A good friend of mine’s mom came from Calcutta over 50 years ago. When in Calcutta spoke no English. Still has a slight accent today.

They have generally integrated well with British Jews.

Cheers

Leslie

Courtesy of the Jewish National and University Library: http://jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/music/sukot/mp3/sukaBombey.mp3

In fact I have done a little research recently about that type of funeral, which you can see here. It must be said though, many Tibetans who have come to India now cremate their dead.

Well Jez, i think sometime in 1960′s some Israeli Rabbis declared Bene Israel to be non-Jews. It was only in 1995 that DNA tests proved the fact that Bene Israel indeed originated from Israel.

You’re surprised? This is referring to a link in The Guardian, right?! Guardian columnists are hardly renowned for their reality based reporting…

The person who said that seems to be suffering from a complete lack of reality – total bollocks.

anyway, the indian-ness is really more cultural. religiously speaking, there’s no indian influence whatsoever; that doesn’t really happen in traditional judaism. in any case, the baghdadi/babylonian tradition is the oldest jewish community in the world, dating back to the destruction of the first Temple in 586CE rather than the that of the second in 70CE, like the rest of the diaspora. so, at home, the community might eat “murgh hamin” (slow-cooked sabbath chicken curry, yum) but they’d speak judeo-arabic, not indian languages or english, which would be used for business.

sonia – on the persecution question, jews were not as far as i know persecuted (except when the portuguese arrived in goa) but things got very nasty after partition, because the jewish community could see that it would not last long considering they were now part of an islamic state that didn’t recognise israel, so they pretty much upped and left. the indian jews left more because they were feeling that they would end up getting targeted during the decolonialisation process for economic reasons.

people will ask other people’s ethnicity – and if you’re jewish – even if you aren’t on the ’surface’ different – a lot of people will then say ‘’ahh’ right so you’re not ‘really’ english then
hehe. that certainly happens. actually, a lot of the time it happens when i’m abroad and someone says, effectively, “you can’t be english, because you aren’t white”. english people are generally far more unsurprised.

obviously after the holocaust it was understandable how a lot of jewish people fleeing didn’t want to associate ‘german-ness’ with their identity – but when you hear people say oh those people were jewish NOt german – and you think – well the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
well, this isn’t really on-topic, but the “ethnic” racism and anti-semitism that we see nowadays actually appeared in the 19th century once jews started converting to christianity after the enlightenment. in europe, previous to this, anti-semitism was based on religious prejudice, “the jews killed jesus” etc. the question of whether you could be a jewish citizen of a christian country only arose with the modern nation-state. before that it was assumed that to be french was to be christian, etc.

an interesting thing about the dalai lama is that he has met with jewish leaders to try and understand how tibetan culture will survive in exile, without sovereignty and a geographical focus on the land of tibet – he figured that we’ve lasted 2000 years in exile and then returned, so obviously we must know how to adapt. clever man, that. if you want to read about this, there’s a jolly good book called “the jew in the lotus” by rodger kamenetz, where he describes the encounter.

b’shalom

bananabrain

Ive been betrayed so many times when it comes to film and music that i just dont acknowledge anything anymore.

It’s not a perfect film, but it’s one of my favourites. It was on this weekend actually, but as it was in the afternoon on five, they censored parts of it out – specifically a funeral scene and some of the symbolism used to describe what the Chinese did to the Tibetans.

I’ve been involved with the Tibetan cause for quite a few years now, so I’m sure I’m biased towards this film, but I really think it’s superb. I say that as a filmmaker, a fan of Scorsese, a fan of the Dalai Lama (Kundun is another name for the Dalai Lama, it means Ocean of Wisdom) and as someone who feels strongly about the crimes of China.

“Ben E King and Ravi Shankar are known to be good mates. Ravi originates from Kushtia, Bangladesh and recorded an album called Passages with Philip Glass. Philip is a Jewish musician and is really quite good!”

Philip Glass is friends with Martin Scorsese and scored his film Kundun, which is about the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the Tibetans fleeing to India to ESCAPE persecution of their religion.

Ahh, the circle is complete.

Oh and Sammy Davis Jnr is Jewish, that never fails to surprise someone.