Reviews for Who Are the Jews of India?

The average rating for Who Are the Jews of India? based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-27 00:00:00 Harry Questor There is certainly a good amount of material here, but much of it is just a synthesis of previous works on Indian Jews rather than original research. But because most of those books are hard to get or out of print, it is useful to have this text. That said, there are a number of problems I had with this book: 1. He has a huge problem with Indian context and his bibliography and footnotes reveal that he has explored very little of Indian history in general. Therefore, Katz says a number of things that are problematic such as: a) He talks about the Baghdadi Jews' involvement in the opium trade, but treats it as a banal, harmless trade. He never mentions the colonial causes of this trade--that it was forced upon Indians and they were not allowed to grow crops for food, but were trapped in a devastating system that kept the majority of Indians destitute and hungry; b) Katz, although he at one point does recognise the problem of saying the 1857 "Mutiny", never uses the term that Indians use, namely The First War of Independence. I will say that these types of problems are consistent--in general Katz seems to either see colonialism as benign or nonexistent, including, of course, when Jews are colonising Palestinian land. c) He thinks Bengali is a "vernacular" form of language and not a full-fledged language rooted in history, culture, and markedly different from other languages from Telugu to Malyalam to Gujarati. d) Katz alludes to extraordinary figures like Subhas Chandra Bose and refers to this anti-colonial movement as if it were an anti-Semitic movement because Bose, like most trying to remove the shackles of European colonialism, appealed to his enemies' enemy, namely Japan and Germany during World War II. None of that context is revealed. 2. He also never address how and why Indian Jews became Zionists. He just talks about it as if it were a foregone conclusion, despite the fact that there has never been any anti-Semitism in India. 3. Makes errors about the Arab world, for example, he thinks that Syria did not exist before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. 4. He uses the paintings in the Pardesi synagogue in Mattancherry as a historical narrative, which he follows and does not question. Thus, the Swadesi narrative is suppressed and he upholds the false notion that the Pardesi Jews were the original Jews in India. 5. He glosses over the racist context into which Indian Jews find themselves when they choose to migrate there. Finally, his footnotes are rather disappointing for a scholarly monograph. It was a rather disappointing read.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-02 00:00:00 Amelio Torres Compelling book.