By Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi
During the last two months two international seminars took place in India focusing on Jewish and Israel Studies, with a gap of a month, in two very different cities, signaling the advent of Jewish and Israel Studies in India as an academic discipline and paving the way for India’s first centre for Israel Studies, scheduled to get functional in August this year.
It was interesting to see Afghan and Jewish studies take centre stage at a three-day- international-seminar on “Cultural Dynamics in Asian Connections” held at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies in Kolkata, India, from March 13 to 15, 2013. The seminar was convened by Priya Singh, a Fellow of the institute, and inaugurated by the Governor of West Bengal, M. K. Narayanan. It was interesting given the fact that Jewish Studies are not a recognized academic discipline in India, though Jews have been present in the country for at least twelve centuries and possibly two millennia. Yet, Jewish Studies found more room than any other field and that too at a seminar which gave almost equal attention to Afghanistan, a country which is left with just one member of the Jewish community that once lived there and which has now migrated to Israel, a nation it refuses to have any relations with in spite of an age old tradition of Israelite origin among its biggest ethnic group, the Pashtuns/Pakhtuns/Pathans. Also, it is pertinent to note that Afghans fought the Soviet invaders with Israeli manufactured arms, now so well known as a result of the Hollywood film Charlie Wilson’s War. The seminar saw the participation of four Afghans, three Jews (one Indian and two Israeli Jews), a secular humanist Pashtun/Pathan from India in the present author, besides a number of scholars from many other countries like, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Lebanon.
Jael Silliman, who has been a tenured Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Iowa and the Program Officer for Women’s Reproductive Rights and Women’s rights respectively, spoke about women’s narratives as they appear in her book A Diaspora of Hope: The Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta. The narratives raised the issues of identity, gender and what it means to live in diaspora and be part of a traveling community. She pointed out how, “in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora stretched from Baghdad to Shanghai and Westward to London. Responding to new economic impulses generated by colonialism, they elaborated and extended ancient and medieval mercantile routes. Their relationship to India was always complicated: neither Indian nor Western, brown or White, but sandwiched between the two, at once insiders and outsiders. They partnered European and Indian commercial interests. As a religious community they were always worried about assimilation and emphasized their foreign origin and their religion to distinguish themselves from the dominant Hindu and also the minority Muslim and Christian communities. Indian independence represented a moment of crisis for the community as they had to redefine themselves as individuals and as a community to a newly forming state.
Taking forward the discussion of identity, the present author drew attention to the ambivalence the Indian Jews have always faced when it comes to their dual identity of being Indian as well as Jewish, in the paper he presented, titled “Between Indianness and Jewishness: The Ambivalence of Indian Jews as Reflected in Literature, Cinema and Art”. In his paper he attempted to explore how the Indian Jewish writers and poets express in their prose and poetry the ambivalence they face and whether at all the pang of their marginalization gets reflected in literature, cinema and art. He pointed out that the ambivalence the Bene Israel, numerically the largest of the three Jewish communities in India (excluding the two Judaizing movements that have emerged there during the latter half of the twentieth century), faced, in spite of their undoubted loyalty to the British, as to how much they should identity with Indians culturally and politically while at the same time trying to maintain their Jewish identity was evident in their publications. They faced the same ambivalence as new migrants in Israel, where the correctness of their observance of Judaism was often questioned. This ambivalence emanated from their marginality in Indian as well as Jewish society given their peripheral positioning due to their function of possessing the elements and orientation of two very different cultures, viz., Jewish and Indian, while simultaneously being denied membership from both these cultures. It is important to note that here marginality means partially belonging to both cultures rather than belonging totally to one.
Achia Anzi, Israeli sculptor and scholar, who gives Hebrew lessons at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, mourns and longs for the lost ideals and vision of Zionism through an introduction to his artistic work, which has emerged for him as a means to deal with the spiritual crisis, besides the political and social, that Israel is experiencing today according to him. His presentation was titled “Peaceful be your return O lovely bird, from warm lands back to my window…”, which was also the title of his first solo exhibition held at Gallery Threshold in Nw Delhi in March last year.
The other seminar to focus on Jewish and Israel Studies took place on April 12, a month after the seminar at the Maulana Abul Kalam Institute of Asian Studies in Kolkata. This seminar, titled “Israel: Perspectives on a State in Transition” was jointly organized by O. P. Jindal Global University and the Middle East Institute at the university’s campus in Sonipat, Haryana. The seminar, convened by Dr. Rohee Das Gupta of the Jindal School of International Affairs, an imminent scholar of Ashkenazim, saw the participation of scholars from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Washington University, Brandeis University and the Gautam Buddha University. It had two panels; one on Israeli Identity, History and Democracy and the other on Israeli Military Strategy and Conflict and keynote lectures by Professor P. R. Kumaraswamy of Jawaharlal Nehru University, author of India’s Israel Policy (Columbia University Press) and Dr. Maina Chawla Singh of Washington University, author of Being Indian, Being Israeli: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Homeland.
Sonia Roy of the Centre for West Asian Studies at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University threw light on the domestic political debates in Israel revolving around the Jewish and democratic identities. She elaborated upon how Jewish and democratic identities of the state remain an area of great and intense internal debates within Israel. She said, “This religious preference also limits the democratic credentials of the state when it comes to matters like personal laws. There is a need to understand and identify the role of religion and democracy in the debates that take place in Israel.”
As part of the same panel on Israeli Identity, History and Democracy, Khinvraj Jangid, who has been a recipient of Japan Foundation’s Ryachi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship’s Fund, spoke on the causes, consequences and relevance of the New History for Israel. The historical revisionism of the 1948 war within Israeli academia and the public discourse ensued in the early 1990s. The works of Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe and Tom Segev have formed the body of literature commonly known as the New History. It was pointed out by Jangid that one of the key questions to study is ‘has the New History succeeding in shaping a new understanding of the 1948 war in Israel? If not how is it relevant?’
Anjani Kumar Singh of Jawaharlal Nehru University stressed upon the need to consider the evolution of Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms to understand the question of Jerusalem in its contemporary form.
The present author, representing the Gautam Buddha University, spoke on how Israel figures in Indian Jewish literature, fiction as well as non-fiction, in English, Hindi and Marathi, as the land of their ancient past as well as their future.
In the second panel, which was dedicated to Israeli Military Strategy and Conflict, Alvite Singh Ningthoujam, who has been a Fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel, in 2010-2011, tried to explore the factors behind American concerns over Israel’s arms exports in his paper titled, “Israel’s Arms Exports and the US Factor: Case Studies of China and South Africa, 1967-2000”.
Jatung Raja Philemon Chiru of the Centre for West Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, gave a presentation on the pre-eminence of the military in Israel-Turkey relations, while Dipanwita Chakrovortty of the same institution spoke on the gender and religious issues related to the Israeli Defence Forces.
This panel was chaired by Dr. Robert P. Barnidge of Brandeis University, while the previous panel was chaired by Dr. Rohee Dasgupta.
In his keynote address Professor Kumaraswamy spoke on the Multiple Persona of Israel, while Dr. Singh in hers spoke on the Indian Jews in Israel. The seminar was inaugurated with the welcome address and scholarly and intellectually rewarding introductory remarks by Professor Sreeram Chaulia, Dean, Jindal School of International Affairs.
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Aafreedi is a scholar and freelance writer. This article initially appeared in Weekly Press/ Pakistan, published in Toronto.