[BRIEF NOTE] The Bene Israel

Reading the Toronto Star today, I came across an article by Prithi Yelaja ("Their tiny slice of India is Jewish") that revealed that Toronto has a significant population of Bene Israel, an ancient population of Indian Jews.

Though his last name might be a hint, Opher Moses still gets puzzled looks when he asks for time off during the Jewish high holidays. Because of his skin colour and accent most people assume he is Hindu or Muslim. "I never get Jewish. Even in Israel they think I'm Palestinian," he says.

A 1999 immigrant from India, Moses is part of a tight-knit community of about 400 Indian Jews in the GTA – a fascinating minority that is misunderstood, at least initially, as often by their Jewish cousins as by the wider world, yet devoted to preserving their faith and heritage. They will gather to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, today.

Their Hebrew service includes elements familiar to all Jews such as the blowing of the shofar (ram's horn), but instead of honey cakes, halva (an Indian sweet made of semolina) will be served as part of the exuberant festivities.

"We wear Indian dress, distribute sweets and sing Indian melodies. Everything is the same way we had it back in India. Sometimes we even incorporate a Bollywood tune to make it more proactive with the audience," says Moses, 24, a mortgage consultant.

Adds Victor Abraham, 72, a lay cantor who officiates during the service: "It's our way of melding our Indian culture with our Jewish faith. Jewish people have always taken on the shades and culture from the part of the world they live in."

As this webpage by Aaron and Shulamith Solomon points out, the most popular theory of the origin of the Bene Israel claims that the community began with a shipwreck that left seven Jewish couples on the western coast of India in the 2nd century BCE. In subsequent centuries, the Bene Israel came to be incorporated into the Indian caste system and thus survived as a distinct subgroup in the Indian mosaic. By the time that the State of Israel was founded, some twenty thousand Indians belonged to the Bene Israel. Later waves of emigration, however, caused this community to nearly disappear, emigrants heading mainly to Israel but apparently also to Toronto. The pessimistic tone of the recent The Forward article "In India, a Historic Community Watches Its Numbers Dwindle" seems accurate enough.

Alibag and the surrounding villages and towns — Ravdanda, Panvel, Pen, Nandgaon, Navgaon, about 22 miles southwest across a gray-green harbor from Mumbai — were home to what was once a thriving and vibrant Jewish community known as the Bene Israel. So many Jews once lived here, in fact, that this dirt road is called Israel Lane. The facades of many of the houses along it still bear Stars of David and Hebrew lettering. Four families now remain, totaling about 20 people. Of those, Dandekar says, it’s not a question of whether they will leave, but when.

“If they get a nice price for their property, they will go,” he said. “They are waiting for money, or waiting for their children to finish their courses, and then they will go.”

[REVIEW] Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction

Alex Harrowell's review, at A Fistful of Euros, of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, is a must-read review of a must-read book aboiut the vissicitudes of the German economy under Naziism.

Tooze provides abundant evidence for his argument that Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, far from being a uniquely advanced economy full of V-2s and Volkswagens, actually lagged behind its competitors. The vast Fordist demi-continent of the United States was for many Germans, an obvious competitor and model, but so were Britain and France, with their vast empires, their high wages, and their relatively abundant agricultural land. Germany, in Tooze's convincing depiction, was a country with an economy that saw little to no net growth over the two decades that followed the First World War, with an urban working class that could barely afford to sustain itself and a peasantry forced to subsist on overcrowded land and little prospect of this changing. One response to the interwar conundrum--the respone, Tooze notes, that West Germany took after the Second World War--would have been for Germany to try to integrate itself into an integrated world and European economy, but the unsettled and unsettling tone of politics in interwar Europe kept that from being fulfilled. Harrowell points out that the Nazis responded by wanting to "shake the structure until it fell down; the economic history of the 30s in Germany is one of continuous foreign exchange crises, mitigated by a succession of increasingly inconsistent expedients." Indeed, "[b]y 1939, the Reichsbank was reduced to commissioning secret studies to estimate the mark’s exchange rate; the economists who carried them out concluded that the concept was now meaningless in the light of dozens of mutually incompatible side-deals with Germany’s trading partners."

The German economy fared worse in the Second World War. Nazi Germany's economic policy-making, rather than advancing beyond sustained inconsistently, devolved to the point of the wholesale pillage of conquered and satellite states. The sort of willing pan-European collaboration that could have made a difference, Tooze points out, was short-circuited not only by Nazi Germany's inability to treat other polities as its equals but by the economical unsustainability of a Europe deprived of extra-European trade. In the end, it all came crashing down.

Tooze's economic history is gripping, not only because it's an economic history that presents compelling arguments but because of its insights into Nazism. As the debate over at J. Bradford Delong's blog suggests, the long-standing debate as to whether the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities were planned by the Nazis in advance (intentionalism) or came about as an epiphenomenon of other Nazi policies (functionalism) seems to have been settled in favour of the intentionalists: An interwar Germany without Nazism might well have gone to war against most of Europe with the aim of securing economic hegemony, but without Nazism's influence on German policy-making (Heather Pringle's The Master Plan, among other books, provides an overview of some of Nazism's inherent irrationality) it seems quite unlikely whether a Nazi-less Germany would ever have come up with such manifestly counterproductive schemes as liquidating the populations of eastern Europe. Too, as Harrowell points out, images of the Americans' settlement of the west of their country and Britain's empire featured prominently as models for Germany's feature imperium, suggesting that Hannah Arendt was quite right to identify intimate links between 19th century European imperialisms and 20th century European wars and genocides. (Mamdami also seems to have been wrong to argue in his When Victims Become Killers that the Nazi Germany did not perceive itself to be a colonizing power in eastern Europe.)

Compelling, well-written, innovative, certainly a classic, The Wages of Destruction must be read by anyone interested in the economics of Nazism and interwar Europe. Tooze deserves a thank-you.