Coffee table book explores India’s Jews

Bombay:
Exploring the Jewish Urban Heritage
Dr. Shaul
Sapir

There are four distinct historic Jewish communities in India – the Cochin or Malabar Jews, the Bene-Israel Jews, the Bene-Menashe Jews and the Baghdadi Jews – author Shaul Sapir explains at the start of this magnificently presented coffee-table book co-published with the  Genealogical Research Centre of India.

While the first three arrived in antiquity, the Baghdadis were the most recent arrivals. Descended from Jews born in Iraq and other Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Syria), they began arriving in India about 1730, clustering in and around the cities of Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata). While many escaped persecution in their former homelands, many were also attracted by the enormous mercantile opportunities that these flourishing cities offered under British rule.

India’s Baghdadi Jews supposedly comprised only about 10 per cent of the country’s Jews, and the Baghdadis of Bombay were only two per cent of the total. Sapir devoted nine years to researching this particular group, which had a disproportionately huge and beneficial influence upon the city. 

Bombay’s Baghdadi Jews excelled as traders and bankers, profiting by their advantageous situation between East and West. David Sassoon (1792-1864), whose family dynasty was referred to as “the Rothschilds of the East,” plays a leading role in this history. A wealthy Jewish merchant, Sassoon fled from Baghdad in 1832 and established the house of David Sassoon & Co., gaining enormous wealth through the opium trade and building a trading operation that extended to China, Japan, Africa and eastern Europe. 

In terms of population, Bombay’s Jewish community reached its peak around 1947, just as both India and the State of Israel were about to declare their independence. The community was then about 30,000-strong, but afterward dwindled precipitously to only a few thousand or perhaps even fewer.

Sapir was born in Bombay to a locally born mother and a father born in Rangoon, Burma: one can imagine that growing up Jewish in such a place, with such an ancestry, must have been a rather exotic experience. He left while still a child and returned decades later to revisit all the sites of his middle-class childhood.

The book features sections on the historical background, synagogues, schools, hospitals, Jewish-run banks, industry, office buildings and residences of note, and much more. There are coloured photographs on practically every page and plenty of detailed maps.

The book may offer more information than many of us will require, except perhaps those who know the city or are planning a trip there. For many readers, the rich visuals and captions will be enough. Sapir has been a teacher of historical geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 1975.

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The Juggler’s Children
Carolyn Abraham
Random House Canada

The late eminent American genealogist Rabbi Malcolm Stern once observed that there is nothing so fascinating to a person as his own genealogical research, and often nothing so boring as being stuck at a dinner table with a family-tree enthusiast who insists upon endlessly discussing their latest research.

With her recent book The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes That Bind Us, Toronto writer Carolyn Abraham gives us an account of her personal genealogical explorations, fuelled by scientific examination of her family’s DNA, that never stops being fascinating. A former science writer for the Globe and Mail, Abraham also delivers a set of clear explanations of chromosomal markers, haploid groups, genetic mutations and other scientific terms intrinsic to understanding the huge emerging science surrounding human DNA.

Born in England of diverse and somewhat mysterious ancestry, Abraham focuses her investigations on two great-grandfathers: her father’s paternal grandfather who came (from China) to the remote Nilgiri Hills region of southern India and was known as a juggler before he disappeared, and her mother’s paternal grandfather, a sea-captain from Jamaica who also settled in India and died at a young age.

At school, her friends were curious “about a brown girl with a Jewish last name who went to the Catholic school,” but Abraham couldn’t answer their simple questions about her ethnicity and roots. As a young adult, she paid a rare visit to her grandfather in England and had an astounding revelation: “I saw something instantly familiar and yet utterly foreign in his face, in the gentle slant of his eyes. He looked Chinese. I was dumbstruck. My grandfather was Chinese? We were Chinese?”

An elderly great-aunt, discovered living in the Nilgiri Hills at age 103, is interviewed; potential relatives in a grandmother’s old address book are telephoned; visits are paid to potential cousins in Jamaica and India; and old cemeteries and church records are combed through. In these and other ways, Abraham conducts a thorough, traditional genealogical investigation.

Yet she goes one giant step further by taking cheek swabs from various close family members and distant relatives in order to see what secrets their DNA – “biological mementos” from our ancestors – will reveal. Sometimes the results only confirm the obvious, but they also provide dramatic surprises such as the so-called “false paternity” or “pedigree error.” (Incredibly, geneticists assert that roughly one in 10 people were “not fathered by the man they believed to be Dad.”)

Amidst her colourful, non-technical scientific descriptions, Abraham describes the work of Toronto researcher Karl Svorecki who discovered that Jewish men from the priestly “Kohan” tribe, regardless of geographic origin, do indeed carry a specific set of mutations on their Y chromosomes (originally reported in the British medical journal Nature in 1997).

She also introduces us to many other leading figures in the modern DNA-related scientific community. These include Houston businessman Bennett Greenspan, who founded the pioneering firm Family Tree DNA, and American geneticist Michael Hammer, who helped determine that a Bantu-speaking tribe in southern Africa called the Lemba were descended from a small group of ancient Jews. (The Lemba still practise certain Jewish customs such as circumcision, keeping Shabbat, and not eating pig-like animals such as the hippopotamus.)

The Juggler’s Children tells us as much about the author’s particular and exotic family-tree saga as it does about ourselves and the unravelling modern science of DNA. It is well-written, informative, and an honest-to-goodness page-turner.