The Bene Israel of India בני ישראל שבהודו
The community of the Konkan coast, whom the neighbours called shanwar teli—Saturday oil-pressers. Fifteen hundred years without books and without contact—and still circumcision, the Sabbath and the Shema.
Their own tradition runs thus: the ancestors were saved from a shipwreck off the Konkan coast, sixteen or eighteen hundred years ago. Where the ship came from is told variously—from Yemen, from Persia.
Then the main thing. They were left alone: without books, without rabbis, without contact with the Jewish world. They took the local language, Marathi, and many of the local customs. And still they kept circumcision, the Sabbath, part of the dietary prohibitions, several festivals and the Shema Yisrael. On Sabbaths they did not work, and their trade was pressing oil—hence the neighbours' name for them: shanwar teli, Saturday oil-pressers.
Contact was restored by a man called David Rahabi—exactly when is unknown; the time is put between 1000 and 1400. He established teaching among them and appointed kajis—elders in charge of religious matters.
In the eighteenth century they moved to Bombay, and everything changed: a first synagogue in 1796, schools, service under the British, doctors, lawyers, engineers.
From 1948 to 1969 more than twelve thousand went to Israel—and there met doubt about their Jewishness, which obstructed marriages. In 1962 the Chief Rabbinate appointed a commission, and it affirmed them as Jews; a requirement to verify descent raised protests, and in 1964 the matter was closed. Today there are about eighty thousand of them in Israel.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Scholarship
- Jewish Virtual Library, "Bene Israel" — the shipwreck tradition, shanwar teli, David Rahabi, Bombay, the aliyah and the commission of 1962
Basis: documents and evidence.