The Jews living in Kerala have emotional ties with the locals. Many Keralites have died due to Hamas attacks in Israel
Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe, the Jewish businessman Shylock tells his rival Antonio in the Shakespeare play Merchant of Venice when the former is insulted and humiliated by the latter. Though Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596, the woes of Jewish people continue unabated even in 2023. Theirs is a history of fighting against all odds for survival. The kind of pogrom and holocausts undergone by the Jews knows no end. While Shylock is portrayed as a villain in the play, it is not known how much effort has been taken by historians and social scientists to study the real Jews, a peace-loving and hard-working population.
The media in India has not been fully sincere while reporting about the happenings in Israel. Hamas, an Islamic terrorist outfit, has been tormenting the Jewish nation with missile attacks and suicide bombers which have claimed hundreds during the last two years. It was in May 2001 Soumya, a Kerala woman who was working as a nurse with an Israeli establishment, was killed in a Hamas attack in Gaza. The Israeli diplomats and officials based in New Delhi and Bangalore had accompanied the mortal remains of Soumya to her home and consoled her close relatives. She was described as an angel by the Israeli Government. But the “secular” Kerala Government and politicians stayed away from the bereaved family.
Hamas has been going ahead with the terrorist attacks against Israel for the last two years. Missile and rocket attacks have become a routine affair for the Jews. The media in India has failed to report these relentless attacks by Hamas. It is only when Hamas suffers some major casualties that the secular brigade in India wakes up “condemning the Zionist” hegemony and whatnot. The Communists had no qualms in portraying Ahmed Yasin, the quadriplegic chief of Hamas, who was killed in a counterattack by the Israeli Defense Forces in a counter-attack in 2004. This is the same person who ordered the Hamas soldiers to wipe out Israeli women and children from the face of the earth. The Communists described the slain man as an embodiment of all that is good and a human rights activist. The larger-than-life-size posters of Yasin adored all thoroughfares and ring roads in Kerala and nothing was surprising in the Communists winning all the seats they contested from the State in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls. Hamas helped him win the polls!
Though a Left Democratic Front MLA by the name of Mani Kappen expressed his condolences in a social media message over the death of Soumya in the hands of Hamas terrorists, he was forced to take off the same within minutes. What the civil society forgets is the fact that India was always a home away from home for the Jewish community. Late historian Prof A Sreedhara Menon in his lively account of Kerala history says that Jewish settlements in the State date back to AD 68. “They arrived in thousands to escape from religious persecution and settled along the Kerala coast. The ancient Jews had trade relations with the Kerala coast even in BC 1000 and this has been substantiated by the arrival of Solomon’s sailing vessels,” Prof Menon has written in Kerala History. He also mentions that the then emperor Bhaskara Ravi Varma had presented the Jewish chieftain Joseph Rabban with special powers. The Portuguese who followed the Jews unleashed attacks on them and drove them away to places like Kochi. This is believed to have happened in 1565. The Jews who were peace-loving people established brotherly ties with the locals and this developed into an emotional bond between them and the local population.
The synagogue at Kochi built in 1567 and the Jew Street, a hub of trading are standing monuments of the love and affection enjoyed by the Jewish community in the region. With the formation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948, the community members started their migration to the Promised Land, though a miniscule of the community chose to stay put in Kochi.
The Jew Street is almost silent and the synagogue comes alive rarely. But the thoughts about Israel enliven the conversations, especially the memories of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and Ariel Sharon. The new generation is ignorant of the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics when Black September, the predecessor to Hamas, took 11 Israeli athletes as hostages and killed them as the entire world stood watching helplessly. It is another thing that the Israeli Army went after the Black September and finished them off once and forever.
T G Mohan Das, thinker and political chronicler thinks that Hamas, Black September and Al Fatah are the organisations that institutionalised terrorism across the world. The 2008 Mumbai Terrorist attacks (known as the 26/11 attack) also saw eight innocent Jewish community members getting murdered by the LeT terrorists at the Chabad House.
(The writer is a special correspondent of The Pioneer, views expressed are personal)
