Shalva Weil
European Jews in India 1930 -1945
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Summary
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Some European Jews were attracted to India by its philosophy and difference, but others fled Germany and other German-speaking countries when they realized what was happening in Europe. One of these was the ethnomusicologist Walter Kaufmann (1907-84), who married Franz Kafka’s niece by proxy and brought her to Bombay, thereby saving her from the Holocaust. Many of the refugees had difficulties adjusting to life in India, as is indicated in Anita Desai’s book Baumgartner’s Bombay, but others, like Kaufmann, contributed to the rich cultural life of the country.
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.