Estimated to be around five to ten thousand, Jews are the smallest religious minority in India classified under the category ‘Others’, representative of 0.7 per cent of the Indian population, in the census.

They are so small in numbers that they do not even qualify to be considered as a community at many places in India in spite of their presence at those places.

Only six individuals remain of the Jewish community of Cochin, while only twenty individuals remain of the Baghdadi Jewish community of Kolkata. The only two states where the Jews are recognised as a religious minority are Maharashtra and Gujarat, where most of them belong to the Bene Israel community.

The only Jew to have ever figured in the politics of independent India was Lt. Gen. J. F. R Jacob, a member of the BJP, who served the states of Punjab and Goa as Governor.

He hailed from a Baghdadi Jewish family of Kolkata. Numerically insignificant as they are, they have neither ever played any noticeable role in Indian electoral politics nor have they themselves ever been an issue. Yet, we see both happening during the current parliamentary elections.

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For the first time in the history of India we have a practicing Jew as a candidate for a seat in the parliament of India in Lalthlamuani, contesting as an independent for the only Lok Sabha seat for Mizoram, reserved for scheduled tribes. She is also the first female contestant ever for this seat. Lalthlamuani belongs to the Judaizing movement called Bene Menashe and runs an NGO called Chhinlung Israel People Convention (CIPC), established by her husband in 1994.

She asserts that she is fighting for their identity and wants to ensure that the voice of a lost tribe of Israel is heard at the centre. A school dropout, her main poll agenda is to pursue a memorandum submitted to the United Nations, seeking recognition of the Mizo Jewish community as a lost tribe of Israel. Bene Menashe is one of the two Judaizing movements that emerged in India during the twentieth century, seen by anthropologists as by-products of Christianity as both were Christian before they started practicing Judaism.

The other Judaizing movement that emerged in India in the twentieth century is the Bene Ephraim among the Madiga in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh.

Yet another emerged during the first decade of the present century, in a section of the Chhetiar community in Erode, Tamil Nadu, but we are not concerned with it here for its basis in not a claim of Israelite descent unlike the Bene Menashe and the Bene Ephraim. Both Bene Menashe and Bene Ephraim claim descent from the legendary lost tribes of Israel. In spite of the absence of any credible and substantial historical evidence, the Bene Menashe, who largely come from the tribes of Chin, Lushai and Kuki, were recognised by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as lost Israelites in 2005.

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Since then around three thousand of them have been settled in Israel because of the efforts made by a couple of Israeli religious nationalist Jewish organisations, Shavei Israel and Amishav. Thousands more wait for their turn. These organisations are devoted to the search for the remnants of the lost tribes of Israel and aim to convert to Judaism and settle in Israel all those who either claim descent from the lost tribes of Israel, are spiritually attracted to Judaism, or have practised Judaism in secrecy for generations in hostile environments.

Messianic fervour ignited in Israel by the victories of the Six Day War (1967) and the Greater Israel Movement led to the foundation of Amishav in 1975 and Shavei Israel in 2002. The belief that the return of the lost tribes of Israel to the land of Israel would expedite the coming of the promised messiah has been the driving force behind the Jewish interest in tracing the remnants and descendants of the mythical lost tribes of Israel.

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It is complemented by Christian interest in doing the same, fuelled by their belief that it would pave the way for the second coming of Christ.

A precondition for their emigration to Israel has been their conversion to orthodox Judaism. However, the conversions were brought to a halt when the Indian authorities expressed their objections to the Foreign Ministry of Israel, as they feared it might annoy the politically significant Christian population of northeast India where the evangelists vehemently opposed these conversions.

In 2011 the entire 7,000 strong Bene Menashe community was permitted to settle in Israel.

The first group of new Bene Menashe immigrants reached Israel in December 2012 to join the 1,700 members of their community who had settled there before, largely in the West Bank, some of them decades ago.

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It was only in the year 2004 that the scientists succeeded in obtaining DNA samples from the Bene Menashe, who had been resisting genetic research for many years as they feared that it could deflate their claim of Israelite descent. The mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome analysis of 414 Bene Menashe individuals from Mizoram, done by the National DNA Analysis Centre in Kolkata, found traces of genetic relatedness between them and Near Eastern lineages.

However, the research was considered unreliable by the Haifa Technion scientists in Israel, according to whom the Kolkata team had not done the complete sequencing of the DNA. However, it did not deter the Chief Rabbi of Israel from officially recognizing them as a lost Israelite tribe. Thus, they emerged as the only such group after the Beta Israel (or Ethiopian Jews) to be so recognised.

The immigration of such groups of non-Halachic Jewish descent is a contentious issue in Israel with the right-wing encouraging it and the left-wing opposing it not only because they believe it would “contribute to further oppression of the Palestinians” but also because they tend to doubt the authenticity of the Bene Menashe’s claim to lost tribe’s status. In response to the proliferation of Judaizing movements across the world the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs in Israel set up a public advisory committee on the relationship between the State of Israel and these communities.

The committee observed, in the report that it submitted on March 10, 2017, that the Israel Rabbinate Court receives 6,000 applications annually for orthodox conversion to Judaism, and thousands of more such applications are received elsewhere, across the world. Based on this, it assumes that 100,000 individuals seek to “join the Jewish People every decade, and the trend is constantly growing”.

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It is so in spite of the fact that Judaism is a non-proselytizing religion. Professor Tudor Parfitt, one of the most prominent experts of Judaizing movements, said in a testimony he gave before the committee that “it is estimated that currently 15 million people are not recognised as Jews, but believe they are either Jews or descended from Jews. This number is similar to that of recognised Jews worldwide.”

The committee saw it as “an unprecedented strategic opportunity to bring populations with an affinity to the Jewish People closer”. It considered it imperative that the “Diaspora Ministry take steps to start tackling the subject in three vital areas: 1) data collection and research; 2) creating public awareness; and 3) work vis-à-vis the communities being organised among these populations.”

The advent of antisemitism in Indian polls

Another first associated with the 2019 Lok Sabha elections is how antisemitism has come to figure in it. Former Congress MLA from Okhla, Asif Muhammad Khan, tried to project Atishi Marlena, the AAP candidate for Lok Sabha seat from East Delhi as Jewish, in spite of the fact that she is not, believing it would be seen a disqualifier by the Muslim voters of the concerned constituency.

He, in a message on social media, allegedly called Atishi a Jew and asked Muslims not to vote for her because of this. According to him Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians are brothers to each other but not a Jew. A Jew has no place in India and the people have to send this message to every household, he was heard saying in a video available online. He was seen saying to a crowd in the same video that they may vote for AAP but he would object if they vote for a Jew.

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He said so in spite of the fact that Jews have been resident in India for at least more than a millennium and have made significant contributions to various domains of life. Whenever and wherever in South Asia there has been a Muslim attack on Jews, the perpetrators have been those who have known them largely through secondary sources and not as a result of any direct contact. Even the Arab-Israel conflict has failed to dent the cordial relations between Jews and Muslims wherever they are neighbours in India.

The Indian Muslim attitudes toward Jews can be broadly classified as indifferent, hostile, and amiable.

An attempt to prove that she was a Rajput and not a Jew, instead of also condemning this blatant antisemitism was all that a senior leader of her party Manish Sisodia, Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi did. Interestingly Marlena did exactly the same. Although she condemned this false rumour of her Jewishness yet not the inherent antisemitism in it, and went on to talk of her Kshatriya (Hindu warrior class) lineage.

The Indian National Congress also failed to condemn what their former MLA said about Jews not having any place in India. Even the international Jewish advocacy groups, also operational in India, were complacent in response to it.

According to the Indian Jewish novelist and scholar Jael Silliman, who divides her time between India and the US, “from the inclusive rhetoric of the anti-colonial leaders after Indian independence and through the 1950s and 1960s, India has experienced a decisive shift to the Hindutva politics that have found expression in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Not only in the charged communal environment within India, but also among many Indians living in the United States, a narrow view of who is Indian keeps gaining ground.”

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Yulia Egorova observes in her book Jews and Muslims in South Asia (2018) that it would not be surprising if, due to the political domination of the Hindu right, the Jews in India find themselves under pressure to bridge the difference between their tradition and Hinduism through rhetoric, while also distancing themselves from Muslims who have lately come to be seen as the most threatening other—even denouncing them.

She points out that this is a phenomenon not unknown in the rest of the world. We do get signs of this phenomenon in the social media posts from Indian Jews and also in their membership of a number of groups on Facebook endorsing closer relations between Hindus and Jews and India and Israel, which are often full of Islamophobic comments, even if not necessarily from the Jewish members.

In the imaginations of the Hindu right, Egorova explains, Israelis “thematized as Jews, are seen as the enemy of Palestinians, thematized as Muslims, and therefore as the friends of the Indian state, construed as the state of the Hindus”.

The author is an Assistant Professor of History at Presidency University, Kolkata.