The Bene Israel (Hebrew: "Sons of Israel")

The largest Jewish community of Indian Jews is that of the Bene Israel. Earlier the Bene Israel lived in the villages of west Maharashtra in the Konkan coast. In the nineteenth century they started moving to the cities, mainly to Bombay (now called Mumbai) and to other cities among them Pune.

The Bene Israel believe that their forefathers arrived in India before the destruction of the second temple. The accepted version is that their forefathers were sailing in a commercial ship from the Land of Israel to India. The ship wrecked near the coast of Konkan. From the ship survived 14 people, seven men and seven women. They swam towards the land and arrived at the village called Navgaon. All their belongings drowned in the sea. The dead bodies of the others from the ship were buried in the village. The survivors somehow managed to settle in the village and started working in agriculture and oil producing which later on became their main profession. As time passed the descendants of the survivors forgot Hebrew and their religious tradition. But they carried out some of the Israeli tradition. The Bene Israels observed Sabbath (Saturday) and abstained on this day from any work. They circumcised their sons on the eighth day after birth. They didn’t eat fish which didn’t had fins and scales. They observed a few Israeli festivals and called them by Indian names.

The Bene Israel’s population at their height was perhaps 30000 in India and that was in the 1950s. Proportionally they weren’t even 0.01% of the Indian population. Since the 1950s most of the Bene Israel have immigrated to Israel, and some to English speaking countries like Australia and England. Today in India there are less than 5000 Bene Israels, most of them live in Thana a suburb of Mumbai (Bombay).

Hey Simon Vijay, welcome back!?!? LOL When did you convert to judaism ? And since when are you living in Tel Aviv ? As far as i can recall you were living somewhere in Salzwedel ?

who?

The first time I clicked this topic, I thought it was good old gomeny.

eh like most Jews most of them emigrated to Israel a while back, I'm still curious as to what Israel has against African Jews.

Ethiopian Jews are treated much better than Asian Jews in Israel !!!

There's Jews all over Africa, but Israel doesn't recognize most of them.

jews in india

wat the fu-k

really

no wayyyyyyy

thats a first for me

I think he is refering to Jewish Indians (whose been there for centuries).
China also has/had Jewsish Chinese as well. Ethiopia too.

China did had Jews who settle their for several centuries too.

Supposedly there were some who are Jews from Baghdad and Persia that came during the Tang and Song Dynasty and settled around the Ancient Capital of Kaifeng, but I heard many of them got assimilated among the population because they just lost contact with Jews from the outside world. Today there are roughly 600 families that claimed descent from them, but in my opinion I think the number in reality is a bit higher. I just want to know would these Chinese Jews be considered Jewish because its more likely their were Jewish paternially than maternally?

And there were Ashkenazi Jews that came during the 1800s-1900s that settled around the Chinese-Russian Border towns, Harbin, HK and Shanghai.

Yeah, I never about them until I saw some TV program about religion in India.

I had no idea that there were jews in India either until I met a guy from work who told me he was Jewish and whose mum was from India. I don't think they really recognise the fact they are from India, because although he speaks bits of hindi and eats Indian food, he always spoke about originating from Iraq or something...saying there were two groups of jews orignially- one from Iraq and one from I think Egypt