The Calcutta Jewish Community and the Jewish Diaspora during the Inter-war Years

Kaustav Chakrabarti

Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 2016, vol. 3, issue 2, 179-200

Abstract: The city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) is home to a tiny community, namely, Baghdadi Jews from the Middle East. The Jewish community contributed extensively toward building and consolidating the rich socio-cultural heritage through the creation of social and cultural infrastructures like schools, hospitals, baby clinics, women and youth organizations. Breaking social taboos, they were stimulated by the attractions of Western education and took up modern professions. Their contributions were keenly appreciated both in pre- and post-independent India. Apart from their domiciled status, the Jews of Calcutta were not indifferent to the events affecting their brethren in the international arena, and in the process began to take keen interest in the fate of worldwide Jewry. This article traces the connection of the Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta with diaspora Jewry in the following areas, namely, the inter-war period, wartime contribution and the Zionist movement, and tries to explore the concept of diaspora with regard to the Calcutta Jews and how it affected their identity during the colonial and the post-colonial era.

Keywords: Jews; Calcutta; diaspora; refugee; Zionism; holocaust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2347798916638212 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:crmide:v:3:y:2016:i:2:p:179-200

DOI: 10.1177/2347798916638212

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Contemporary Review of the Middle East
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().