The 'modern' Western world was introduced to Indian Jews in 1665 when Menasseh Bene Israel of Amsterdam petitioned Oliver Cromwell's government to permit Jews to return to England from where they had been expelled in 129, citing the tolerant maharajas of Cochin as examples of pragmatic and tolerant leadership to be emulated in England. Over the next 35 years, books, magazine and newspaper articles, travel diaries, and a variety of government and commercial documents have explored Indian Jewish experience, often sensationally. Over the past half-century, modern scholarship has applied historical, sociological, anthropological, political, cultural, literary, and folkloristic perspectives, and all the while Indian Jews themselves have narrated their stories to ever-fascinated audiences. This bibliography, compiled over three decades of research, is designed to assist students and scholars who wish to explore India's rich and varied Jewish heritage. It is organised by communities.First are general works on Indian Jewry, followed by: sections on the Cochin Jews; the Bene Israel of Maharashtra; the little-known Mughal Jews; the 'Baghdadi' communities of Indian port cities; the Ashkenazim, many of whom but not all were refugees to India from Nazi-dominated Europe; and finally, recent Judaising movements of north-east India and in Andhra Pradesh. \n
Nathan Katz is the Bhagwan Mahavir Professor of Jain Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University. A specialist in both South Asian and Jewish Studies, his fifteen books include: Studies of Indian-Jewish Identity (1995) and Kashrut, Caste and Kabbalah: The Religious Life of the Jews of Cochin (25), both published by Manohar, as well as Buddhist Images of Human Perfection (1982), Ethnic Conflict in Buddhist Societies (1988), The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India (1993), Who Are the Jews of India? (2), Indo-Judaic Studies for the 21st Century (27), and a book of memoirs, Spiritual Journey Home: From Eastern Mysticism to the Western Wall (29). He is co-editor of the Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies.
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