The Formative Period: 849–1269

This history of Jews in Malabar began in precisely 849 in a place called Kurakkēṇi Kollam, somewhere in or around what is later known as the port town of Kollam (Quilon). A small island some distance offshore to the west was known to the early Arab navigators sailing their vessels eastwards. This was their first landing post after about a month of sailing across the Arabian Sea driven by the northeastern monsoon winds. The placename Malabar is derived from the name of this little island, malī, compounded with an Arabic-Persian word bār, which means “land.” Malī was later signified as Kūlam Malī, or the Mali Island of the port town Kollam, where Arab and Chinese vessels met in the fifteenth century during the heyday of international trade activities in the region. The term Malabar is spelled variously in the different Arabic (and Judeo-Arabic) manu-scripts: mulaybār, manībār, and malībārāt. With the growing frequency of references to the term, it evolves from referring to a single geographic signpost, namely the small island of Malī, to denoting a much broader coastal area. Indeed, in later centuries the term Malabar became associated with the western coastline of South India, extending from the Konkan region to Kanyakumari at the southernmost tip of India.

During the British colonial period, Malabar came to denote an area roughly extend-ing from Ponnani in the south to Kasargode in the north, thus including the southern-most areas of Tulu speakers (or South Karnataka). British Malabar was densely popu-lated by indigenous Muslims connected to West, Central, South, and Southeast Asia via a web of intellectual, religious, and political networks. By the twentieth century, the human landscape of the region bore the marks of centuries of increasingly intensified and diversified trade activities crisscrossing the Indian Ocean maritime routes. It should come as no surprise, then, that the earliest record of Jews in the region hails from Kol-lam, near the island that lent its name to the whole region of Malabar. By the twelfth century, Kollam became one of the most important and world-famous centres of international trade, at least for Jewish traders sailing along the Indian Ocean maritime trade routes.