Reading the two works together, reinforced ones sense of the Jewish people as am olam . The authors raise numerous points of interest to ordinary readers and scholars alike. Who is not curious as to how the Jews of India survived for so long in an atmosphere of tolerance when other Jewish communities such as that in China, benefitting from similar toleration, assimilated so thoroughly. Their argument is that India as a host society combined tolerance with culturally enforced diversity which made the difference. Indian society, with its several major religions and further division within Hinduism into four major castes, a fifth of outcasts, and over 3,000 subcastes, tolerates wide diversity but does not permit people born into one group to cross over into another or even to associate with the others beyond the public square, since the food taboos of every religious community, caste and subcaste mean that they cannot eat with one another.
Nothing separates more than that.
This book is especially important because the authors document the last year of complete life of the organized Jewish community when they were in residence in Cochin. Thus the authors record the last gasps of a once-flourishing community. They devote the last part of their book to describing the dissolution of that community, principally as a result of aliya to the State of Israel. In doing so, intentionally or not, they make the case for Zionism in the modern and postmodern worlds. All too often, the case for Zionism is made out to be one of finding a refuge for persecuted Jews.