On Origins and History Telling

History telling about the origins of communities and nations tends to drift to the realms of myths and legends, risking the obfuscation of historical realities that good stories often intend to hide. Origin legends are, of course, a powerful tool for analyzing group identity and processes of sociocultural formations, albeit requiring sifting fact from fiction. Analyzing origin legends means reading them against broader historical circumstances respective to the time of telling the legends in written or oral form. Many origin legends purposefully forge and legitimize group supremacy, leading to the erosion of the status of groups perceived as inferior rivals and whose histories are less appealing to the imagination. Those who fail to produce a compelling origin leg-end risk being left behind, even if their historical narrative is corroborated by records. This is precisely the case of the Jews of Malabar, whose origins are pushed back to biblical times beyond the reach of corroborating evidence, effectively erasing their historical records preserved in tangible and intangible heritage between the ninth and the late fifteenth centuries. This book is based on historical evidence produced by Jews and on Jews in Malabar before legends about their origins began to circulate sometime in the early sixteenth century. Interesting as these origin legends may be—and they are, indeed—I am obliged to leave them out for a future study on the histori-cal circumstances that prompted their production.

Judaism as a lived religion is attested in the region from the late thirteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The earliest evidence for a settled Jewish community is a Hebrew tombstone dated 1269. A few decades later, a synagogue was constructed in Kochi with a stone inscription dated 1344, and by the 1950s, eight synagogue communi-ties were deeply rooted in the landscape. The tombstone, however, is too sporadic evi-dence to account for a fullyfledged community, albeit attesting to enhanced contacts that can explain the emergence of a synagogue congregation seventyfive years later in Kochi. Three synagogues were located in Kochi (Cochin). The more recent one, and the one still intact, is the Paradeśi Synagogue, which was built no earlier than 1568 and no later than 1664. These are estimates as there is no inscription to attest to its foundation date.