A lament for the dying Jewry in Kerala
End stories are brutal, even when beautifully elegiac and many have been written for the Jews — on the gutted walls of the First Temple and in the smouldering remains of the Second, on the courts of Inquisition in Lisbon and in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But without cataclysmic cries, without a spectacle of sorrow, without the brutal hand of an outsider, Jewry is dying a slow death in the narrow bylanes of Kochi’s Jew Town.

When Edna Fernandes reached Kerala on September 2006, there were just a dozen White Jews and less than 40 Black Jews. At the old cemetery on one end of Jew Town, every new tombstone became a reminder that they were probably one step closer to a collective demise, that amid the curio shops of Keralites and Kashmiris, they were

themselves turning into “souvenir people” for Nikon-toting tourists. The book is a lament for the country’s oldest Jewish

diaspora — how the Jews, who fled Jerusalem and Europe to make the sliver of land that is now Kerala home, masterminded their own tragedy.

It is not that the Jews did not face floods even in the generally pleasant Kerala — a torrential downpour in 1341 was not quite of biblical proportion but was bad enough to slit the harbour mouth of Cranganore “where Solomon’s ships alighted” and which became the settlement of Jews, and drive them out of there. It is not that the Jews did not face discrimination in Kerala where the Muslim would embroider the Jewish bride’s muslin blouse and the Hindu would lend his music for the wedding procession — the apartheid was from within. The Black Jews, who probably arrived after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and married the locals, were looked down upon by the White Jews, who docked in Kerala fleeing the Inquisition of Europe. The White Jews, who stood out with their fair skin and white clothes and walked the markets like wraiths, claimed they were “pure” and won the favours of the Brahmin king who was no stranger to the terminology or to colour-coded divisions. And there was exodus: with the formation of Israel in 1948, many left for the Promised Land, leaving behind the old, the infirm and the supremely nostalgic.

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