The Last Jews of Kerala: The Two Thousand Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community
Two thousand years ago, a little-known group of Jews settled in Kerala, in southwestern India. Eventually, they numbered in the thousands, with eight synagogues. Fernandes explains that some of them owned large estates and plantations and enjoyed economic privilege and political influence, but for centuries, the Black Jews of Ernakulam feuded with the White Jews of Mattancherry, fighting over who arrived first in their adopted land. Today, fewer than 50 Jews are left, and only one synagogue remains. “This account,” Fernandes writes, “charts their rise and fall, from a glorious centuries-long heyday when they were the confidantes of kings, to the twentieth-century decline and twenty-first-century denouement.” Fernandes says that their fortunes were lost by a devastating nexus of apartheid, centuries of interbreeding, mental illness, and a latter-day exodus from Kerala after the creation of Israel in 1948. Fernandes, a British Indian journalist, is the author of Holy Warriors (2007).  Her new book brings to life a Jewish society little known to most of us. --George Cohen