Jewish history in Kerala, the southernmost state in modern India, goes back to as early as the tenth century CE. In the mid-twentieth century, Kerala Jews migrated en masse to Israel, leaving behind but a handful of their community members and remnants of eight communities, synagogues, and cemeteries. The paper presents a preliminary attempt to describe and analyze the language—so far left undocumented and unexplored—still spoken by Kerala Jews in Israel, based on a language documentation project carried out in 2008 and 2009. In light of the data collected and studied so far, it is clear that the language in question fits nicely into the Jewish languages spectrum, while at the same time it fits perfectly into the linguistic mosaic of castolects in Kerala. Though the linguistic database described here reflects a language in its last stages, it affords salvaging the remnants of a once rich oral heritage and opens new channels for the study of the history, society, and culture of Kerala Jews.

Aśu was a twelfth-century woman from the West Coast of South India. She is mentioned as a Tuḷuva “slave girl” (šifḥa) in a deed of manumission authored by Abraham Ben Yijū, a Jewish merchant who lived with her for nearly eighteen years and had children with her. It is thus accepted that Aśu was a manumitted slave. However, there is evidence to the contrary suggesting that Aśu was a member of a matrilineal household of the Nāyar caste of landlords, and that by allying with her, Ben Yijū was establishing a transregional network in collaboration with hinterland Indian merchants. In what follows, I examine the textual evidence from the Cairo Geniza related to the couple and reevaluate it against the anthropological history of Nāyars, especially in relation to their matrilineal inheritance customs and intercaste matrimonial alliances. Arguably, familial alliances such as those of Aśu and Ben Yijū matured into full-fledged communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the region. A better understanding of the relations between these two individuals, Aśu and Ben Yijū, can shed light on the history of the transregional maritime networks and, consequently, on the history of interreligious relations in the Malayalam-speaking region.

This contribution offers a review of Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and its Significance for Ritual Theory by Axel Michaels (2016).

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Jewish history in Kerala is based on sources mainly from the colonial period onward and mostly in European languages, failing to account for the premodern history of Jews in Kerala. These early modern sources are based on oral traditions of Paradeśi Jews in Cochin, who view the majority of Kerala Jews as inferior. Consequently, the premodern history of Kerala Jews remains untold, despite the existence of premodern sources that undermine unsupported notions about the premodern history of Kerala Jews—a Jewish ‘ur-settlement’ called Shingly in Kodungallur and a centuries-old isolation from world Jewry. This article reconstructs Jewish history in premodern Kerala solely based on premodern travelogues and literature on the one hand and on historical documents in Old Malayalam, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic on the other hand. Sources of the early modern period are then examined for tracing the origins of the Shingly myth, arguing that the incorporation of the Shingly legend into the historiography of Kerala Jews was affected by contacts with European Jews in the Age of Discoveries rather than being a reflection of historical events.