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Nathan Katz. Who are the Jews of India? The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xv, 205 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2004

Brian Weinstein
Affiliation:
Howard University, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

If there is a contemporary “dean” of Indo-Judaic studies, it is Nathan Katz, professor and chair of religious studies at Florida International University. He is helping revive the field of study inaugurated by Walter Fischel, who died in 1973. Katz first made his mark with several articles and a book about one of the three Indian Jewish communities, The Last Jews of Cochin (1993); he edited Studies of Indian Jewish Identity (1995) with chapters about the Jews of Cochin, the Bene Israel of Bombay and Maharashtra, and the Baghdadis of Bombay and Calcutta. He subsequently founded and currently co-edits the Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies. Katz contributes to comparative Jewish studies by synthesizing in this book a new wave of publications from the period of 1985 to 1995, which he calls “a groundbreaking era for the study of Indian Jewish communities” (p. 6). His purpose here is to explain generally how these Jews, who never suffered discrimination at the hands of the Indian majority, maintained their identities and their commitment to Halakhah while acculturating to Indian and English ways.

Type
Book Review
Copyright
© 2003 by the Association for Jewish Studies

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