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Other dispersed
Jewish communities
Other
communities in Africa
Mozambique:
The Jewish community that once lived in Mozambique
fled to avoid persecution by anti-colonialists. Now the government has softened its stance toward the West and returned the Maputo synagogue to the Jewish community, but little to no Jewish community remains to reclaim it.
Egypt:
The once-proud
Egyptian Jewish community is now
nearing extinction.
Asia
The Jews of Africa are not the only Jews
who live in remote or distant areas, far away
from the mainstream of contemporary Judaism.
Similarly non-traditional Jewish communities
exist all over the world, from the jungles of the
Amazon to the distant mountains of India.
The Jewish people can trace their history
back several thousand years to the Fertile
Crescent, an area bordered by the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers in the Central Asian region once
known as Mesopotamia. Since their inception as a
people, many Jews have traveled eastward from the
Fertile Crescent to trade silk and spices with
other Central and Eastern Asian merchants. When
the Assyrians conquered Palestine in 721 B.C. and
the ten northern tribes of Israel fled to points
unknown, did some follow those trade routes
through Persia and Afghanistan to India, China,
perhaps even as far as Japan? Some researchers
believe that Jewish practices may more likely
have spread eastward through gradual contact with
Hebrew traders, but the fact remains that there
are practicing Jewish communities sprinkled about
Asia. In fact, there are well-documented cases of
Jews fleeing eastward to avoid religious
persecution by Romans and Muslims, and as
recently as World War II, tens of thousands of
Jews fled to distant Asian cities like Shanghai
to avoid Nazi persecution, joining communities of
already-practicing Jews in Central Asia, India
and China. Some of the more interesting
communities that the authors could feature in The
Jews of Asia may include:
India:
-- the Shinlung ("cave dwellers")
live in the northeastern India near the border of
Myanmar. According to tribal lore, this Jewish
community descends from the wandering tribe of
Menashe, cast out of Israel almost 2,700 years
ago. After traveling through Persia to
Afghanistan and finally to China, this tribe
claims that they fled religious persecution a
final time by moving into caves in the mountains
of northeastern India. Over the centuries they
emerged from the caves and began to live in
mountain towns, finally falling prey to Christian
missionaries in the late 19th
century. In the last twenty-five years, several
thousand Shinlung rediscovered their ancestors’
religion and have since become observant Jews.
Three hundred members of the community have
emigrated to Israel, though five thousand remain
in India.
-- the Telugu: a very poor community of
Jewish "untouchables" who live in the
eastern Indian region of Andhra Pradesh. They
believe that their ancestors are Jews that
migrated from northern India, Afghanistan or the
North-East Frontier region (Manipur, Mizoram)
during the 9th or 10th centuries and settled
around the area of Nandial. Most of the current
Telugu Jews live in the small town
Kottareddipalem, though some scattered families
live in Ongole in the Prakasham District.
-- Cochin: The Jews of Cochin -- a small
city in Southwestern India -- claim that they
first arrived in India after the destruction of
Jerusalem’s Great Temple in the year 70.
Their sprawling Jewish community consolidated the
town of Cranganore in about 1000 when the local
Hindu leader granted control of the region to a
Jew named Joseph Rabban. When the Moors raided
Cranganore in 1524 the Jews fled to Cochin under
the protection of a Hindu Raja who granted them
their own area of the city, which later came to
be called "Jew Town." Though most
Cochin Jews have emigrated to Israel or the West,
some still inhabit Jew Town and maintain Jewish
practices there.
China:
-- Kaifeng: a once-thriving Jewish
community whose members are likely to be
descended from Persian Jewish traders who settled
in Kaifeng in the 10th
& 11th centuries.
Most Kaifeng Jews assimilated with local
Confucians in the 16th
century, but 500 contemporary descendants of
those Jews have revitalized their Jewish
practices.
-- Shanghai: During WWII, Shanghai’s
small Jewish community of merchants and
descendants of silk traders became a safe haven
for almost 30,000 European Jews who were fleeing
from the Nazis. During the war they were allowed
to practice freely and even build their own
autonomous government. Though most emigrated to
the U.S. after the war ended, some Jews still
live in Shanghai and practice an increasingly
"Chinese" Judaism.
Indonesia:
Descendants of Iraqi Jews who came to
Indonesia more than a century ago to trade spices
still live and practice in Surabaya in the
eastern half of the densely populated (and almost
exclusively Muslim) island of Java. Their Jewish
traditions are primarily ancient in origin (the
Sabbath before Yom Kippur, for example, the
community leader slaughters a chicken and swings
it around the synagogue courtyard to dispel the
community’s sins), though Dutch Jewish
traders from the 18th
and 19th centuries
introduced them to some European Rabbinical
teachings.
Uzbekistan:
The Bukharan Jewish community, living
mainly in Samarkand and Bukhara, traces its
origins back to 5th-century exiles from Persia,
though some claim that Bukhara is actually the
ancient city of Habor, to which the Lost Tribes
were exiled. Community members speak their own
Tajik-Jewish dialect and have a number of unique
festivals and practices that have developed over
centuries of relative isolation in the Asian
mountains.
Azerbaijan:
Nearly 8,000 "Mountain Jews" live
in the Azerbaijan in cities like Baku and in
villages such as Krasnaya, Sloboda and Vartashen.
These Jews descend from Iranian tribes that moved
into the Azerbaijani mountains in the 5th
and 6th centuries. They
are separate from other Jewish communities in
that they speak Tat, a unique New-Persian
language, and have developed many practices and
traditions in kind with Dagestan mountain tribes.
They have traditionally been grain farmers and
wine makers, and were allowed to retain many of
their skills (although less of their culture)
during the Soviet period. The community has
become active again since the end of the Soviet
period, but Azerbaijiani nationalism has recently
threatened to curtail their revival.
Afghanistan:
Jews have lived in what is now known as
Afghanistan for more than two thousand years.
Fleeing persecution in the ancient land of Israel,
many stayed to work as merchants, trading silk
and spices from the East. In the early 19th
century, tens of thousands of Persian Jews
settled to Afghanistan fleeing forced conversion.
Though the community dwindled throughout the 20th
century due to isolation and Islamic suppression,
a small, determined Jewish community of merchants
and traders does continue in Kabul. Afghani Jews
currently live under the strict Islamic Taliban
regime and have had scant contact with the
international Jewish community in recent years,
but they maintain a synagogue in Kabul and pursue
their Jewish practices.
Iran:
The roots of the Persian Jewish community
reach back to the 6th
century B.C. The Jewish community in Persia used
to be one of the most culturally vibrant in the
world, yet its numbers have dwindled due to
centuries of harsh persecution. Before the
Islamic revolution in 1979 there were 80,000 Jews
in Iran, and though most have emigrated to Israel,
there is still a dedicated Jewish community in
Tehran. There currently a small number of
synagogues in Tehran, as well as three Jewish
schools. Though curriculum in the Jewish schools
is strictly Islamic and teachers are only allowed
to teach the Bible in Persian, there is some
Hebrew instruction available through the
community’s elders. The recent moderate
regime in Iran has loosened control on the Jewish
minority in Tehran, and the community has been
able to revitalize some of its religious
practices.
Yemen:
Though Jews have populated Yemen since
Biblical times, the first substantial number of
Yemenites to accept Judaism did so in the fifth
century under King Du-Nuas. As the only non-Muslims
in the country, Yemenite Jews have faced constant
persecution, including laws forbidding them to
wear certain colors, ride animals or build tall
houses. Jews began to emigrate from Yemen in 1882
and many landed in Israel. Emigration increased
when Israel became a nation in 1948, and the
fledgling nation accepted thousands of Jews who
fled anti-Jewish riots. Despite the suppression,
a small, secretive Jewish community remains in
northern Yemen in villages in the vicinity of
Saada, which is located in Sa'ata Province, close
to the Saudi border. These Jews are not allowed
to hold political office and are discouraged from
having contact with their Muslim neighbors, so
they continue their practices in virtual
seclusion.
Latin
America
When the Jews of Spain and Portugal fled
the Inquisition, many emigrated to distant places
like the newly developing lands of Latin America.
Even in their new surroundings the Jews were not
immune to persecution; many publicly converted to
Catholicism while continuing their Jewish
practices underground. Almost five hundred years
after the Inquisition, some South Americans have
begun to examine their non-traditional Catholic
practices and realize that they have been
practicing the underground Judaism of their
ancestors. Jews like those in Venhaver and Natal
in the Rio Grande do Norte area of Brazil, the
Antiquenas of Colombia and Jews from the
Naucalpan and Vallejo districts of Mexico City
have begun to revisit their progenitors’
practices. They live on the margins of already-thriving
Jewish communities in Latin American cities like
Sao Paulo, Brazil, Lima Peru and Santiago, Chile,
the members of which are descendants of Spanish,
Persian and Iraqi traders who immigrated to Latin
America in the 18th and
19th centuries or
European Jews also fled there to avoid the Nazis
during World War II. In addition to these more
mainstream Jewish communities, there are also a
large number of "non-traditional" Jews
in Latin America such as the "Iglesia
Israelitas" in Southern Chile, a remote
Indian tribe with many Jewish practices, and
certain communities of mestizos (Mexicans of
mixed Indian and European ancestry) who claim
ancient Jewish roots, such as the "Iglesia
de Dios" and "Casa de Dios." Some
of the more colorful Jewish communities in Latin
America include:
Peru:
In 1966, an Incan Catholic from the
Peruvian city of Trujillo named Villanueva began
to learn more about Judaism and, when the
Catholic Church excommunicated him for his
increasing hostility toward Catholicism, he
emigrated to Spain to avoid further prejudice.
While in Spain Villanueva studied Judaism and
returned to Peru to convert his community of
Indians to his new-found faith. More than five
hundred of his fellow community members became
devoted Jews. As the poor Trujillo Jews became
more observant they found that they were not able
to acquire sufficient ritual objects such as
prayer books (siddurim) or
prayer shawls (tallisim). In
the absence of necessary ritual objects the Incan
Jewish community began to focus more on studying
mystical questions such as reincarnation (gilgul)
and concept of a Messiah. The European-descended
Jews of Lima did not accept the Incas’
Judaism and did not allow them to use the
synagogue or ritual bath (mikva);
when Inca Jewish women needed to use the ritual
bath they used the ocean or a nearby waterfall.
In order to find a more receptive environment for
their Judaism three hundred members of the
community have emigrated to Israel, but some have
remained, assuring that their way of life would
not disappear from Peru. Their ranks are growing,
and the Incan Jewish community of Trujillo has
again had to face poverty, prejudice and the
question of how they are going to maintain their
Judaism.
Brazil:
In the arid Northern region of Brazil, Rio
Grande do Norte, Catholics in villages like
Venhaver and Natal have long been recognized for
their "unusual" religious practices.
Settled in the early 1700s when Portuguese
Inquisitional activity was at its strongest in
the Brazilian northeast, Rio Grande do Norte is
remote enough that Jews fleeing persecution were
able to avoid much of it by hiding there. Even so,
most of the Northern Brazilian Jews became
Catholic, though they wove their Jewish practices
into their Catholicism. Even today, members of
the Venhaver community eat according to the
Jewish dietary laws, hang small bags of dirt on
their door post (traditional Jews hang a mezuzah
on their door post, a small container
with particular passage of the Torah enclosed),
light candles on Friday nights, refuse to kneel
in Church when they pray and hold alternative
services at a secret place called the "snoga,"
which some suggest is derived from the Portuguese
word "sinagoga," Dozens of Marrano-descended
families in the larger city of Natal have
undergone "purification" ceremonies to
cleanse them of Catholic beliefs and allow them
to resume their ancestors’ Judaism.
Cuba:
Since the Soviet Union stopped funding
Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba in the late
1980s, Castro has slowly loosened the economic
and social control of his people and allowed
those interested in religion to resume their
practices. Approximately 2,000 Jews remain in
Cuba, most of whom are of Spanish descent. Most
are poor, generally unable to afford prayer books
and other Jewish articles, and elderly, as the
Communist government has prohibited Jewish
practices for nearly thirty years. Jews in Havana
and Santiago have recently reopened their
synagogues and have held public celebrations and
Jewish study sessions in order to interest
younger Cubans in the religion, openly affirming
their Judaism for the first time in decades.
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