Asian Current

City of Black and White Jews

At dusk we reached the end of the first stage of our voyage through the romantic backwater lagoons and inlets of the Malabar coast. A crowd of brown boys gathered at the jetty, shouting, “Allerpey!”

We got out and sorted our baggage. Then the brown boys saw visions of baksheesh. Nor were they alone in demanding toll. There was the man who took our tickets, and the man who watched the man who took our tickets to see that he didn’t swindle, and the boy who brought the bullock-cart, and the man who brought the boy who brought the bullock-cart.

“Baksheesh! Rickshaw! Allerpey!” clamored the brown coolies. But alas I Allah didn’t pay. We were the victims who had to produce!

In these out-of-the-way parts of India the nervous traveler is apt to get rattled by the constant demands for baksheesh. But it is the custom of the country. He is a foolish man who tries to pay only for services rendered. It is the undeserving who demand baksheesh and get it too, if the traveler is in search of smiles and peace.

After all, the privilege of visiting this country is worth a lot of the fat coppers of Travancore!

It is a moonless night. Our beds are in the garden by the road, where a breeze is floating through the sentinel palms. The voice of the mosquito is heard in the land and the time of the brain-fever bird has come. But we lie safe inside our mosquito-nets and relax in the tepid air, pondering dreamily on the life about us. A bullfrog croaks for a moment, then lapses into sudden silence. By the garden gate pass silent figures sheeted like the Roman dead. A bat looms by. There comes to us the agonized wail of some beast in pain. Then again a sudden silence, as if a throat had been choked. The powers of evil are abroad. A million tiny lives are born only to die again. By fang and foot the tragedy is played. Then from far away comes to our sleepy ears a sound of worship, the murmur of a multitude, the bugling of conches-the people of Brahma are at prayer.

Allerpey is on the backwater from Quilon to Cochin, a flourishing city so unknown to the outer world that even Murray’s voluminous guide-book doesn’t name it.

At Cochin, the pepper port, we are again in touch with the West, for British Cochin is a big and growing commercial center where cocoanut-fiber, spice, “and all things nice” are exported to an annual value of three and a half millions sterling. There are roughly three towns at Cochin-British Cochin, Jew Town, and Ernakulam. The latter is on the land side of the bay that forms a natural harbor, and is the terminus of the railway. It is a clean and prosperous city, with no historical associations but good accommodation for travelers. British Cochin and Jew Town rank among the quaint places of the world.

Two thousand years ago Chinese pirates taught the Cochinese a peculiar way of fishing. They still prefer it to modern methods. There is a contraption of string and bamboo by the quay-side on which a long pole is hinged, with one end inland and the other over the sea. From the sea end is suspended a kite-like affair. This is the net. The other end of the pole is weighted, for the convenience of the fishermen, who lower the net slowly into the sea and then withdraw it with its freight of fishes. The cords and stones with which these machines are hung, and the curious old creatures who work the levers and stare into the net with googly eyes, are like Heath Robinson’s and Rube Goldberg’s cartoons come to life, and are a strange contrast to the Pierce Leslie factory a hundred yards away. From time immemorial this fishing has continued, and until recently at Cannanore, farther up the coast, half the catch of sharks’ fins and one fish were the perquisites of the rajah’s cat, as a curious form of state tax.

Towards the club we come to St. Francis’s Church, shut and locked after the unfortunate Church of England fashion. It is a gray, unimpressive building both within and without, yet venerable for its associations.

This was the first Christian church in India. Here Vasco da Gama was buried on Christmas Day, 1524.

Those who believe that the caste system, India’s social cancer, will ever be rooted out, should visit Cochin. Here there are as many subdivisions among the Christians as there are among the Hindus, and the lines between them are almost as sharply drawn.

According to tradition, the first Christian converts were made nearly two thousand years ago when the Apostle Thomas came to the Malabar coast. Since then climate and tradition have been at work on Christianity, with the result that to-day there are three divisions of the Roman Catholics using the Latin liturgy, but who do not worship together and who are differentiated by name-”The Three Hundred,” “The Five Hundred,” and “The Seven Hundred.” Then there is another Catholic sect that uses the Church of Rome liturgy in the ancient Syrian language instead of in Latin. There are also the Chaldean Syrians, who obey the “Patriarch of Babylon,” and the Jacobite Syrians, who recognize the leadership of the “Patriarch of Antioch,” and the St. Thomas Syrians, who disregard the rule of both Rome and Antioch and elect their own bishop.

The last-named are the “religious Bolsheviki” of Cochin. They call themselves St. Thomas Syrians on the ground that they are the only Christians in India who adhere to the ritual of the apostolic age. They believe in neither confession, absolution, fasting, invocation of the saints, veneration of relics, masses for the dead, nor baptismal regeneration.

As a result of century after century of dispute these sects have petrified into castes, and to-day intermarriage between castes is as uncommon among them as it is among their Hindu neighbors.

In addition to these seven groups there are others who adhere to various Protestant faiths. But by far the most interesting community we find in Cochin is in Jew Town, a quarter reminding us of the ghettos of Warsaw, Constantinople, or N ew York. But such is the effect of India on invading religions that even the Jews are split up into three separate castes, known as the “Whites,” the “Browns,” and the “Blacks.”

As we drive in our rickshaws toward Jew Town we are confronted by the curse of Cochin. A plague hangs over their city, the plague of death by deformity. One out of every ten of the people we pass suffers from elephantiasis, one of the most terrible diseases known to medical science, for it not only destroys the human frame but first distorts it into a thing of ridicule. The disease causes a swelling of the ankles and knees until the legs are the size of bolsters. It is a common sight to see men walking around in what are apparently brown top-boots, their flesh being thus travestied by this hideous affliction. It is cured in several different ways, one of which is for the victim to have the accumulated fat pared down until his legs are of normal size. But not many can afford the operation, or the necessary trip to the distant metropolis of Madras. The afflicted often live and work to late middle age, but their limbs grow bigger and bigger until they reach the limit of elasticity, and the periodic attacks of fever that accompany elephantiasis grow more frequent until at last the sufferers are relieved of their “too too solid flesh.” Fortunately, English bacteriologists have isolated the microbe-a water-borne germ.

A Brahmin, with the gaudy, diabolic-looking trident of Vishnu on his forehead, who is employed as a clerk by the wealthiest Jew shopkeeper, leads us through a maze of crooked thoroughfares until we find ourselves in a narrow street among a stately silent people dressed in long tunics of rich color, waistcoats buttoned tight around the neck, baggy white trousers, wooden sandals, and skull-caps. It is easy to distinguish them from the other inhabitants of Cochin by the locks that hang down in front of their ears.

The two-storied houses on either side of the street are of a style foreign to India, and the faces looking out at us from the shuttered windows remind us of the Rebeccas and J ezebels of Jerusalem. At the head of the street we come to a synagogue, with its tower and the old Dutch clock that has told off the lazy, listless hours of life in this Indian ghetto since the day when the merchant buccaneers from Amsterdam protected these Jews from the horrors of the Portuguese Inquisition.

Noone seems to know just when these people settled in southern India. The history of the early days of the colony is shrouded in the mists of obscurity. The Black Jews, who look much like the native Muhammadans except for their locks, stoutly uphold their tradition that they arrived first. According to one of their legends, the Apostle Thomas landed on the coast of Malabar in the year 52 A. D., and they came seventeen years later.

Some writers believe that the Children of Israel have been in touch with this portion of India since the ships of Solomon came here for their “precious cargoes” one thousand years B. c. Sir W. Hunter, a historian of wide repute, tells us that Roman merchant triremes sailing between Myos Hormuz on the Red Sea and the ports of Arabia, Ceylon, and Malabar, found a Jewish colony in southwestern India in the second century A. D.

But the historians and the antiquarians are unable to agree. Some hold that the Black Jews were the first, while others believe that the White Jews preceded them. The former have a tradition that they are descendants of the J udean-Arabians who are still found at Sanaa in the Yemen, and at Aden. The White Jews laugh at this story and declare that the Black Jews are merely the descendants of slaves whom they bought and afterwards converted and liberated.

One of the rabbis of the White Jewish community told us that Nebuchadnezzar, the haughty monarch who carried the Children of Israel off to Babylon in captivity, extended his empire all the way to Cape Comorin, the southernmost ti p of India, and then exiled the tribe of Manasseh to this extreme corner of his realm. He firmly believed that his people were the descendants of this tribe. A few have names like David Castile (David the Castilian), and this has been responsible for the rumor that they may be descendants of the Jews who were driven out of Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.

For centuries these people lived in peace and contentment with their Hindu and Muhammadan neighbors. But with the arrival of the representatives of the first great Christian power to invade the Orient-the Portuguese-their era of persecution began. Great rivalry existed between the Portuguese and the Dutch. The buccaneer dons suspected the Jews of helping their enemies, so they burned their settlements and chased them into the mountains. It was during this time that the records that might have revealed their origin were destroyed. Later on, when the Dutch defeated the Portuguese, the Jews came out of the jungle and with the assistance of their protectors rebuilt their homes and synagogues in Cochin.