The Cochin Jews יהודי קוצ'ין

The community's tradition places its arrival in the first century, after the destruction of the Temple; South Indian Christian traditions say the same. There is nothing by which to check it.

But this is in hand: copper plates in ancient Tamil script. The raja Bhaskara Ravi Varman granted Joseph Rabban seventy-two privileges—down to the right to burn a lamp by day. The plates were once dated to 345; present scholarship agrees on about the year 1000. It is the oldest document of the Jewish history of India.

The community was sharply divided, and divided not by rite but by caste, in the Indian manner. The Paradesi ('foreigners', called the White Jews)—descendants of those who came from Spain and Portugal from the sixteenth century; the Malabari (the Black Jews)—the old inhabitants; and the meshuchrarim, descendants of manumitted slaves, whom both the others slighted. In the Paradesi synagogue, built in 1568, the Black Jews were not allowed to pray.

In 1948 about two and a half thousand Jews lived on the Malabar coast. In 1953 two thousand four hundred left for Israel. Today there are fewer than a hundred in Cochin, and the Paradesi synagogue stands.