Passage To India (Extract)

By JUDY BOLTON FASMAN
Extract from Issue 16, November 24, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. In recent years there has been a surfeit of stories about people raised as gentiles who suddenly discover their Jewish ancestry. The "suddenly Jewish" genre is typified by Helen Fremont's 1999 memoir, "After Long Silence." Fremont's parents were Holocaust survivors who raised her as a Catholic, and it was not until well into adulthood that Fremont found out about her true origins. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's 1997 discovery that her parents were born Jewish (they too had converted to Catholicism) is another famous example. Pulling back from the sensationalism of the "suddenly Jewish" phenomenon, Sadia Shepard's fascinating new memoir can be described as "almost Jewish." Shepard grew up with a grandmother who was born Jewish in India, and converted to Islam to marry Shephard's Muslim grandfather. Discovering her Jewish background was not as shocking as it was for Helen Fremont, but clearly it was life-altering for Shepard. She was determined to go back to India and learn more about her grandmother by studying and documenting her community, the Bene Israel. Shepard was born in Colorado in 1975 and raised in a unique and ecumenical household in the Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill. Shepard remembers that her parents threw parties in which people in suits comfortably mingled with others wearing saris and traditional Pakistani dress. Her mother, Samina, born in Karachi, is a Muslim. Her father, Richard, a native of Colorado, was raised as a Christian but converted to Islam when he married Samina. There was also a de facto third parent in this entrancing family, Sadia Shepard's beloved grandmother, Rahat Siddiqi, whom she called Nana. When Shepard was 13 she found a medal among Nana's jewelry that had been awarded to "Rachel Jacobs" for completing a nursing course in Bombay with honors. This led Shepard to the surprising discovery that her grandmother was born in 1917 as Rachel Jacobs, a member of the Bene Israel community who lived with her family in Castle Rock, a two-day journey from Bombay. Unlike the Jewish communities of Cochin and Calcutta, whose origins are known, the Bene Israel have been the source of much lore and fascination. They themselves claim to be one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Fleeing persecution, they assert that they were shipwrecked on the southern coast of India in the second century BCE. Only seven families survived. The Torahs they had brought with them from the Galilee were lost at sea. The traditional account, repeated by Shepard, maintains that without a written law to guide them, these Jews came to practice their Judaism on automatic pilot by observing dietary laws they didn't understand and celebrating holidays they did not overtly connect with Judaism. The only Hebrew they remembered was the first line of the Sh'ma. It wasn't until the 18th century, when Jewish traders from Baghdad recognized some of the Bene Israel's customs - such as circumcising their sons at eight days - as distinctly Jewish that they began to reclaim their religious heritage. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Bene Israel were practicing traditional Judaism. The community began to immigrate to Israel as soon as it was founded, and doubts about their status were finally dispelled in 1964 when the Chief Rabbinate declared that the Bene Israel were "full Jews in every respect." Sadia Shepard vividly tells how at 16 Rachel Jacobs eloped with her father's business partner Ali Siddiqi, a Muslim ten years her senior. Ali had two wives and several children when he married Rachel. The families lived in separate households until the partition of India in 1947 when they fled to Pakistan. Rachel Jacobs became Rahat Siddiqi and was suddenly thrust into exile in Karachi, where she shared a house with Ali's two other families. Extract from Issue 16, November 24, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.