"Who is not curious as to how the Jews of India survived for so long in an atmosphere of tolerance when other Jewish communities such as that in China, benefiting from similar toleration, assimilated so thoroughly. Their argument is that India as a host society combined tolerance with culturally enforced diversity which made the difference. Indian society, with its several major religions and further division within Hinduism into four major castes, a fifth of outcasts, and over 3,000 subcastes, tolerates wide diversity but does not permit people born into one group to cross over into another or even to associate with the others beyond the public square, since the food taboos of every religious community, caste and subcaste mean that they cannot eat with one another. Nothing separates more than that. The Jewish community could fit into India as another caste and even developed its own subcastes, as the authors explain, properly denoting this as the Cochin Jews' one great (and sad) departure from halakhic Judaism."
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Sources
Daniel J. Elazar, Foreword to The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_India
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History of the Jews in India
The history of the Jews in India reaches back to ancient history. Judaism was one of the first foreign religions to arrive in India in recorded history. Indian Jews are a religious minority in India who have historically lived there without any instances of anti-Semitism from the local non-jewish majority.
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