It was British colonialism that initially drove Baghdadi Jews to move eastwards from Iraq and the wider Mediterranean basin. In India and several Far Eastern satellite spots the community collectively came to be known as ‘Baghdadi’. Their settlement from the mid eighteenth century in India coincided with the rise of port cities and economic mobility under imperial expansion.
These Middle Eastern Jews soon became centrally involved in Indo-Asian commerce and performing arts, in ways disproportionate to their ‘micro-minority’ status, largely because of the opportunities afforded by the British Raj. As they began their new lives in Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai), the Baghdadi Jews demonstrated meteoric rise in their social status. With success, the formerly Arabic and Persian-speaking Jews shifted their identity from Judeo-Arabic to British-European. But just after 150 years, with the demise of Empire in the mid-twentieth century, they were faced with a challenge: was their culture Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, European, Indian, Bengali? The community also grappled with another brand new allegiance – to Israel. Lipika Pelham explores the cultural and linguistic shifts among Baghdadi Jews during the colonial period, and the resurgence of a hybrid Indian-Jewish identity among the descendants following the post-WWII collapse of the community’s social fabric.
