History of the Jews in India

The history of the Jews in India reaches back to ancient times.

Judaism was one of the first foreign religions to arrive in India in recorded history.Indian Jews are a religious minority of India, but unlike many parts of the world, have historically lived in India without any instances of antisemitism from the local majority populace, the Hindus. The better-established ancient communities have assimilated a large number of local traditions through cultural diffusion. The Jewish community of India is the fourth largest Asian Jewish community after Israel, Asian Russia, and Iran. The Jewish population in India is hard to estimate, since each Jewish community is distinct with different origins; while some allegedly arrived during the time of the Kingdom of Judah, others are seen by some as descendants of Israel's Ten Lost Tribes. In addition to Jewish expatriates and recent immigrants, there are seven Jewish groups in India:

The oldest of the Indian Jewish communities is in Cochin. The traditional account is that traders from Judea arrived in the city of Cochin, Kerala, in 562 BCE, and that more Jews came as exiles from Israel in the year 70 CE. after the destruction of the Second Temple. It is also believed that the Jews settled in India when King Solomon was in power. This was a time that teak, ivory, spices, and peacock were popular in trade in Cochin. There is no exact date or reason to why they arrived in India but scholars date it to around the early Middle Ages. Cochin is a group of small tropical islands filled with markets and many different cultures such as Dutch, Hindu, Jewish, Portuguese, and British. The distinct Jewish community was called Anjuvannam. The still-functioning synagogue in Mattancherry belongs to the Paradesi Jews, the descendants of Sephardim that were expelled from Spain in 1492, although the Jewish community in Mattancherry had only six remaining members as of 2015.

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