Introduction: The Regional History of the Malabar Coast

This chapter focuses on the Jewish trade and kinship networks emerging between 849 (the Kollam copper plates) and 1000, when the Muyirikkōṭu inscription, later known as the Jewish copper plates, was issued. These inscriptions also constitute important milestones in the history of the region, namely the period of state formation in histori-cal Kerala, termed by historians the second Cēra kingdom characterized by the rule of the (Cēramāṉ) Perumāḷs between the midninth and the late twelfth centuries. As the formative period in Malabar Jewish history roughly parallels this period, a few words about the Cēra kingdom are in place.

The term Cēra is related to the name of the region, Kerala, as it is known in Indic lan-guages, in particular Sanskrit and Pali. Somewhat incongruent with the regional identity of Kerala in the Cēra period, the toponym Malabar refers to the western coastal areas of South India from the perspective of West Asian seafarers—Muslim, Christian, and Jew-ish. In contrast, the landscape that gave rise to the historical Indic communities of the region ran through two different axes connecting the west coast eastwards with Tamil Nadu on the one hand, and northwards with central and northern India on the other hand. Around the eighth century, Brahmin settlements (ūr) emerged as temple-centred villages, while older Buddhist and Jain institutions were gradually fading away. By this time, the Malayalam-speaking region had become known by the name ascribed to it in the ancient stone inscriptions of the great Buddhist emperor Aśoka and preserved in Sanskrit literary traditions over centuries.

Besides cultural, and religious history, the name of Kerala also reflects the geomor-phological history of the constantly changing littoral lying below the Western Ghats. The Indo-Aryan name is derived from a proto-Dravidian root *kēr- with the nominal ending -al, *kēral (joint), which possibly reflects a prehistorical memory of a geological event like an earthquake or tsunami that carved a significant landmass out of the ocean. This memory is also reflected in the origin myth of Kerala, associating its foundation with the feat of the legendary Paraśurāma, who threw his axe into the Arabian Sea, raising the coastal belt to the surface. Indeed, the geological history of the coastline of central Kerala is divided into three periods of formation, with the oldest going back to ca. 5000 B.C.E.