Shalva Weil
“Blacks” (Malabari) and “Whites” (Paradesi) and In-Between: Caste-like Distinctions among the Cochin Jews
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Summary
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The Cochin Jews are the smallest group of Indian Jews, numbering only 2,400 at their peak in 1947. The Malabaris claim to have been in South India for thousands of years, and may have come with King Solomon’s fleet. The Paradesi were largely of Portuguese and Spanish origin. Members of the two groups did not intermarry or even interdine until a Gandhi-like revolution took place in this tiny community in the 20th century. Nearly all the Malabaris came to live in agricultural settlements in Israel, while the Paradesis are all but extinct.
Shalva Weil
Prof. Shalva Weil is Senior Researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she researches ethnicities, migration and femicide. She is editor of several books on India’s Jews, including India’s Jewish Heritage (Marg, 2002 & 2009), Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First Century (with Nathan Katz et al) (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), Karmic Passages (with David Shulman) (OUP, 2008), Baghdadi Jews in India (Routledge, 2019), and The Jews of Goa (Primus, 2020). She has published over 250 articles (120 on Indian Jews), chapters in books, and encyclopedia entries on different aspects of Jews and Judaism in India. Shalva Weil is Founding Chairperson of the first India-Israel Friendship Association (with Maestro Zubin Mehta as President) when diplomatic relations were established between the two countries in 1992. In 2017, as GIAN Distinguished Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, she taught the first-ever semester course on Jews in India in India. In 2021, she was invited to research the Sassoons as Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Financial History at Darwin College, at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2022, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain.