Kerala (India) — Malabar coast
The Cochin Jews trace their settlement to either the destruction of the First Temple or to early-Christian-era Roman trade. The Paradesi community of post-1492 Sephardic refugees built the still-standing 1568 Paradesi Synagogue. R. Nehemia Mota (16th c.) is the community's venerated saint.
1 teacher
Cochin (Kochi) through the eras
Cochin's Malabar Coast Jews trace their settlement either to the destruction of the First Temple or to early-Christian-era Roman trade with the Indian Ocean. The Sasanam Tablets of 1000 CE (traditionally dated; possibly somewhat later) document the Cochin community's status under the Hindu kings of Cranganore. The community had unique customs reflecting centuries of isolation from the broader Jewish world.
Cochin under Portuguese (1503-1663) and then Dutch (1663-1795) rule received an infusion of Sephardic refugees, the 'Paradesi' (foreigners) Jews from Iberia, Egypt, and Aleppo. The Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568, still stands as the oldest functioning synagogue in the Commonwealth nations. The community organized itself into three distinct subgroups — 'White' Jews (Paradesi), 'Black' Jews (Malabari, the older community), and 'Meshuchrarim' (freed slaves) — with separate synagogues and partial inter-marriage prohibitions, a stratification that persisted into the 20th century. The community produced its own characteristic liturgical literature, including the 'Megillat Paradesim'.
Cochin's small Jewish community (peaking at around 2,500 in the 1940s) almost entirely emigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, attracted by Zionist appeal and the post-independence economic difficulties of Kerala. Today only a handful of elderly Jews remain in Cochin itself; the Paradesi Synagogue continues as a heritage site, and the community survives in Israel primarily in Moshav Nevatim in the Negev, where they have preserved their distinctive Malayalam-Hebrew liturgical tradition.
Teachers who lived here