Western Jews in India : From the Fifteenth Century to the Present

Contents: Foreword. Introduction. 1. Jews in South Asia/Kenneth X. Robbins. 2. European jews in the Military service and courts of Indian rulers. 3. Portuguese service in India. 4. Jews new Christians and the portuguese on the South Malabar coast/Kenneth X. Robbins. 5. Subversion in a liminal space: Perso-Arab Learning asian medicinals and the European classical revival in the coloquios 1563 of garcia da orta/Guy Attewell. 6. Jews in the British Raj: Sir Edwin S. Montagu (1917-1922) and Lord reading (1921-1926). 7. Between faith and reason: Waldemar Haffkine 1860-1930 in India/Marina Sorokina. 8. The transformation of Leopold Weiss into Muhammad Asad (1900-1992)/Kenneth X. Robbins. 9. From French Jew to Indian Goddess: the story of Mirra Alfassa/Kenneth X. Robbins. 10. Polish jew to Hindu Sannyasi to Nisarga Yogist: Maurice Frydman Bharatananda c. 1901-1976/John McLeod and Kenneth X. Robbins. 11. Artists and architects. Bibliography. This is the first book describing the roles of Western Jews in South Asian political affairs, medicine, painting, architecture and religion. A time-line summarizes their contributions and those of the Indian Jews to the Indian subcontinent. Many of these foreign Jews left behind their Jewish identities. Others remained Jews, but functioned as individuals unconcerned with implementing any Jewish agenda. The mother a great mystic and leader of the Aurobindo ashram was a French artist with a Turkish Jewish background. Maurice Frydman Bharatananda an important associate of Nisargadatta Maharaj and other gurus, tried to create a Gandhian democracy in Aundh. Muhammad Asad Leopold Weiss was an important Islamic political thinker and government official in Pakistan. Jews provided the Portuguese who persecuted them with language skills and access to trading networks. Jean-Baptiste Ventura became commander of the Sikh armies. In 1921, Lord Reading and Edwin Montagu were the two highest British officials governing India. Garcia da Orta was a founder of tropical medical botany in the sixteenth century. Waldemar Haffkine, who created anti-cholera and plague vaccines, undertook large-scale vaccination programmes in India. Louis Kahn created the iconic National Parliament House in Bangladesh. The buildings of Moshe Safdie, Joseph A. Stein and Stanley Tigerman are very well known in India and Bangladesh. (jacket)