Reading the complex reality of India’s Jewish communities: Tiny – but still expanding

In her aching, confessional Book of Esther, the author Esther David (her original family name was Dandekar) describes attempting to “make aliyah” via the Law of Return, which gives Jewish people from any part of the worlds the right to migrate to Israel.

She was “running away from India” and her Bene Israeli community, which maintains the tradition that they are descended from 14 Jewish men and women from across the Arabian Sea who were shipwrecked on the Konkan coastline over 2,000 years ago.

That is why David says she “tried to uproot myself from my surrogate motherland, and replant myself in the home of my ancestors”. Her intention was to move “like a pilgrimage. It would wipe out my past. Give me a new life.” She tried to learn Hebrew, sang Israeli folk songs, and learned to dance the Hora (an originally Eastern European practice that has become intrinsic to contemporary Jewish culture0. But the alienation never lifted: “What a heavy price one had to pay to be a Jew!”

At one point, the new migrant was offered an appealing home, where “the courtyard was covered with mosaic tiles in green, blue and white. There was an orange tree in the centre, laden with ripe fruit. I felt I had walked…

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