14 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 6, DECEMBER 2010

Yulia Egorova and

Shahid PerwezYulia Egorova is Lecturer

in Anthropology at the

University of Durham.

She is the author of Jews

and India: Perceptions and

image (Routledge 2006) and

co-author (with T. Parfitt)

of Genetics, mass media

and identity: A case study of

the genetic research on the

Lemba and the Bene Israel

(Routledge 2006). Her email

is Yulia.egorova@durham.

ac.uk.

Shahid Perwez is a

postdoctoral Research

Associate in the Department

of Anthropology at the

University of Durham.

Following completion of the

study on the Bene Ephraim,

he is now working on a book

based on his PhD thesis, on

female infanticide and sex-

selective abortion in Tamil

Nadu. His email is shahid.

perwez@durham.ac.uk.

Fig. 1. Bene Ephraim elders

presiding over a wedding.

The Children of EphraimBeing Jewish in Andhra Pradesh

In February 2010 Zoek de Verschillen, a programme

produced by the Dutch Jewish TV channel, featured an

episode on the Bene Ephraim of Andhra Pradesh. Zoek

de Verschillen, which translates as Spot the difference,

could probably be described as a reality TV show in

which young Jewish men and women from Holland visit

Jewish communities in different parts of the world. In

each episode, the protagonist is taken to the airport and

handed a sheet of paper with the name of an exotic place

where they will be spending a week with a local Jewish

family.

In the case of Eli, a young Orthodox Jewish man from

Amsterdam, it was the village of Chebrole in India, the

home of the Bene Ephraim a community of Madiga

untouchables in Andhra Pradesh. In the late 1980s the

Bene Ephraim declared that they belonged to one of the

Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and expressed a wish to repat-

riate to the Jewish state.1 The community is led by the two

brothers Shmuel and Sadok Yacobi and maintains a

synagogue, which is now regularly attended by about 100

people from the Madiga community.

In the programme, after spending a week with the

Yacobis and other community members, Eli arrives at the

conclusion that although he sympathizes with the Bene

Ephraim movement and appreciates their devotion to

Judaism, he doubts that they could be considered Jewish

from the Orthodox perspective. He accepts that he can see

them as his brothers, but not as Jewish brothers. Elis

explanation for his position is that they lack a genealogy

to prove beyond doubt that they are Jewish. He therefore

concludes that the desire of the Bene Ephraim to move to

the state of Israel will remain a dream that is unlikely to

be realized.

* * *

One of us (Yulia) first learnt about the Bene Ephraim

in 2001 while researching the more conventional

Jewish communities of India and Indian attitudes towards

Judaism.2 We have now been working with this group for

over a year and have had a chance to observe their prac-

tice and to discuss the life and history of the community

at length with the Yacobi family and other Bene Ephraim.

Like Eli, we were impressed with the level of sincerity

and devotion to Judaism and Jewish culture that the com-

munity amply demonstrated. In their everyday life com-

munity members strive to observe Jewish dietary laws

(kashrut), rules of circumcision, and the main Jewish holi-

days and Sabbath, notwithstanding the fact that this has led

to them losing the support of their previous Christian ben-

efactors (back in the 19th century the ancestors of the Bene

Ephraim were converted to Christianity by an American

Baptist mission).

For many of them it has also meant having to sacrifice

Saturday wages, as the majority of the Bene Ephraim are

agricultural labourers and are now expected to work six

days a week. Community members have been actively

learning Hebrew and studying Jewish law. One significant

outcome of these practices is that many Bene Ephraim

children and young people now consider themselves to be

first and foremost Jewish, as this is the tradition that they

grew up with. All the community members have unequivo-

cally expressed the desire to live in the state of Israel. Why,

then, did Eli posit that their migration to Israel was not

likely to happen, and why did he think that, despite their

devotion to Judaism, the Bene Ephraim were not Jewish

after all?

Firstly, he suggested that their practices were still not

entirely orthodox. Indeed, community members them-

selves admit that since their ancestors did not have a

chance to practise Judaism openly, they had forgotten

We would like to thank

Gwynned de Looijer and

Jan de Ruiter for their help

in translating episodes of

the Zoek de Verschillen

programme into English. The

study on which this paper

is based was funded by the

Rothschild Foundation and

the Arts and Humanities

Research Council (reference

AH/G010463/1) and we are

grateful for this support. We

also wish to thank the two

anonymous AT reviewers for

their helpful comments.

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ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 6, DECEMBER 2010 15

most of it, and are now slowly learning it almost from

scratch. Secondly, Eli particularly emphasized that they

had no genealogy, and that they could not prove that their

mothers were Jewish. How does this assertion fit with the

narratives the Bene Ephraim have about their origin?

From Israel to Andhra

In 2002 Shmuel Yacobi published a book entitled The cul-

tural hermeneutics, offering an account of the history of

the community which may be summarized as follows. The

Bene Ephraim descended from the tribes of Israel, who in

722 BCE were exiled from the ancient kingdom of Israel

by the Assyrians. After their sojourn in Persia, they moved

to the northern part of the subcontinent, which was then

populated by Dravidian groups. In the seventh century

BCE the subcontinent was conquered by the Aryans, who

established the caste system and relegated the Dravidians

and the Bene Ephraim to the positions of Shudras and the

untouchables respectively. Both groups were later moved

to the south of India, where they now reside.

The current state of affairs in the community is explained

as an unfortunate result of the further advance of Aryan

rule, under which the Bene Ephraim lost their status and

political significance, were reduced to poverty and, left

with very few means of maintaining their tradition, almost

forgot it. The book claimed that at the time of writing only

a few Bene Ephraim were aware of their Israelite origin

and they are now concentrated in Kothareddypalem hamlet

of Chebrole village in Andhra Pradesh (Yacobi 2002).

From the accounts of the Yacobis, and of their village

neighbours, it appears that the community began practising

Judaism only in the late 1980s. Their main synagogue was

built in 1991. Their neighbours do not remember them

being anything other than Madiga Christians before that.

However, the Yacobis maintain that their parents and

grandparents had been aware of their Israelite origin and

had practised Judaism in secret for a long time. In an illu-

minating conversation in the courtyard of the synagogue,

Shmuel told Shahid Perwez:

Thirty years ago, in the same place where we are sitting now,

my grandmother once said that we would soon go back to

Israel. Though she said this in response to our complaint of the

intolerable noise from the adjoining Hindu temple, I became

serious and asked why we do not return to Israel now. I already

knew through the newspapers that the two of the tribes (Judah

and Benyamin) had been returning to Israel since 1948 and so I

asked my grandmother. She said we (the Ephraims) are chosen

for taking sufferings on us. We have to stay back and fulfil the

Covenant.

The second half of the 20th century witnessed mass con-

versions of untouchables in India to Buddhism (famously

initiated by Dr B.R. Ambedkar), Islam and Christianity.

The objective of these conversions was to liberate these

communities from the stigma associated with their status

in the caste system. Madiga untouchables the community

the Bene Ephraim stem from probably have the lowest

status in Andhra Pradesh. Madigas have traditionally been

associated with shoemaking and agricultural labour, and

continue in these activities today. Demographically, the

Madigas constitute 46.94% of the total scheduled caste

population of the state, which the 2001 census put at

twelve million.3

The Judaization of the Bene Ephraim has been

described as Jewish liberation theology, as its objec-

tive appears to be to challenge the position of this com-

munity in the Indian caste system (Francisco 1997). The

Christianization of their ancestors in the 19th century did

not allow them to escape untouchable status, which is not

surprising given that in the caste system elective associa-

tion with a group cannot form a solid basis for asserting

a new identity, and Christian universalism could not help

them to change their status.

Grounding their identity in the discourse of the Lost

Tribes would mean claiming physical kinship with a com-

munity completely foreign to the caste system, and might

thus provide Bene Ephraim with an opportunity to disso-

ciate themselves from it. In fact, some of their legends are

reminiscent of those of other Madiga groups suggesting

that their ancestors had had a higher status. Robert Deliege

argues that the narratives of origin of a range of untouch-

able groups in India often explain how their ancestors

lost their higher status by mistake or as a punishment

(Deliege 1993).

Fig. 2. Bene Ephraim

men at a Sabbath service

at the synagogue in

Kothareddypalem, Chebrole.

1. For a detailed discussion

of the history of the Lost

Tribes discourse see Parfitt

2002, Ben-Dor Benite 2009.

2. For more information

about the Jews of India see,

among others, Isenberg 1998,

Katz 2000, Roland 1999,

Katz et al. 2007, Weil 2002.

For Indian perceptions of the

Jewish culture see Egorova

2006.

3. For detailed information

on the Madiga see Charseley

2004, Singh 1969, Still 2009.

4. See editorial in Dalit

Voice, 1-15 October 2004,

vol. 23: 19.

5. The Bnei Menashe

(also known as Shinlung)

movement emerged in

the early 1950s from the

Christianized tribes of Chin,

Kuki, Lushai and Mizo settled

in Mizoram, Manipur, Assam

and the plains of Burma.

Once introduced to the

Bible at the end of the 19th

century, these communities

found parallels between

ancient Jewish customs and

their indigenous traditions.

This led some of them to the

conclusion that their tribes

were of Jewish origin. In

the 1970s, the leaders of the

movement began to seek

contact with Israeli authorities

with a view to obtaining

permission to settle in Israel,

and with Jewish organizations

in the diaspora (Samra 1992,

1996, Weil 1997, 2003,

Halkin 2002).

6. Tanakh is a name used

in Judaism for the Hebrew

Bible.

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16 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 6, DECEMBER 2010

The Judaization of the Bene Ephraim has been dis-

missed by some commentators as an attempt by a former

untouchable community to change its members position

in the local hierarchy, or to improve their material cir-

cumstances by moving to the state of Israel. Their claims

have been ridiculed by their upper-caste Hindu neighbours

and by critics from the Dalit movement.4 In the TV pro-

gramme, Eli suggests that the Bene Ephraim probably

consider Judaism a solution out of their current situa-

tion. However, does this association with untouchability

warrant immediate scepticism about the Jewishness of the

Bene Ephraim?

From Dalits to Bene Ephraim

The Yacobis stressed from the very beginning of our inter-

actions with them that their low-caste status had nothing to

do with the emergence of the Bene Ephraim. However, on

a number of occasions Shmuel Yacobi admitted to us that

his research and activism towards finding the Israelite con-

nection was partially driven by observing and pondering

over his fellow members sufferings and exploitation at the

hands of higher castes. When he was a child, he himself

was refused a glass of water by a woman who belonged to

a high caste. His mother told him stories of how she was

made to sit separately at school, often outside the class-

room, and to use the sand floor to write on instead of a slate

or board. The local tea and food stall in the village in those

days, if ever it served them, did so through the back door of

the shop so as not to discomfort its high-caste customers.

Eli is right that it is impossible to prove beyond doubt

that the Bene Ephraim history goes back to ancient Israel.

There is no evidence that would document their Jewish

practice earlier than the late 1980s. In this respect the story

of the Bene Ephraim reminds us that Judaism cannot be

unproblematically described as an ethnocentric religion.

Despite the fact that it does not see itself as a proselyt-

izing tradition, it certainly allows conversions. Moreover,

over the last century Judaism has attracted a significant

number of groups who, like the Bene Ephraim, are willing

to embrace Jewish beliefs and practices. Some such groups

emerged with the help of Christian missionaries who

turned to Judaism to explain new and exotic communi-

ties (Parfitt and Trevisan Semi 2002). Lost tribes also fig-

ured in colonial representations of various communities of

the subcontinent: for instance, it has been suggested that

the Ten Lost Tribes were found in Afghanistan, Kashmir

7. Aliyah (ascent in

Hebrew) is a term used to

designate the migration of

Jews to the state of Israel

under the Law of Return.

8. The term Sephardi, in

its strict sense, refers to the

descendants of Spanish Jews,

who were expelled from

Spain in 1492. However, in

popular parlance in Israel it

has come to include all non-

Ashkenazi Jews (Ben-Rafael

and Sharot 1991).

9. Since the emergence

of the state of Israel its

authorities have been very

keen on establishing and

maintaining good relations

with India and securing its

support in the Arab-Israeli

conflict (Kumaraswamy

1995).

10. Shavei Israel is

Hebrew for Israel returns.

For more information on the

activities of this organization

in respect of Bnei Menashe,

see http://www.shavei.

org/en/Community.

aspx?Name=Bnei+Menashe

Ben-Dor Benite, Z. 2009. The

Ten Lost Tribes: A world

history. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Bruder, E. 2008. The Black

Jews of Africa: History,

religion, identity. New

York: Oxford University

Press.

Charsley, S. 2004.

Interpreting

untouchability: The

performance of caste in

Andhra Pradesh, South

India. Asian Folklore

Studies 63: 267-290.

Deliege, R. 1993. The myths

of origin of the Indian

untouchables. Man 3:

533-549.

Egorova, Y. 2006. Jews and

India: Perceptions and

image. London and New

York: Routledge.

Figs 3 and 4. Bene Ephraim

houses and their owners.

Fig. 5. Bene Ephraim

women at a Sabbath

service in the synagogue in

Kothareddypalem. YU

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ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 6, DECEMBER 2010 17

and Tibet (Parfitt 2002). More specifically, Christian mis-

sionaries played an important role in the development of

the Bene Israel Indian Jewish community of the Konkan

coast, and possibly in the emergence of the Shinlung (now

better known as Bnei Menashe), a Judaizing movement

that emerged in the northeast of India in the early 1950s.5

A number of groups became attracted to Judaism of their

own accord. Sometimes this interest was aroused by the

perceived exclusivity of Jewish culture, which could offer

a new grounding for communities with uncertain origins.

Some groups turned to Judaism because the historical expe-

rience of suffering of the Jewish people seemed to mirror

their own conditions of discrimination (Parfitt and Trevisan

Semi 2002). In the 20th century a considerable number of

Judaizing movements emerged in different parts of Africa,

as well as among African American groups.

As Edith Bruder demonstrated in her recent study of

these new African Jewish communities, the reasons for

their emergence are complex and multi-faceted. For some

of these groups, particularly those that developed in the

USA, embracing Judaism represented a protest against

white supremacism and a search for new modes of self-

understanding (Bruder 2008). Similarly, the story of Bene

Ephraim suggests both desire for a different status and a

need to explore the past. The Jewish tradition is seen as a

suitable means of satisfying both ends, and thus appears to

be imbued with liberatory potential for socially marginal-

ized communities.

However, the case of Bene Ephraim also demonstrates

the strength of the perception that membership in the

Jewish community is based on Jewish genealogy. Though

the Yacobi family do not possess any material evidence of

their Jewish origin or of their earlier practices, they feel

under pressure to shroud their narrative in what Tamar

Katriel has described as the rhetoric of facticity (1999).

Sadok Yacobi and his wife told us that though their syna-

gogue was built in 1991, it replaced a much older syna-

gogue which had been based in a hut and kept secret. We

expressed considerable interest in its history. Several days

later, a big sign appeared on the front wall of the syna-

gogue dating its establishment to 1909.

Likewise, Shmuel Yacobis book also tries to provide

evidence for the antiquity of Bene Ephraim and makes a

claim that their ancestors had a significant impact on the

religions and cultures of the local Dravidians. A large part

of the book is devoted to the description of the alleged

similarities between the Hebrew and Telugu languages.

According to Yacobi, the ancient texts that laid the foun-

dation of the current Hindu tradition, such as the Vedas and

the Upanishads, contain the knowledge which was stolen

by ancient Aryans from the Dravidians and the Bene

Ephraim. The emergence of Buddhism on the subcontinent

is also attributed to the Lost Tribes (Yacobi 2002).

Visitors to the community are often taken by the Yacobi

family to Amravati, a small town on the banks of the river

Krishna in Guntur district, which was the site of a Buddhist

stupa built in the reign of the emperor Ashoka. The town

is shown off as a prominent place of interest in the Jewish

history of India. Furthermore, Telugu names of commu-

nity members are traced back to Hebrew names found in

the Tanakh.6 These are the names that Bene Ephraim go

by in those of their interactions with the outside world,

where they need to emphasize their Jewishness.

(Re)inventing traditions

In addition to stressing the factual evidence of their

Israelite origin, the leaders of the community are also

keen to safeguard the boundaries of their group, and are

even making them increasingly rigid. In his book Shmuel

Yacobi suggests that all Madiga, and possibly even all the

former untouchable groups of Andhra Pradesh, are Jewish.

Recently the brothers have begun to lean more towards

the position that this may not be the case. Sadok Yacobi

now maintains that only a very limited number of families

constitute the true Bene Ephraim, and that they became

associated with the Madiga by mistake in time immemo-

rial. Shmuel Yacobi, on the other hand, expressed a flex-

ible view as to who counts as Bene Ephraim: anyone who

can come up with an oral tradition that they might have

heard from their forefathers linking their practices to those

of Israelites may count as Bene Ephraim.

Community leaders are also keen on ensuring that the

religious practices of the Bene Ephraim are as close to

those of Orthodox Jews as possible an ideal which would

still take some time to achieve. At the very least, they insist

that all members of the group those to be included among

the real Bene Ephraim identify solely with Judaism and

the Jewish people, and abandon Christianity completely.

Again, this will require more time and work.

Although most Bene Ephraim we met seemed to be

devoted to Jewish practice and were keen on making an

aliyah7 to the state of Israel, some of them demonstrated

much more syncretism in their self-identification than

others. As part of our fieldwork, we initiated a household

survey of community members or to be more precise, of

the real Bene Ephraim as indicated to us by the Yacobis.

In the survey, among other things, we asked community

members about their religious affiliation. While most of

them were keen to stress that they were Jewish, some

were not quite sure about the answer. One Bene Ephraim

responded that he was Christian. He was immediately

(gently) corrected by one of the Yacobis, who stayed

around to ensure that we recorded the right information

about their congregation.

What led the Yacobis to change their definition of

community membership and demand stricter practice? It

Francisco, J. 1997. Lost tribe.

The India Magazine of

Her People and Culture

December: 46-51.

Freund, M. 2010.

Fundamentally Freund:

Menassehs children.

Jerusalem Post, 25 March

2010.

Halkin, H. 2002. Across the

Sabbath River: In search

of a lost tribe of Israel.

New York: Houghton

Mifflin.

Isenberg, S.B. 1988.

Indias Bene Israel: A

comprehensive inquiry

and source book. Bombay:

Popular Prakashan.

Katriel, T. 1999. Sites of

memory: Discourses

of the past in Israeli

pioneering settlement

museums. In Ben-Amos,

D. and Weissberg, L. (eds)

Cultural memory and the

construction of identity,

pp. 99-136. Detroit: Wayne

State University Press.

Katz, N. 2000. Who are the

Jews of India? Berkeley:

University of California

Press.

et al. 2007. Indo-Judaic

studies in the twenty-first

century: A view from

the margin. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Kumaraswamy, P.R. 1995.

India and Israel: Prelude

to normalization. Journal

of South Asian and Middle

Eastern Studies 19: 58-70.

Parfitt, T. 2002. The Lost

Tribes of Israel. London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

and Trevisan Semi,

E. 2002. Judaising

movements: Studies in

the margins of Judaism.

Richmond: Routledge

Curzon.

Roland, J. 1999. The Jewish

communities of India. New

Brunswick: Transactions

Publishers.

Samra, M. 1992. Judaism in

Manipur and Mizoram:

By-product of Christian

mission. The Australian

Journal of Jewish Studies

1: 7-23.

Fig. 6. Bene Yaacob synagogue

in Kothareddypalem, Chebrole.

Fig. 7. A Bene Ephraim house.

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1996. Buallawn Israel: The

emergence of a Judaising

movement in Mizoram,

northeast India. In Olson,

L. (ed.) Religious change,

conversion and culture,

pp. 106-132. Sydney:

Association for Studies in

Society and Culture.

Singh, T.R. 1969. The

Madiga: A study in social

structure and change.

Lucknow: Ethnographic

and Folk Culture Society.

Still, C. 2009. From militant

rejection to pragmatic

consensus: Caste among

Madigas in Andhra

Pradesh. Journal of South

Asian Development 4:

7-23.

Weil, S. 1997. Double

conversion among the

Children of Menasseh.

In Pfeffer, G. and Behera,

D.K. (eds) Contemporary

society: Tribal studies,

pp. 84-103. New Delhi:

Concept Publishing

Company.

2002. Indias Jewish

heritage: Ritual, art and

life cycle. Mumbai: Marg.

2003. Dual conversion

among the Shinlung in

North-East India. Studies

in Tribes and Tribals 1:

43-57.

Yacobi, S. 2002. The

cultural hermeneutics: An

introduction to the cultural

transactions of the Hebrew

Bible among the ancient

nations of the Thalmudic

Telugu empire of India.

Vijayawada: Hebrew Open

University Publications.

may be that this was a result of their interactions with the

outside world, and particularly with the Israeli authori-

ties. Back in the 1990s Shmuel Yacobi applied for visas

to go to Israel for his family and over a hundred other

Bene Ephaim. Their applications were refused, and media

reports appeared to the effect that millions of Indian

untouchables were planning to move to Israel. This nega-

tively affected the chances of Bene Ephraim moving to

the Jewish state.

It is not surprising, then, that they modified their pre-

vious, more inclusive, narrative of origin to consolidate

community boundaries, and insist on stricter and more

exclusive Jewish practice. To go back to Elis remarks,

it is this type of comment, questioning Bene Ephraims

genealogical affiliation to the Jewish people, that appears

to be providing the framework for the groups current self-

presentation and forcing them to adopt a more exclusive

definition of community membership.

This, however, is bound to be a two-way process. In

2005 the Sephardi8 Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Amar,

announced his decision to recognize the community of

Bnei Menashe, mentioned above, as a Lost Tribe, and to

assist in their formal conversion to Orthodox Judaism a

practice which would ease their immigration to the Jewish

state. Conversions were started but had to be halted later

the same year after the Indian authorities informed the

Israeli Foreign Ministry that they did not support this

initiative.9

Nevertheless, about 1700 Bnei Menashe are already in

Israel. Most of them had come to the Jewish state even

before 2005 on tourist visas and managed to stay. At the

moment, the interests of those who remained in India are

promoted by an organization called Shavei Israel, which

assists communities claiming Jewish or Lost Tribes status

in moving to the state of Israel.10 Recently the head of

Shavei Israel, Michael Freund, made an appeal to Israeli

prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging him to allow

the entire 7000-strong population of Bnei Menashe to

migrate to Israel and to undergo conversion there (Freund

2010). The emergence of the Bene Ephraim is likely to

continue the renegotiation of definitions of Jewishness at

least on the ground, if not among the officialdom of the

Jewish state. l

Fig. 8. Bene Ephraim

followers celebrating the

dedication of a new Torah

scroll in Kothareddypalem,

December 2009.

Fig. 9. Shmuel Yacobi

addressing a Seventh Day

Adventist congregation on the

Israelite past of his ancestors.

Fig. 10. A Bene Ephraim

wedding.

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