I am a research fellow of the VW Momentum programme: From Pre-Modern to Modern Perspectives in Judaic Studies, at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. My project, From Babylon to Kolkata: Jews of the Near East United by Exile, looks into the history of the settlement of Jews from Baghdad and wider Iraq in Indian cities from the 1790s until WWII. It focuses on the Baghdadi satellite community’s quest for a Jewish-European-Indian identity in Kolkata during the colonial period, when the city became the capital of British India. It also analyses the East-West duality of the Baghdadi diaspora and how that led to a unique cultural pluralism, circulating Jewish identity and modern thoughts across diverse frontiers.
With my background as a BBC journalist for over two decades often covering the Middle East, and with a recent doctorate on Sephardi Jewish revival in Early Modern Amsterdam, I will be using interdisciplinary methodology in my research, drawing from multiples fields of studies as this fellowship programme encourages. As the post-Enlightenment western concept of modernity cannot be told without reference to the Jews, particularly the Sephardi community in 17thcentury Amsterdam, my work investigates if the Baghdadi Jewish story occupies a unique place in the early 20th century intellectual transformation of colonial India.
I aim to explore the concept of ‘co-existence’ that prevailed in Kolkata and India as a whole under the British, when it was a kind of confessional cohabitation, necessitating an elaborate set of arrangements and accommodation of different communities. Strict laws were in place for categorisation of various communities on the electoral roll to maintain social cohesion. Within this, I shall look at a select group of Baghdadi families who suddenly found themselves at a juncture of social, political and linguistic transition, and how they navigated their link to the city and its elite colonial establishment while maintaining their Judeo-Arabic culture.
My research will present the case studies as a crucible, where instances of colonial (and postcolonial) identity performances across religion and race, and the tension between the binary logic of identity—which distinguishes between cultural authenticity and fraudulence: an individual is either x or y—will be evaluated. It will explore the hybrid historical awareness of a Near Eastern Jewish identity, combining micro and macro histories.
I shall examine how the interviewees perceive the concept of an authentic identity. In exilic and post-exilic societies where assimilation is either a mainstream cultural requirement or the migrant’s chosen approach, my research will analyse what made the Baghdadi Jews in India and in the wider diaspora cling to one another within an ancestral identity, how they fostered a modern Jewish geography of belonging. In so doing, my studies will explore, if they – previously a quasi-ethnic group of people of common origin – also spearheaded a Mizrahi Jewish Internationalism
Areas of Interest
Western Sephardim, New Christians, Marrano Memoirs, Amsterdam Jewish Community, Identity Formation, Saul Levi Morteira, Baghdadi Jews in Kolkata, Jewish Diaspora Communities
