The Jews of India · the second silence

Jews have lived in India for a very long time and by several routes — the Cochin community of Kerala with its copper-plate grants, the Bene Israel of the Konkan coast, the later Baghdadi merchants of Bombay and Calcutta. Synagogues, cemeteries, centuries of ordinary life inside a Hindu world. And, as at Kaifeng, essentially no record of doctrinal exchange. No Jewish text of the period shows Vedāntic influence; no Hindu school shows Jewish. Living beside a tradition turns out to be a remarkably poor predictor of thinking with it — which is precisely why the rhymes on this door have to be read as convergence, and why the one real bridge, when it finally came, came through a Sufi prince and then through Europe rather than across the street.