israel and in England, and sources on Adenese Jewish tombstones have been re-examined.
In this article, the complexities of diasporas and homelands are explored by documenting the shifting identities of the Bene Israel of Aden as they manifested themselves through the cross-sections of religion, caste and ethnicity, which in turn oscillate in line with broader political and global changes. The article surveys the history of Jews in Aden during the modern period. Then, it explains the origins of the Bene Israel, and, on the basis of research into tombstones and archival literature, it shows how many settled in Aden, proving beyond a doubt that a community of Bene Israel lived in Aden during the British occupation of the city (1839–1967). Finally, the article documents the history and way of life of the Bene Israel in Aden and their relations with other Jews, in order to understand the more complex questions of shifting identities and multi-oriented, oscillating diasporas and homelands.
Jews in Aden
Jews have resided in Aden for centuries. According to Klein-Franke: ‘Approximately 200 Hebrew epitaphs have been discovered in Aden during the last 150 years. Approximately 70 epitaphs predate the nineteenth century’. 17 In 1839, when Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines of the Indian Marines, the British East India Company’s navy, annexed Aden, the total population of Aden was 1,000, of whom 250 or 300 were Jewish. 18 The aim of the British conquest of Aden was to eliminate Arab pirates and establish easy access to a supply port for the Royal Navy, where they could make repairs and develop a trade depot under their jurisdiction on the way to India and the Far East. 19 The British brought in Indians, including Bene Israel Indian Jews, from other parts of the subcontinent to aid them in constructing army barracks, fortifications, roads, hospitals and warehouses. The Indians were also employed in numerous clerical and skilled artisan jobs, whereby they manned junior executive and clerical positions, while the British colonialists reserved the higher positions for themselves. 20
In 1839, the British revoked the status of the Jews in Aden as dhimmi, or protected non-Muslims who were allowed to retain their religion in exchange for loyalty and the payment of taxes, but which effectively made them second-class citizens. In 1846, the British cleaned and repaired the Tanks, an ancient water reservoir. The fresh supply of food and water encouraged merchants from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean to establish agencies in Aden, and the port turned into a flourishing harbour. This encouraged the settlement of Jews in Aden from Yemen and from different parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jews of Aden were employed as petty traders and small craftsmen, such as mat-weavers, book-binders, masons, porters, jewellers, goldsmiths, shoe-makers and tailors. They were the first to introduce tile- and fez-making in Aden and also featured prominently in the ostrich-feather trade and the cigarette industry. 21 The Bene Israel from India, who were distinct from the rest of the Jewish community in Aden, served in the employ of the British, either as part of the military or, in ancillary positions, as military accounts’ clerks and draftsmen, officials in the Public Works Department, Commissariat and medical services. Special mention must be made of the Adenese Jewish Messa family who made their fortune as importers of hides and coffee from the highlands of Yemen and Ethiopia, 22 which they supplied to the British army and administration. 23 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Messa firm ran a Bombay-based office, where the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon dynasty ran a commercial empire, and which coordinated commerce from the headquarters of the Bombay Presidency through Aden in the direction of the hinterlands of Africa.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was a huge catalyst in encouraging commercial firms to take root in Aden. Members of the Jewish Sassoon families from Baghdad and India invested heavily in the project, and some of their kin moved their commercial interests to Aden. Aden became an essential stop for steamers, and a major trading port for commodities going from east to west and west to east. With the provision of security and prospects of a modern life in Aden, the population swelled, and Jews from Yemen, Baghdad, India, Persia and other parts of the Ottoman Empire began to converge on the port. 24 During the colonial period, Aden was comprised of several distinct sectors: the original port, Ma’ala; the modern port, Steamer Point; the Crater; and some resort areas and islands. The Jews congregated in a Jewish quarter in the Crater, later known as the ‘Aden Cantonment’ or the ‘Aden Camp’. After the opening of the Suez Canal, they began to travel from there to Steamer Point, which later became known as Tawahi, to buy and sell merchandise from the ships; some even moved to residences in the British quarter and opened up modern businesses there. 25
By 1931, the total population of Aden had swelled to 48,838 26 ; of these, 4,200 were Jews, who constituted 11.5% of the total population. In 1932, Aden became a separate province of British India; Jews were attacked and wounded, and Jewish shops were looted after Muslims claimed that a mosque had been defiled by Jews. In 1937, Aden became a Crown colony and was no longer considered part of British India. 27 When India received its independence in 1947, followed by the independence of the State of Israel in 1948, pogroms broke out again against the Jews, during which 87 Jews were murdered. 28 Most Jews fled Aden, but some stayed on. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in 1965 the Jewish population in Aden numbered 400. 29 By 1967, the British were ousted from the Aden Protectorate, a move that had its origins in the 1963 ‘Adenese Emergency’ or the Radfan Uprising. The National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Yemen had provoked street riots, which were crushed by British troops, but pro-guerrilla rioters continued to be active. The Emergency was exacerbated by Israel’s Six-Day War in June 1967 when Egypt accused the British of aiding Israel to defeat them. The Jews who had remained in Aden were issued with British Overseas Passports and were airlifted out secretly by the Royal Air Force in the middle of the night. They were given the choice of touching down in London or continuing on to Israel: 150 Jews elected for the Jewish ‘homeland’.
Today, the Adenese Jewry Heritage Museum in Tel Aviv documents the lives of Jews in Aden prior to their migration. It is remarkable that it does not contain a single reference to Bene Israel Indian Jews, who also lived in Aden. Nor is the settlement of the Bene Israel in Aden recognised by non–Bene Israel scholars. In the 1970s, a scholarly book on the Bene Israel in Bombay was published in London, with no mention of Aden. 30 In answer to my written enquiry, the author, who at the time was the foremost academic source on the Bene Israel, replied that no Adenese Bene Israel community had existed. This was also the reaction of later researchers on Aden, including Adenese Jews themselves. 31
The reasons for this lacuna are associated with the way the Bene Israel were regarded by other Jews, which will be clarified in this article. First and foremost, the Bene Israel were not part of mainstream Judaism until recently. They called themselves the ‘Children of Israel’ who derived from the Kingdom of Israel, and not ‘Jews’ from the Kingdom of Judah. Their origins were shrouded in mystery, and they did not possess the Oral Law, which comprises Rabbinic interpretations of the Torah written over the generations. Many Jews did not regard the Bene Israel as ‘pure’ Jews, since their customs were foreign. This situation was only resolved in 1964 when the Israeli Rabbinate finally acknowledged them as ‘full Jews’. 32 This article will show that the Bene Israel resided with other Indians in the British quarters in Aden and did not participate fully in Jewish life in the Jewish quarter.
The Origins of the Bene Israel
The Bene Israel are the largest Indian Jewish group, numbering 26,512 at their peak just after Indian independence.
33
Other Indian Jewish communities included the Cochin Jews from Kerala
34
and the Baghdadi Jews.
35
The Bene Israel originated on the Konkan coast, south of Bombay, claiming that they arrived from ‘the North’, perhaps as early as 175
So long as the Bene Israel lived in the Konkan villages unhindered by outside agencies, they identified as Indians who were part of the Hindu caste system, yet stood outside it by virtue of their belief in monotheism and observance of the Jewish religion. Their occupation of Sabbath-observing oil-pressers differentiated them from other castes. At the same time, the descendants of the Bene Israel survivors of the shipwreck identified themselves with an imaginary or historical Israel from where their co-religionists were later exiled by the Assyrian kings as the Ten Lost Tribes. From the Indian Konkan, the Bene Israel ‘remembered’ another homeland whence they originated, but at this point in time they still did not connect with the Jews, who traced descent from the Kingdom of Judah. 37
According to Bene Israel oral history, when discovered by David Rahabi (since they were living cut off from all other Jewish communities), 38 the Bene Israel observed the Sabbath, dietary laws, circumcision and many of the Jewish festivals. In order to ascertain whether the Bene Israel were indeed Jews, Rahabi requested the women to prepare him a fish meal. When they singled out the fish with fins and scales—that is, the kosher fish from the non-kosher fish—Rahabi was convinced of the community’s Jewish identity and agreed to instruct them in the tenets of Judaism. The Bene Israel memory of a historic homeland in Israel was now beginning to change to include an affiliation with the wider Jewish world.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Bene Israel began to move out of the Konkan villages to Bombay in the employ of the British. It is important to note that by virtue of the fact that they were out-of-caste Indians who adhered to monotheism, the Bene Israel were classified by the British in official reports and governmental censuses from 1786 onwards as members of a Native Jew caste, or Israel caste. 39 As Numark has noted: ‘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)’. 40
The Bene Israel earned a reputation as efficient soldiers in the Maratha wars (1775–82, 1803–05 and 1817–18), the Anglo-Mysore wars (1767–69, 1780–84, 1790–92 and 1799), the first Anglo-Afghan war (1839–42) and the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824–26). 41 After the Adenese occupation, some Bene Israel were sent to fight in the Sikh wars, but, most significantly, these ‘Native Jews’ demonstrated their loyalty to the British during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. 42 Caste restrictions precluded Hindus from going far afield from the India they knew, for fear that members of their own caste might not be available for religious ceremonies in a foreign land. The Bene Israel, as an out-of-caste minority, did not suffer from such restrictions and could recreate their community in foreign lands. Their homeland was Bombay and the Konkan villages, but they were willing to serve in the British–Indian Bombay Presidency diaspora. They worked for the British in telegraphs and posts, police and railways and spread out over the Indian subcontinent, establishing synagogues and communities as far afield as Pune, Ahmedabad, Rangoon, Karachi and Aden.
Settlement of the Bene Israel in Aden
The presence of members of the Bene Israel community in Aden in the first half of the nineteenth century is confirmed by two types of empirical sources: the documentation of tombstones in the Jewish cemeteries in Aden and British colonial reports largely found in the British Library in London as well as censuses in the India Office Records.
Six tombstones in the Crater Jewish cemetery with Marathi and Hebrew epitaphs dating to 1849 and the 1850s were recorded by Chajes and Kriste. 43 Among the tombstones is that of Zipporah, the wife of Sargaokar, who died at the age of 60 in 1849, and another is of a 10-year-old girl named Sapara, who was buried in 1858 by her father Yehezkiel (Ezekiel), according to the Marathi epitaph. In addition, at least three Bene Israel gravestones have been documented in the Ma’ala Jewish cemetery. 44 In 2024, an informant sent this author a photograph of an additional Bene Israel gravestone with inscriptions in Marathi and Hebrew from the Ma’ala cemetery, not documented by any other source. 45 The tombstones prove the existence of Bene Israel in Aden, but the small number of Bene Israel tombstones unearthed does not indicate community numbers over the generations. This is because most of the Jewish tombstones have been destroyed, even at the time when Chajes and Kriste visited Aden. In addition, upon the termination of their employment with the British, the Bene Israel tended to return to their homeland in the Bombay Presidency rather than living out their lives in the Adenese diaspora. Thus, even though the number of extant tombstones is few, we know that there were more which have been destroyed, and that a significant number of Bene Israel who lived in Aden did not die there and would therefore have been buried elsewhere.
In 1837, the total Jewish population in the Indian subcontinent was 6,951, of whom 5,255 were Bene Israel. 46 Of these, an estimated 1,000, including dependents, were serving in the British Army. 47 In 1839, at the time of the British conquest of Aden, some of the 250–300 recorded Jews were Bene Israel who had arrived in Aden in the employ of the British. Since the British permitted native military and ancillary personnel to settle in Aden en famille with wives and children, the Bene Israel regarded Aden as a favourable diaspora, where they could continue their way of life.
By 1860, there were 1,500 Jews in Aden, the majority of whom were from Yemen. Sapir reports that around one-fifth of these, approximately 300 people, were Bene Israel, including some households with women and children. 48 In 1872, the British government census recorded that the civilian population in the British sector numbered 19,289, of whom 1,435 were Indian Jews, including 666 males and 769 females. 49 The majority of these Indian Jews were Bene Israel, although a few Baghdadi Indian Jewish traders had moved to the British sector near Steamer Point in order to carry out their commercial enterprises.
By 1881, the total number of Jews in the Indian subcontinent increased to 12,040, of whom 7,000 were Bene Israel. 50 In that year, the Jewish presence in Aden had increased to 2,121, but according to Schechtman, an authority on the Jews of Aden, the number of Bene Israel was reduced to 125, and ‘Later on all the Bene Israel returned to India’. 51 This statement appears to be incorrect, as this article demonstrates; the Bene Israel continued to live in Aden during the twentieth century. However, Schechtman is correct in suggesting that by 1881 the numbers of Bene Israel in Aden had temporarily decreased, which was due to two major factors. First, until the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the Bene Israel had been over-represented in the Native Army, but after the Mutiny, only one officer per ‘caste’ was allowed, and henceforth, the military service of the Bene Israel was gradually reduced in favour of civilian careers. 52 Second, the plague epidemic was exacerbated by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and took many Bene Israel and other Indian lives. Cholera and the bubonic plague were eventually curbed by the remarkable Ukrainian Jew, Waldemar Haffkine (1860–1923), who came to India in 1893 at the invitation of the British government in India. Of interest are the plans he approved for a Bene Israel Plague Hospital and Segregation Camp in Connaught Road, Byculla, Mumbai, which was set up especially to aid the Bene Israel community. In 1899, Haffkine expanded his labours and founded the Bombay Plague Research Laboratory, which dispensed thousands of doses of the plague prophylactic that he had invented in all parts of the Indian subcontinent. His reports to the British administration reveal that from 30 November 1899 until 4 May1900, Haffkine administered 25,175 inoculations in Aden, and in May 1903, a further 2,005 doses, thereby combatting the epidemics. 53
By 1901, there were a total of 13,919 Indian Jews, who made up approximately 21% of the total number of Indian Jews, living in the British Presidency. Of these, 9,441 Jews were residing in the Bombay Presidency proper, 991 in the feudatory states, such as Janjira and Bhor States, 428 were living in Sind in present-day Pakistan and as many as 3,059 Indian Jews were residing in Aden. 54 The majority of those who lived in Aden were Bene Israel, since many of the Yemenites and other Jewish traders in Aden were not included in the census as British citizens, and only a few Cochin Jews and Baghdadi traders were resident in Aden. Of the 3,059 Jews, 2,910 Jews lived within the Aden Municipality, and a total of 149 Jews, all of whom were Bene Israel, were stationed outside. Nine, including the head of the telegraph office, were stationed on Perim Island, a small volcanic island on the southwestern tip of Aden, where a detachment of Indian troops was garrisoned; 32 Bene Israel lived in the Do. Cantonment, and a further 108 Bene Israel were resident in Sheikh Osman Suburb, 55 where the Government of Aden had purchased land from the Sultan of Lahj in 1880 to build a new modern city.
In 1931, Aden’s total population of 4,200 people included Bene Israel, Yemenite and Adenese Jews, Jewish families from Baghdad and Persia, and other Sefardi Jews, as well as a handful of European Jews who had migrated to Aden. After the riots in 1932, many Bene Israel returned to Bombay, and only smaller numbers remained in Aden until 1947, when pogroms against the Jews again erupted. After Indian Independence and Partition, most remaining Bene Israel returned to Bombay and to their ancestral homes in the Indian ‘motherland’. A few families remained until unrest again rocked Aden with the ‘Adenese Emergency’ and the subsequent rioting during Israel’s Six-Day War. In 1967, when the Jews of Aden were evacuated, some Bene Israel exited the airplane in London; most continued to Israel. Between 1839 and 1967, the Bene Israel had thus shifted their identity from ‘Children of Israel’ to mainstream Jews, many of whom identified with Zionism and the State of Israel. The minority of Adenese Jews still identified with the British and preferred to spend their remaining years in Britain.
Relations with Other Jews and Shifting Identities
After the British conquest, the Bene Israel who had arrived in the employ of the British lived as a kind of Indian ‘sub-caste’ among other Indians. They were distanced physically from the other Jews in Aden, who were concentrated in the Crater. Most of the Jews had shops and stores along the main roads that border the quarter, and 64 Jewish small lock-up shops were situated in the bazaar, which they shared with Arabs and Indians. A few wealthier Jewish families had stores at Steamer Point, where the big ships landed their passengers. Sapir describes how the Bene Israel lived on the periphery of the town, in special quarters allocated to them by the British, and also outside the town, ‘and the Yemenite Jews resident in the city do not mix with them’. 56 The Bene Israel quarters were adjacent to those of other Indians, and particularly Indian Muslims, with whom they had good relations. However, in keeping with caste restrictions, they did not mix with the predominant Indian group, the Banyans, who imported cloths, musk, gold and ivory from Africa and exported goods through Red Sea ports to Aden and India. In 1838, the British traveller Lieutenant Wellsted wrote of the Banyans that ‘this wily race … confine themselves exclusively to commercial pursuits, and … exclude all other classes by every means in their power from participation in their gains’. 57 Similarly, other castes avoided inter-dining and close social and cultural ties with the Bene Israel.
Distinct from the other Jews, who were largely engaged in commerce or petty trading, the Bene Israel worked in ancillary positions for the British, such as in the telegraph and posts. Upon annexation, mail services were established with two postal clerks, four letter carriers and later a postmaster, and research has shown that all were Bene Israel. 58 In addition, the Bene Israel were employed as skilled workers as masons, carpenters, metal-workers and engineers.
Some Bene Israel in Aden held prestigious positions and prospered. A case in point is a Bene Israel by the name of Jacob, the son of Abraham, a clerk and scribe in the British Court of Law, who was the right-hand man of the British governor in the first half of the 1850s. He was requested to remove seven ancient Jewish sepulchral tablets with Hebrew epitaphs, which were located to the east of the Crater cemetery mentioned above, and store them in the British administration residence until they were transferred to the British Museum, where they are stored to this day. 59 Another example is Isaaji Joseph Pinglay, who started off as an employee of a wealthy Arab contractor Aba Hassan, 60 but later worked for the British and became a Khan Bahadur, an honour conferred on him on behalf of the Government of British India by the viceroy and governor-general of India. 61 Isaaji Pinglay commissioned several Torah scrolls written by Yemenite scribes, which he later donated to Bene Israel synagogues in Mumbai, Pune and Panvel. 62
Unlike the other Adenese Jews, the Bene Israel in Aden did not observe the Sabbath strictly, and went to work on that day; only a minority would attend synagogue regularly on the Sabbath. The Bene Israel observed most of the Jewish festivals, but not all. On the High Holy Days (comprising New Year and the Day of Atonement) and on the occasion of the Passover, they asked their employers for holidays in order to worship in the synagogue with their co-religionists; they often joined the Yemenite Jews. The Bene Israel only ate kosher food and would not inter-dine with other Indian castes or with non-Jews. They also adhered strictly to the Jewish laws of circumcision for a male on the eighth day and would turn to a Yemenite or Adenese mohel (circumciser) to perform the rite. This practice continued into the twentieth century. When Mazal Benjamin’s father was posted on Camaran Island in 1933, her mother was sent back to Aden while pregnant, so that they could avail themselves of an Adenese mohel. 63
At first, the Bene Israel in Aden joined the Yemenite Jews in their synagogues. However, the Yemenites did not ‘call up’ the Bene Israel to read the Torah, possibly because of their lack of knowledge of Hebrew. 64 This assertion is supported by Anzi, who writes: ‘The sources suggest they did not read the Torah since they could not read Hebrew’. 65 Indeed, Lord remarked that the Jews of Aden generally speak Arabic and that the Bene Israel of the Bombay Presidency knew little Hebrew, although ‘the study of it is on the increase’. 66 However, this was less true of the Bene Israel of Aden, who were more literate in Hebrew than their Bombay brethren, although even in Bombay, some Bene Israel were in the forefront of the study of Hebrew. Joseph Ezekiel Rajpurkar (1834–1905), a professor of Hebrew at Bombay University, was appointed by the Baghdadi Jews to be headmaster of the David Sassoon Benevolent Institution. 67 The more likely reason that the Yemenite Jews did not ‘call up’ the Bene Israel to read the Torah would be the supposition that the Yemenite Jews had doubts about the Jewishness of the Bene Israel. 68 The Adenese Jews and the Baghdadi traders certainly doubted their legitimacy as Jews and frowned upon their Jewish status. Sapir observed that the Baghdadi Jews did not intermarry with the Bene Israel because the latter did not divorce according to Jewish law and also did not implement levirate marriage, and therefore, their offspring could be deemed to be illegitimate. 69 In India, the Baghdadi Jews and the Bene Israel prayed in separate synagogues and were even buried in separate cemeteries.
As their numbers swelled, and as restrictions were imposed by the British on Indians entering and exiting the British sector in Aden, the Bene Israel started to organise separate prayers in their own prayer halls with hired Yemenite or Cochin Jewish cantors (hazzanim), as they did in Bombay. One such prayer hall was established by Samuel Isaaji (Isaac) Pinglay, an accounts officer of the Public Works Department in Aden. Gradually, the Bene Israel in the Adenese diaspora became more accepted by other Jews. During the twentieth century, some Bene Israel joined other Indian Jews of Cochin and Baghdadi origin in the Moshe Hanokh (Mi’lamat Hanokh) Sefardi synagogue. 70 After the number of Adenese Jews was severely reduced due to the riots in the 1930s, the differences between the Bene Israel and other Jews dissipated. Ezekiel (Sitkal) Divekar, a Bene Israel, acted as a synagogue warden due to his knowledge of Hebrew and ability to read the Torah with the required cantations. 71
At first, some Bene Israel had studied in the Yemenite heder (home schools) and learned Hebrew and religious studies from a mori (Yemenite teacher), whom they preferred to call hacham (wise man). 72 However, most Bene Israel who understood the positive effects of education were educated in British government schools, where they learned English and other languages. In the 1930s, Mazal Benjamin’s mother knew Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Arabic and English and could read the Hebrew prayers as well. 73 When Menachem Messa opened a Jewish boys’ school in 1912, 74 the Bene Israel did not send their sons there, nor did they send their girls to the girls’ school opened by Sellim Moshe Menahem Messa in 1929. This was due not only to the schools’ distance from the Bene Israel residences in the British Quarter but also to the inferior secular academic education offered at the Jewish schools. ‘Their buildings were modern but the educational standards were not high. Only the head teacher in the boys’ school had any academic qualification, and only a small number of the boys continued to the government secondary school. The community has not produced a single physician or a single lawyer, and scarcely any qualified teachers’. 75 This may be an additional reason why the Adenese Jews were reluctant to include the Bene Israel among their numbers, since they simply did not meet them in their institutions.
Oscillating Diasporas and Homelands
Although Aden was geographically located at a distance from Maharashtra and the familiar Konkan coast and Bombay, it was under the jurisdiction of the Bombay Presidency, and the Bene Israel could return home with relative ease. By 1856, the Peninsular and Orient Steam Navigation Company Line initiated a fortnightly steamer service to Bombay. If the Bene Israel were ill or incurable, if their service had terminated or if they simply wanted to reunite with members of their joint families, 76 they could take the steamer back to Bombay. Sometimes, Bene Israel from Bombay stayed with community members in Aden on their way to and from pilgrimages in the Holy Land. 77 Living like Indians in Aden, the Bene Israel kept up constant ties with their ancestral homes and the Bombay homeland, sending letters, gifts and kin back and forth. Marriages were arranged between Bombay and Aden, special religious rites were performed ‘back home’ and, at retirement, families asked to return ‘home’. 78 Aden was viewed as the diaspora of the Bombay Presidency governed by the Raj, and Bombay and its environs the homeland. For the Bene Israel of Aden, the distant homeland of the Kingdom of Israel faded into a backdrop, as Bombay became their point of reference and their ‘homeland’.
The Bene Israel in Aden operated as a self-contained transient community. Caste distinctions ensured that the Bene Israel did not marry members of other religions. The community was endogamous, and intermarriage with other Jews was negligible. It should also be remembered that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to recent times, both the Bene Israel and the Yemenite Jews arranged marriages for girls at first puberty with kin or community members. 79 In addition, since other Jews cast aspersions on their Jewishness, the Bene Israel kept to themselves as a community.
By the twentieth century, Bene Israel diasporas and homelands were oscillating as identification, identities and affiliations began to fluctuate. A new homeland and new diasporas were emerging for the Bene Israel, as new centres were taking form elsewhere. In the first half of the twentieth century, Zionism began to take root in India, particularly after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when the British government announced its support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. In 1920 the Bombay Zionist Association was established, which encouraged support for a new homeland, the Jewish national homeland in Palestine. The homeland, like the diaspora, became characterised by ‘super-diversity’, 80 accentuating rifts and differences between members of the same ethnicity. Dr Abraham Solomon Erulkar, one of Mahatma Gandhi’s doctors from the Bene Israel community in Ahmedabad, was a staunch supporter of Home Rule in India and had a large following among his co-religionists, who were not Zionists. 81 News of this rapidly spread to Aden, but there the Bene Israel lived entirely under the protection of the British and tended to oppose Home Rule. For the Bene Israel, the Indian homeland had become multi-oriented.
When Aden was no longer a Crown Colony in 1937, the Bene Israel of Aden felt that their diaspora in Aden had come to an end and that it was time to return to the homeland, in this case Bombay. By the time India declared Independence in 1947, it appeared that Zionism had won the day. Indian Jews, who were concerned about the future of minorities in the new Indian state, decided to emigrate to Israel, which was declared a state in 1948. By this time, the vast majority of Bene Israel identified as Jews and Zionists, and wanted to join their brethren in the Jewish homeland. India had come to be seen as one node of a Jewish diaspora, and Israel had become the Jewish homeland.
Conclusions
This article has reported upon a diverse ethnic group, the Bene Israel, who were Jewish, Indian and Adenese. Despite the fact that a Bene Israel Indian Jewish community in Aden is largely unknown, and their existence often denied, this article has documented a substantial community which resided in Aden during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. When the British conquered Aden in 1839, the Bene Israel numbered a few hundred, but at their peak, the numbers of community members, including spouses and children, rose to nearly 3,000. The community wound down after the riots against the British and the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and was finally dissolved in 1967.
The Bene Israel constituted a self-contained endogamous community living in their own quarters provided for them by the British. They were employed either as soldiers or, in ancillary services, as clerks, accountants and to a lesser extent artisans. None were traders like the Yemenite, Adenese or Baghdadi Jews. Religious life was observed within the confines of the ethnic group, and on Passover and High Holy Days, the Bene Israel would opt to go to the synagogue for prayers, although during the year, most would go to work on Saturday, the Jewish day of rest. The Bene Israel were neither accepted completely as Jews by other mainstream Jews, since their origins were unknown and their religious practices were different, nor regarded totally as Indians by other Indians since they were out of caste. This uniqueness led the colonial rulers to exploit their multiple identities and cultivate them as members of an Israel caste or a Native Jew caste. The British categorisation served to reinforce their dual identity as members of a wider Israeli or Jewish community, while at the same time firmly establishing them as Indians governed by a caste system.
So long as the Bene Israel lived in the Konkan villages, their traditional occupation of pressing oil reflected their particular position in the caste hierarchy, yet they were differentiated from other oil-pressers since they refrained from work on the Sabbath. Their group appellation as ‘Children of Israel’ identified them with an entity and location—Israel—outside India, but did not yet connect them fully with other Jews. From the Konkan, they ‘remembered’ another homeland whence they had originated—the Kingdom of Israel. Once discovered by Rahabi, a Jewish outsider, and then by the British, the Bene Israel diasporic imagination was expanded from a distant homeland in Israel to a wider Jewish world. Subsequently, the Bene Israel came into contact with other Jews in India, including Yemenite Jews, Cochin Jews and Jews from the wider Ottoman Empire, as well as emissaries from the Holy Land. In addition, Christian missionaries introduced them to the Bible in Marathi and to Holy books in Hebrew, and wanted to convert them to Christianity by virtue of the fact that they were a ‘lost tribe’. Gradually, the diaspora of the Bene Israel began to include Jews the world over, who themselves were members of other diasporic communities.
Once in Aden, the distant homeland of the Biblical Kingdom of Israel began to fade as a more immediate and pervasive diaspora, India, took over. Like other Indians, the Bene Israel residing in Aden longed for their ancestral homes, for their places of worship and for their way of life in Bombay, which now became their predominant homeland. Aden was the diaspora of the Bombay Presidency governed by the Raj—the imagined diaspora in Anderson’s sense 82 —to which they dreamed of returning, either for family visits or upon retirement. By the twentieth century, Bene Israel diasporas and homelands were oscillating as identities began to shift. In 1937, Aden had been wrenched from British India, and for many Indians, their diaspora in Aden was winding down; it was time to return to the homeland, Bombay. The Bene Israel community was divided: with Home Rule, the identification of their imagined homeland, Bombay, with the Raj was terminating. But Zionism had taken root and created a new national homeland for Jews the world over, including for the majority of the Bene Israel. In Israel, the Bene Israel cultivated ‘dichotomous diasporas’ by keeping alive the notions of dual hybrid homelands: India became the motherland, and Israel became the fatherland. 83 Transnational ties were maintained through arranged marriages across continents, mutual visits and shared cultures between Israel and India, bridged between the hybrid definitions of diaspora and homeland.
For the Adenese Bene Israel, however, diasporic realities were more complex. In Aden, diaspora was indeed characterised by a common identity and co-responsibility, as a type of consciousness, a specific way of life and a mode of cultural production in which trans-national ties were maintained globally, as Vertovec suggested. But as opposed to the Bene Israel who had remained in India, diaspora was not simply a question of hybridity, but a reflection of oscillations between different points in time and space, influenced by the location of culture, as Bhabha championed. In the Adenese Bene Israel diaspora, which Bhabha might have called a ‘third space’, diasporas and homelands kept oscillating in keeping with changing geo-political factors. In parallel, community members oscillated within them as to their identities, membership and affiliation in different diasporas and homelands—in relation to other Bene Israel, and in relation to other Indians, and in relation to other Jews—far away in other centres.