Not every death marks the end of an epoch of history, but with the death of lt General JFR Jacob, an era has ended for he was the last of a fine tradition of Jews who enriched public life in India

When a well-known person dies, it is common for obituary writers to use the phrase “end of an era”. While meant as a tribute, this expression is not always accurate. Not every person represents an era, and not every death stands for the end of an epoch of history. With the death of lt General JFR Jacob, however, it could truly be said an era has ended — for he was the last of a fine tradition of Jews who distinguished public life in India.

General Jacob’s peer, Vice-Admiral Benjamin Samson, father of Bharatanatyam artiste leela Samson, passed on about a decade ago. So many of the other Jewish families in India have migrated, either to Israel or the West, some to other parts of Asia. A whole history has gone with them, or successive histories, for Jews came to India in several waves, the earliest reputedly coming 2,000 years ago when the Romans destroyed the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.

In later centuries, a shipwreck off the Konkan coast is supposed to have brought a community of Jewish survivors to modern Maharashtra. More recently, Jews made their way to India from the Iberian Peninsula, after the 15th century Christian re-conquest of Spain expelled both Muslims (Moors) and Jews. Finally, in the 18th century, Baghdadi Jews — “Near Easterners” as they were called, and recognised as “White Jews” as opposed to earlier Jewish communities that had begun to look more “Indian” — too arrived in India in substantial numbers.

Separately, Jewish communities have been traced to Mizoram. There is even a theory of Kashmiris being descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel, a theory that can be extremely political uncomfortable (if not combustible) in the politics of today.

The Baghdadi Jews became the most prominent of India’s Jewish communities primarily due to their success in business and many notable professions. Indeed, from merchants, bankers, academics and military officers to cinema artistes, confectionary makers and embroiderers, a gamut of skills came to be associated with India’s Jews. The Jews who came to India from west Asia settled largely in Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata).

In his book, An Odyssey in War and Peace (2011), the Calcutta-born General Jacob described his family’s journey to India: “My great-grandmother left Syria some 200 years ago and travelled to India via Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan to Multan. My grandmother … moved from Multan to Calcutta, where my mother Carrie was born.”

The Sassoon family was perhaps the best-regarded of the Baghdadi Jews. It excelled in business and commerce, running banking operations, making money from the opium trade with China — a dubious attribute it shared with prominent Parsi families, as well as with the Tagores of Bengal — and built massive dockyards and water-front facilities in cities as far apart as Bombay (now Mumbai) and Shanghai.

A branch of the Sassoon family migrated to the United Kingdom, one of its members marrying into another wealthy Jewish clan, the Rothschilds. Siegfried Sassoon, the soldier-poet of World War I, was a descendant of this Indian Jewish family.

The Kadoorie family of Hong Kong is another example of Jews of Indian origin (or at least a strong Indian connection). Having lived in the Bombay area from the early 18th century, they subsequently moved to China and Hong Kong. Mr Michael Kadoorie, the current patriarch of the family, runs the ClP Group (formerly China light and Power) and has invested in the power sector in Gujarat. He was an early endorser of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s economic policies in the State. Tourists may be more interested in the fact that the Kadoories own the iconic Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.

The story goes that Michael Kadoorie and Ratan Tata — they are roughly the same age — are friends, and continue an association that began between the Kadoorie and Tata families in Bombay some 150 years ago. The Indian Jewish diaspora — a sub-diaspora within the diaspora, if one may — is large and varied enough to merit its own museum in modern Israel.  Indian-origin Jews turn up where least expected; one of them became the first lady of Cyprus a few years ago.

If one expands that list to the subcontinent, it grows even more. Jews ran businesses in Myanmar. Cities such as Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, had a strong Jewish community as well. Old timers in Pakistan still talk of running into Urdu-speaking Jews in london, their families having moved out of Karachi in the years and decades following 1947.

As the writer and political activist Farahnaz Ispahani so poignantly records in her recent book Purifying the land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities, “Karachi’s synagogue was demolished in July 1988 — reportedly on the direct orders of General Zia, Pakistan’s military dictator at the time — to make way for a shopping mall. The city’s last professed Jew, an 88-year-old woman, died in 2006.”

The legacy of India’s Jewish children is slipping away but still visible. It is there in the Sassoon Hospital in Pune and the Haffkine Institute in Mumbai, not to speak of several other structures in the city, the red-brick Ezra Mansion of Kolkata. The Jacob family itself lives on, in a manner of speaking, at Fort William, the headquarters of the Eastern Command in Kolkata, from where General Jacob retired as commander in 1978.

As he wrote in his 2011 book, “The (Eastern Command Officers’) Mess was sparsely furnished. I donated my family mahogany dining table, with dining chairs to seat 36, a rosewood table to seat 12, four marble-top tables, a roll-top desk, six old Chinese scrolls, and some modern paintings. I had spent the most important years of my life in Fort William, both as Chief of Staff and as Army Commander, and attempted in some small measure to give back to the Command to which I owed so much.”

That gift sums up ‘Jakes’ Jacob, a bachelor whose surviving family was the Indian Army and whose commitment to his Jewish heritage was matched only by his passion for India. It was a country that gave him, and his people, a lot, he felt — and to his last day he took care and pride to remember. He never left, as so many others did. India was his once-and-forever Promised land.