The ingathering of the far communities

In forty years all of them gathered in Israel. These communities are usually spoken of separately and as curiosities. In fact they share one story, and it matters more than any of them singly.

All three lived in an isolation Jewish history hardly knows. The Cochin Jews on the Malabar coast held copper plates of privileges from a raja, granted about the year 1000, and were divided in the Indian manner, by caste. The Bene Israel on the Konkan coast lived fifteen hundred years without books or rabbis—the neighbours called them shanwar teli, Saturday oil-pressers—yet kept circumcision, the Sabbath and the Shema. Beta Israel in the Ethiopian highlands separated before the Oral Torah was written down: they had the Orit, the Torah, but neither Mishnah nor Talmud, and in place of rabbis stood the priests, the kessim.

The gathering was quick. In 1953, of two and a half thousand Cochin Jews, two thousand four hundred left—almost the whole community at once. From 1948 to 1969 more than twelve thousand Bene Israel came. Ethiopian Jewry was brought out in two operations: Moses in 1984 and Solomon in 1991.

And there they met what they had not expected. Fifteen hundred years of separation meant their practice matched no one's, and a question of status arose—obstructing marriages above all.

It was answered thus. For the Bene Israel: the Chief Rabbinate appointed a commission in 1962, and it affirmed them as Jews; a requirement to verify descent raised protests, and in 1964 the matter was closed. For Beta Israel the answer had been given far earlier—the Radbaz, head of Egyptian Jewry, ruled in the sixteenth century that they are Jews like all others; and in 1973 Rav Ovadia Yosef relied on Maimonides on the tribe of Dan and ruled that no conversion is required of them.

Note how alike these answers are. Both were given not out of indulgence and not out of policy but out of analysis: they looked for what the sources say and stood on that. And both were given in favour of recognition—although descent cannot be proved across fifteen hundred years of separation, and everyone understood that.