Sephardic Jews in India
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
|
India  Israel
|
|
| Languages | |
| Initially Ladino, later Judeo-Malayalam, now mostly Hebrew & English | |
| Religion | |
| Orthodox Judaism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
|
Chennai Jews Cochin Jews Sephardic Jews Paradesi Jews |
India 
India: Chennai, and the Eastern, South-Eastern Coast
Sephardic Jews in India are European Jews who settled in southwest India, in Goa, Madras (now Chennai) and, primarily and for the longest period, on the Malabar coast, after having left the Iberian peninsula at the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century, in search of religious freedom due to the Spanish Inquisition in both Spain and Portugal. In Iberia, they spoke the vernacular language of their kingdom (basically Castillian i.e. Spanish-Portuguese or Catalan) and some of them also Arabic. After several generations out of Spain, especially in the Ottoman Empire, their Spanish became a distinctive dialect that combined archaisms and loan words from Turkish, Greek and Slavic languages, besides some Italian and French.
Most of the Sephardic Jews who came to India were from Portugal and their communities are found in and around the former Portuguese dominions and territories in India. The first Portuguese Jews to arrive in India were sailors. Portuguese were able mariners and Sephardic Jews were essential in helping navigate the waters of India. As K. M. Mathew documents, Jews such as Abraham Zacuto, Pedro Nunes, Joao Baptista Lavanha, and Duarte Gomes de Solis were instrumental in charting the waters along the Indian coast. Some crypto-Jews came with the Portuguese colonialists who were taking territorial possessions and expanding into the East, which was given to the Portuguese through the Treaty of Tordesillas. The Treaty of Tordesillas, authorized by Pope Alexander VI gave Portugal the right to found colonies in the Eastern Hemisphere (Spain was given the West). Thus, as Professor Walter Fischel, the now deceased Chair of the Department of Near Eastern History at the University of California - Berkeley, explains, the Portuguese were able to use the crypto-Jews in Goa and elsewhere in their Indian and Asian possessions as "letter-carriers, translators, agents, etc." The ability of the Sephardic Jews and anusim to speak Arabic made them vital to Portuguese colonial ambitions in the East, where they could interact and conduct diplomatic and trade missions in the courts of the Mughal Empire and the surrounding Muslim and Hindu states. India attracted Sephardic Jews and anusim for a few reasons. In his lecture at the Library of Congress, Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Chair in Social Sciences at University of California, Los Angeles, explains that crypto-Jews were especially attracted to India because not only was it a center of trade, but India had established and ancient Jewish settlements along its Western coast. The presence of these communities meant that crypto-Jews, who had been forced to accept Catholicism, could operate within the Portuguese Empire but away from the Inquisiton, and, if they wished, the crypto-Jews were able to contact the Jews in these communities and re-adopt the faith of their fathers.
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Wikipedia