Shalva Weil
Synagogues, Politics and Opium: The Sojourn of the Baghdadi Jews in India
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Summary
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A revealing overview of the Baghdadi Jews, who actually came from several places, including Basra and Syria. They settled in Bombay, Poona, and Calcutta in the 19th century and many worked in the Sassoon mills and docks. By Indian Independence in 1947, most of the Baghdadis began to leave India and settled in English-speaking countries and to a lesser extent in Israel.
Shalva Weil
Prof. Shalva Weil is Senior Researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she researches ethnicities, migration and femicide. She is editor of several books on India’s Jews, including India’s Jewish Heritage (Marg, 2002 & 2009), Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First Century (with Nathan Katz et al) (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), Karmic Passages (with David Shulman) (OUP, 2008), Baghdadi Jews in India (Routledge, 2019), and The Jews of Goa (Primus, 2020). She has published over 250 articles (120 on Indian Jews), chapters in books, and encyclopedia entries on different aspects of Jews and Judaism in India. Shalva Weil is Founding Chairperson of the first India-Israel Friendship Association (with Maestro Zubin Mehta as President) when diplomatic relations were established between the two countries in 1992. In 2017, as GIAN Distinguished Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, she taught the first-ever semester course on Jews in India in India. In 2021, she was invited to research the Sassoons as Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Financial History at Darwin College, at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2022, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain.