For India’s Jews, Sense of Security is Shattered

New America Media ^ | Dec 13, 2008 | Jeremy Kahn

[MyTwoCopperCoins]

MUMBAI, India (JTA) - The Colaba neighborhood that surrounds the modern apartment block where terrorists last week murdered a Chabad-Lubavitch couple and four other Jews has begun to return to normal.

But for Mumbai's ancient Jewish community, nothing will ever be the same.

"This is the first time when a Jew has been targeted in India because he is a Jew," said Jonathon Solomon, a Mumbai lawyer and the president of the Indian Jewish Federation. "The tradition of the last thousand years has been breached."

Jews are believed to have lived in India since the time of King Solomon, and throughout its ancient history the community has experienced virtually no anti-Semitism -- a source of pride to India's Jews and non-Jews alike.

"This is one of the few countries where Jews never faced discrimination and persecution," said Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, who heads the Jewish community in New Delhi.

Mumbai's Jewish associations run particularly deep. The construction of many of the city's best-known monuments and civic institutions were funded by the so-called "Baghdadi Jews" - actually a collection of families from Syria and Iran as well as from the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Basra - who arrived in then-British Bombay as shipping barons and manufacturing tycoons in the late 18th century.

The city is also the heart of the Bene Israel community, a group of ethnically Indian Jews who claim to be descended from seven families shipwrecked on the southern Indian coast while fleeing persecution in the Galilee during the second century B.C.E.

In 1947, at the time of India's Independence, it was estimated that about 25,000 Jews lived in India. Fewer than 5,000 remain today, the majority of them in Mumbai and its suburbs. But Solomon said that perhaps five times that many Indians have at least one Jewish

[mosquewatch]

This is one Jew that survived. That being texted the 7th century bastards murdered his mother and father in front of him.

Why the rest of us put up with these bomb belt, gun toting "Die for Allah" idiots, is beyond me. I hate these vermin scum ( Muslim terrorists ) with everything in me.

Send Muslim terrorists too "allah" , and do it now.

[Fiji Hill]

At the public library where I work, I had a co-worker from the Bombay area who was a member of that Jewish community. He knew several languages, including Arabic, which he studied for 10 years, and informed us that the Koran in our reference collection was a radical translation from a faction based in Saudi Arabia. He recommended a translation that was more balanced and authoritative.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]

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[cmdjing]

Actually you just reminded me of something. Almost all the Korans and Islamic religious and philosophical texts in the U.S. prison system are fundamentalist literature donated courtesy of the Saudies so I can’t say I am surprised of what you found in the library. Apparently much of the older classical religious text and poetry, the equivalent of Aquinas, are not taught and ignored in favor of the screeds of 19th and 20th century Saudi and Egyptian crazies. It’s like learning about Christianity not from it’s early philosopher saints, but from Chic tracts. No wonder Islam is so messed up.

[rmlew]

Many Iraqi Jews came to India in the 18th and 19th centuries. They are known as Baghdadi Jews, the most promenent of whom are the Sassoon family in the UK and General J. F. R. Jacob. General Jacob crushed the Pakistani army in East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971 and then became a BJP governor of Punjab.