Shalva Weil
The Jews of Goa under the Portuguese
Summary
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There may have been early settlement of Jews in Goa, but there certainly was a Jewish colony there under the Portuguese. However, the Portuguese set up an Inquisition in Goa and tried many Jews and conversos or New Christians. They kept alive Garcia de Orta (1501-68), the physician of the king and a famous botanist, but burned his sister on the stake. By the 18th century the community of Jews had disappeared but their memory lingered on in some families to this day.
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.