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The literary and intellectual traditions of China, Japan, and Korea are not organized around any of the Abrahamic religious formations that have structured every previous case in the comparative analysis. Chinese literary culture is organized around Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist inheritances. Japanese literary culture is organized around Shinto, Buddhist, and specifically Japanese aesthetic traditions. Korean literary culture is organized around Confucian formation, Buddhist tradition, and a specifically Korean aesthetic sensibility. None of these traditions has any historical relationship to Jews, Judaism, and to the Hebrew Bible.
This means that the custodianship question in Northeast Asia takes a completely different form. The question is not whether a Jewish intellectual can inhabit a tradition that has historically excluded or persecuted his community. The question is whether a Jewish intellectual can engage with a tradition that has no prior relationship to his formation, in which the distancing mechanism is not a defensive response to a tradition that has been used against him but simply the natural condition of engaging with an alien culture.
Jewish communities in Northeast Asia were tiny, recent, and transient in ways that had no parallel in any of the previous national configurations. The major Jewish communities in the region were the result of recent immigration, primarily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and were concentrated in a few specific locations, Shanghai, Harbin, Kobe, and later Hong Kong and Tokyo, rather than being distributed across the broader national society in ways that would have allowed significant participation in the national literary and academic traditions.
The Shanghai Jewish community is the most historically important in Northeast Asia because it was the largest and the most culturally significant. Shanghai attracted two distinct waves of Jewish immigration. The Sephardic Jewish merchants who came from Baghdad and Bombay in the nineteenth century, families like the Sassoons and the Kadouries, established themselves as commercial and philanthropic figures in Shanghai’s cosmopolitan treaty port society. The refugees from Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe who arrived in the 1930s and early 1940s, unable to obtain visas for any other destination, created a refugee culture in the Hongkou district that maintained Jewish intellectual and cultural life under extreme conditions.
The relationship between these Jewish communities and Chinese literary and intellectual culture was minimal.
The figure of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s visit to China in 1938, documented in their Journey to a War, is relevant here not because either was Jewish but because it illustrates what the engagement of European literary intellectuals with Chinese culture looked like in the period when the Shanghai Jewish refugee community was establishing itself. Auden and Isherwood brought to China the perspective of European literary modernism and produced from the encounter a work that was simultaneously a document of political crisis, a travel narrative, and a meditation on the limits of European literary culture when confronted with an alien civilization. The Jewish refugee intellectuals who were living in Shanghai at the same time were engaged in a similar encounter with Chinese culture but from a position of greater vulnerability and considerably less institutional support.
The Harbin Jewish community is the other major Northeast Asian Jewish community. Harbin, in Manchuria, developed a substantial Jewish community in the early twentieth century as a consequence of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway by the Russian Empire, which brought Jewish workers and professionals into the region. At its peak in the 1920s the Harbin Jewish community numbered approximately twenty thousand and maintained a rich Jewish cultural life including newspapers, schools, theaters, and cultural organizations that were organized primarily around the Yiddish language culture that the community had brought from Russia.
The Harbin Jewish community’s relationship to Chinese literary and intellectual culture was minimal. The community was organized primarily around its own internal cultural life, maintaining Russian Jewish culture in a Chinese context rather than engaging significantly with the Chinese literary tradition. The community’s subsequent history was shaped by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, the subsequent Soviet influence in the region after 1945, and the gradual emigration of most community members to Israel, Australia, and the Americas through the late 1940s and 1950s.
Japan’s specific modernization project, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its systematic engagement with Western intellectual and cultural traditions, created a context for the reception of Jewish intellectual frameworks. Japan did not have a Jewish community of any significance, with the tiny exception of a small Sephardic merchant community in Yokohama and Kobe, but it engaged with Jewish intellectual traditions through the reception of European thought in ways that produced distinctive cross-traditional fertilization.
Marxism was received in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s with an intensity and a sophistication that produced serious scholarship. Japanese Marxist intellectuals engaged with the works of Marx, Engels, and the Frankfurt School with a rigor that reflected both the Japanese intellectual tradition’s capacity for systematic engagement with foreign intellectual frameworks and the specific political urgency of Marxist analysis for a society undergoing rapid and disruptive modernization.
The reception of Freud in Japan is equally important because Freudian psychoanalysis was received in Japan in ways that brought it into contact with the Japanese Buddhist tradition’s own sophisticated account of the unconscious, of desire, and of the relationship between individual psychology and social structure. The encounter between Freudian psychoanalysis and Japanese Buddhist psychology produced the work of Kosawa Heisaku, who developed a Japanese psychoanalytic framework that engaged with Freud’s Oedipus complex through the lens of the Japanese Buddhist concept of Ajase.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Walter Benjamin’s essays on culture and capitalism, and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man were received by Japanese intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s with an engagement that produced significant Japanese contributions to critical theory. The specifically Jewish formation that underlay the Frankfurt School’s critical project was received in Japan without any awareness of its Jewish origins, which illustrates an interesting variation on the custodianship question, the transmission of an intellectual tradition across a cultural boundary so complete that the formation that produced it becomes invisible in the reception.
This invisibility of the Jewish intellectual formation in the Japanese reception of the Frankfurt School is distinctive. In all the previous national cases the Jewish intellectual brought his formation into a cultural context that had some prior relationship, positive or negative, to Jewish identity and Jewish tradition. In the Japanese case the Jewish intellectual formation was received into a cultural context that had no prior relationship to it whatsoever, and the reception therefore produced a different kind of engagement, more purely intellectual and less personally charged, that allowed the analytical tools developed through the Jewish formation to be applied to Japanese society without the emotional and political complications that characterized the Jewish intellectual’s engagement with European traditions.
The Chinese reception of Jewish intellectual frameworks follows a broadly similar pattern to the Japanese case but with specific differences rooted in the specific character of Chinese intellectual culture and the specific political history of twentieth century China. The Chinese Communist Party’s engagement with Marxism brought specifically Jewish intellectual formation into Chinese intellectual culture through the mediation of the Marxist tradition, without any direct engagement with the Jewish origins of that formation. Mao Zedong’s reading of Marx and Lenin, filtered through the specific conditions of Chinese revolutionary politics, produced a form of Marxist engagement that was simultaneously deeply indebted to the Jewish intellectual formation that had produced it and completely unaware of that debt.
Israel Epstein was the most important case of a Jewish intellectual who engaged directly with Chinese literary and political culture over an extended period. Epstein was born in Warsaw to a Jewish family that emigrated to China in the 1920s, and he spent most of his adult life in China as a journalist, a political activist, and eventually a prominent figure in the People’s Republic. His trajectory, from Polish Jewish immigrant child in Tianjin to committed Chinese Communist and eventually a Chinese citizen who was given the name Ai Pei Si Tan, is the most complete available example of Jewish assimilation into Chinese culture.
Epstein’s commitment to Chinese Communism was genuine rather than merely strategic, rooted in the same universalist political framework that Novick identified in the American Jewish historians who developed consensus theory. He wrote extensively about China, about the Chinese revolution, and about Chinese culture in ways that brought his Jewish formation to the analysis of the Chinese situation without acknowledging the Jewish character of that formation. His long imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, when he was accused of being a Soviet spy partly on the basis of his Jewish origins, illustrates the familiar pattern of the Jewish intellectual who adopts the dominant culture’s universalist framework and discovers that the universalism has limits that his Jewish identity will eventually encounter.
The Korean case is the least examined of the Northeast Asian configurations and the most peripheral because the Korean Jewish community was essentially nonexistent and the Korean intellectual tradition’s engagement with Jewish intellectual frameworks was even more mediated and less direct than the Japanese and Chinese cases.
Korean intellectual culture’s engagement with Western thought came primarily through the Japanese colonial period, during which Western intellectual frameworks were transmitted to Korea through Japanese mediation, and through the post-liberation period after 1945, during which American cultural influence became dominant in the south. The Jewish intellectual formations that entered Korean intellectual culture, through the reception of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, arrived through these mediating traditions rather than through any direct engagement with Jewish intellectual life.
Korean Christianity is overwhelmingly Protestant and developed a specific relationship to the Hebrew Bible and to the Jewish intellectual tradition that is different from the European Protestant relationship. Korean Protestantism’s intense engagement with the Old Testament, its identification of the Korean national experience with the biblical narrative of exile, suffering, and redemption, and its specific form of biblical literalism, all create a relationship to specifically Jewish textual and narrative traditions that is more direct and more emotionally resonant than the equivalent relationship in most Western Protestant traditions.
The Korean church’s engagement with the Hebrew Bible produces a typological reading that parallels the Christian typological tradition examined in the English literary case, but with a specifically Korean character rooted in the Korean experience of colonial suffering and national division. Korean Christians who read the exodus narrative as a prefiguration of Korean liberation from Japanese colonialism, or who read the psalms of lament as expressions of the Korean experience of han, the specifically Korean concept of accumulated sorrow and resentment rooted in historical suffering, are performing the operation of typological reading that my analysis identified as one of the losses produced by the shift in literary academic custodianship, but in a cultural context where the formation that makes that reading possible is not eroding but is deepened by a vigorous religious community.
Contemporary Chinese, Japanese, and Korean academic institutions engage with Jewish intellectual traditions, including Hebrew Bible scholarship, Jewish philosophy, Holocaust studies, and post-colonial theory rooted partly in Jewish intellectual formation, in ways that bring these traditions into contact with specifically Northeast Asian intellectual cultures without any of the personal and communal stakes that characterized the European cases.
China has developed a significant academic interest in Jewish studies, Hebrew Bible scholarship, and Jewish intellectual history in recent decades, partly through the establishment of formal academic programs in Jewish studies at several major Chinese universities. The motivations behind this engagement are multiple and not entirely clear, including both genuine intellectual curiosity and more instrumental considerations about understanding a globally influential intellectual tradition, but the engagement is producing scholarship that brings Chinese intellectual formation to the analysis of Jewish texts and traditions in ways that generate new insights that neither tradition could have produced independently.
Japan’s extensive engagement with Holocaust scholarship, which began in the early postwar period and has produced a substantial body of Japanese Holocaust scholarship, reflects both the specific Japanese sensitivity to the question of how a highly cultured civilization could produce systematic genocide.
Unlike Northeast Asia, South Asia has a historical relationship to the Jewish intellectual tradition that predates the modern period. The Indian subcontinent had Jewish communities of considerable antiquity, the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the Cochin Jews of Kerala, and the Baghdadi Jews who settled primarily in Calcutta and Bombay in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and these communities participated in South Asian cultural life.
The cultural formations that Jewish intellectuals encountered in South Asia were organized around Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions that were simultaneously ancient, sophisticated, and entirely independent of the Abrahamic heritage that had shaped every previous case in the comparative analysis. The Indian intellectual tradition, encompassing the Vedic and Upanishadic philosophical heritage, the Sanskrit literary tradition, the Pali Buddhist canon, the Persian literary tradition that flourished in the Mughal court, and the multiple regional literary traditions in languages like Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, and Urdu, presented Jewish intellectuals with a form of cultural encounter that was in some ways more analogous to the Northeast Asian case than to the European cases, because the traditions were genuinely foreign to the Jewish inheritance in ways that the Christian and Islamic traditions were not.
South Asia differs fundamentally from Northeast Asia because the colonial encounter with European culture created a context for intellectual life that was organized around British educational and literary institutions in ways that brought the European model of literary and academic culture directly into the South Asian environment. The British colonial university system, established primarily through the efforts of figures like Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose Minute on Indian Education of 1835 explicitly argued for the replacement of traditional Sanskrit and Arabic learning with English language education, created a colonial literary and academic culture in South Asia that was simultaneously European in its institutional form and South Asian in its content and in the communities it served.
This colonial institutional context means that the custodianship question in South Asia operates at two distinct levels simultaneously. At one level it is the question of Jewish intellectual participation in specifically South Asian literary and intellectual traditions, the Sanskrit tradition, the Tamil tradition, the Bengali tradition, the Urdu tradition. At another level it is the question of Jewish intellectual participation in the British colonial literary and academic institutions that were established in South Asia and that created a new literary culture organized around the English language and the British educational tradition. These two levels of the custodianship question are related but distinct, and the honest analysis requires attending to both.
The Bene Israel community of Maharashtra is the oldest and most thoroughly indigenous Jewish community in South Asia, with origins that the community traces to the shipwreck of ancient Jewish traders on the Konkan coast, though the historical evidence for the community’s origins is fragmentary and contested. The Bene Israel had been part of Maharashtrian society for so long that by the time of significant contact with other Jewish communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they had lost knowledge of Hebrew and had adopted many features of the surrounding Hindu culture, including the caste system, which they replicated internally with divisions between black and white Bene Israel that paralleled the social structure of the surrounding society.
The Bene Israel community’s relationship to Maharashtrian literary and cultural life illustrates the custodianship question in a form that is simultaneously familiar in its structure and distinctive in its specific character. The Bene Israel had been formed by centuries of immersion in Maharashtrian culture to the point where their Jewish identity was maintained primarily through specific religious practices, dietary laws, the observance of the Sabbath, and certain festivals, while their cultural formation was in most respects indistinguishable from that of the surrounding Marathi-speaking community. This is the most complete available example of cultural formation through immersion rather than through institutional education, the absorption of a surrounding culture’s assumptions, values, and aesthetic sensibilities through the daily practice of living within it rather than through deliberate engagement with its literary and intellectual traditions.
The Bene Israel’s participation in Maharashtrian cultural life was therefore not the participation of Jewish intellectuals entering an established literary tradition from outside but the participation of community members who were already formed by the surrounding culture and whose specifically Jewish identity was maintained through religious practice rather than through intellectual engagement with a specifically Jewish literary and philosophical heritage. This makes the Bene Israel case the most extreme available example of the porous self in Taylor’s terms, a community so thoroughly formed by the surrounding culture that the boundary between self and environment had become genuinely permeable rather than merely professionally managed.
The Cochin Jewish community of Kerala presents a different version of the South Asian custodianship question because the Cochin Jews, who were divided into White Jews, Black Jews, and Meshuvarim freed slaves, had a longer documented history of engagement with the specific literary and cultural traditions of Kerala and a more complex relationship to the Kerala Hindu kingdoms that had granted them specific rights and privileges in return for commercial services. The Cochin Jewish community maintained closer contact with other Jewish communities, particularly through the spice trade that brought them into regular contact with Jewish merchants from the Middle East and later from Europe, and therefore maintained a more specifically Jewish intellectual formation than the Bene Israel, including knowledge of Hebrew and engagement with the broader tradition of Jewish religious scholarship.
The Paradesi synagogue in Cochin, built in 1568 and among the oldest surviving synagogues in the Commonwealth, is itself a document of the custodianship question in its South Asian form. The synagogue’s architecture combines European synagogue forms with specifically Kerala decorative elements, including the Chinese tiles that cover its floor and the Kerala style of its wooden ceiling, in a synthesis that is visually striking and architecturally distinctive precisely because it brings together formations from multiple traditions without subordinating any of them to the others. The synagogue is simultaneously a Jewish religious building maintaining the forms of Jewish liturgical practice and a Kerala building constructed in a specifically Kerala aesthetic tradition, and the combination is neither a distortion of the Jewish form nor a foreign imposition on the Kerala tradition but a genuine synthesis that neither tradition alone could have produced.
The Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta and Bombay is the most important dimension of the South Asian custodianship question because it was the community most engaged with the British colonial literary and academic institutions that created the institutional framework for modern Indian intellectual life. The Baghdadi Jews who settled in Calcutta and Bombay in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were primarily commercial families from Baghdad, Aleppo, and other Middle Eastern Jewish communities who came to British India in search of commercial opportunities and who established themselves in the colonial merchant class that occupied a specific position in the British colonial hierarchy between the British rulers and the Indian majority.
The Sassoon family is the most important example of the Baghdadi Jewish commercial establishment in South Asia and their cultural philanthropy illustrates the specific form of the custodianship question in its South Asian colonial context. The Sassoons established themselves first in Bombay and then in Shanghai as among the most important commercial families in the British colonial world, and their philanthropic activities, including the establishment of schools, hospitals, and cultural institutions in both cities, brought Jewish resources to the support of colonial institutions that served multiple communities. Their cultural philanthropy was not organized primarily around specifically Jewish cultural institutions but around the colonial institutions that served the broader society, illustrating the assimilation strategy in a specifically colonial form.
Nissim Ezekiel is the most important Jewish intellectual figure in the history of Indian English literature. He was born in Bombay to a Bene Israel family and educated in English, becoming one of the founding figures of modern Indian poetry in English and a central figure in the development of an authentically Indian voice within the English language literary tradition. His asked what it means to write poetry in the English language from a position of Indian formation, and his Jewish identity adds a further dimension to this question that he engaged with throughout his career.
His poems about his Jewish identity, his engagement with the Bene Israel community’s specific relationship to Indian and Jewish heritage simultaneously, and his position as a multiply marginal figure in Indian literary culture, too Jewish for the mainstream Indian literary establishment and too Indian for the specifically Jewish institutional world, all illustrate the double outsider position in its specifically South Asian form. His Jewish formation gave him the outsider’s angle of vision that allowed him to see Indian English poetry from outside the mainstream both of Indian vernacular literary culture and of British English literary culture, and this double outsideness produced a poetic voice that was influential in the development of Indian English literary culture.
His famous poems about Bombay, particularly The Patriot and the Nighty Night and Enterprise and Night of the Scorpion, bring to the specific texture of Bombay life the combination of love and irony, and of intimate knowledge and critical distance. He knows Bombay from inside, with the deep formation of someone who has lived within its specific rhythms and its specific social structures, and he sees it from outside, with the angle of vision that his multiple marginality provides, and the combination produces poetry that is both more honest and more loving than either pure insider or pure outsider perspective could have generated.
The Bombay literary scene that Ezekiel helped create in the 1950s and 1960s is itself an interesting case study in the cross-traditional intellectual fertilization that the specifically South Asian colonial context made possible. The group of poets and writers who gathered around Ezekiel, including Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, and Gieve Patel, brought together Indian Hindu, Indian Muslim, Indian Parsi, and Indian Jewish formations in a specifically English language literary project that was organized around the question of what an authentically Indian voice in English might sound like. The custodianship question in this context is the question of who has the right and the capacity to speak in English from an Indian position, and the specifically Jewish contribution to this conversation, through Ezekiel’s work and his influence, was the outsider’s gift of defamiliarization applied to the colonial linguistic inheritance rather than to the dominant ethnic or religious tradition.
The relationship between the South Asian Jewish communities and the broader Indian nationalist movement is a dimension of the custodianship question that has parallels to the South African case but with specific Indian characteristics. The Indian independence movement, organized primarily around the Congress Party and the specific political philosophy of Gandhi and Nehru, created a specific context for Jewish intellectual engagement with Indian politics that differed from the equivalent European and American contexts in important ways.
Gandhi’s relationship to Jewish intellectuals and to the question of Jewish suffering under Nazism is controversial. Gandhi’s advice to European Jews that they should practice nonviolent resistance to the Nazi persecution, offered in 1938 when the scale of what was happening was not yet apparent, was received by Jewish intellectuals with a mixture of incomprehension and outrage that illustrates the limits of cross-traditional understanding even between two traditions both of which had sophisticated accounts of suffering and resistance. Gandhi’s advice reflected the specific character of his political philosophy, rooted in Hindu concepts of ahimsa and satyagraha, and his inability to understand the specific nature of the Nazi threat reflected the limits of his formation when applied to a situation that had no equivalent in his Indian experience.
The Jewish intellectual response to Gandhi’s advice illustrates the custodianship question from the opposite direction, the moment when the Jewish intellectual formation’s specific account of political violence and the limits of moral suasion encountered a non-Jewish tradition’s account of the same questions and found it inadequate to the specific historical situation that the Jewish experience demanded. This encounter is one of the few available examples in the comparative analysis of the Jewish formation’s specific gifts being brought not to the analysis of a dominant tradition but to the critique of another minority tradition’s intellectual framework.
Miriam Kressenstein was a German Jewish refugee who came to India in the 1930s and engaged with the Indian independence movement from a formation rooted in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. She brought Jewish intellectual resources to the analysis of Indian colonial politics in ways that enriched both traditions without satisfying the requirements of either.
The Bengali literary tradition is the most important regional literary tradition for the custodianship question in South Asia because Bengal was the center of the Bengal Renaissance, the most important intellectual and literary movement in modern Indian history, and because Calcutta was home to the largest Baghdadi Jewish community in South Asia. The Bengal Renaissance, associated primarily with figures like Ram Mohan Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, was organized around the question of how Bengali intellectuals could engage with the European intellectual tradition without losing their specifically Bengali and specifically Hindu cultural formation.
Rabindranath Tagore is the most important single figure in the Bengali literary tradition for my analysis, not because he was Jewish but because his engagement with the custodianship question in its specifically Bengali colonial form produced some of the most philosophically serious writing on the relationship between inherited cultural formation and engagement with foreign intellectual traditions available anywhere in the comparative analysis. Tagore’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first awarded to a non-European writer, was in some ways a recognition of his success in transmitting the specifically Bengali and specifically Hindu literary and spiritual formation into a form that the European literary establishment could receive, and the question of what was gained and what was lost in that transmission is a form of the custodianship question that Tagore himself engaged with directly and honestly throughout his career.
His relationship to Jewish intellectuals and to the Jewish intellectual tradition is indirect but not entirely absent. His engagement with European modernism, his correspondence with European literary figures, and his visits to Europe and America brought him into contact with the Jewish intellectual culture of the early twentieth century in ways that left traces in his work. His engagement with the Hebrew Bible, which he read in English translation with great attention, produced specific reflections on the relationship between the Hebrew prophetic tradition and the Indian devotional tradition that are directly relevant to the custodianship question. Tagore found in the Hebrew prophetic tradition a form of moral urgency and a willingness to speak truth to power that resonated with dimensions of the Indian bhakti devotional tradition, and his reflections on this parallel illuminate both traditions from an angle that neither tradition’s own internal scholarship had been able to generate.
The figure of David Sassoon, the Baghdadi Jewish philanthropist who established the David Sassoon Library in Bombay, is relevant to the custodianship question in its institutional dimension because the library, founded in 1847 and still operating, was one of the most important cultural institutions in colonial Bombay and served the entire Bombay intellectual community rather than specifically the Jewish community. The Sassoon Library’s role in making European and Indian literary and intellectual resources available to the Bombay intellectual community illustrates the Jewish contribution to South Asian intellectual culture in its institutional rather than its specifically literary or critical form, the establishment of infrastructure for intellectual life that served multiple communities without privileging any single tradition.
The Indian reception of Freudian psychoanalysis is an important dimension of the South Asian custodianship question because it brings the specifically Jewish intellectual formation that produced psychoanalysis into contact with the Indian psychological and philosophical tradition in ways that produced some of the most interesting cross-traditional intellectual work of the twentieth century. The Indian psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose, who corresponded directly with Freud and who developed an Indian variant of psychoanalytic theory rooted in Vedantic philosophy, is the most important figure in this cross-traditional encounter.
Bose’s engagement with Freud, and Freud’s engagement with Bose’s critique of the Oedipus complex, is one of the most honest available examples of cross-traditional intellectual exchange in the comparative analysis because both parties acknowledged the genuine differences between their frameworks rather than simply assimilating one to the other. Bose argued that the Oedipus complex, organized around the specifically Western nuclear family structure and the specifically Western concept of individual identity, did not adequately account for the Indian family structure and the Indian philosophical tradition’s account of the relationship between individual and cosmic self. Freud’s response acknowledged the force of this critique while maintaining that the Oedipal structure was universal rather than culturally specific. The debate between them is a version of the custodianship question operating between two specific intellectual formations, one Jewish European and one Bengali Hindu, each of which had developed sophisticated accounts of the unconscious and each of which found the other’s account both illuminating and inadequate to its own specific cultural formation.
The partition of British India in 1947 and the subsequent creation of Pakistan adds a dimension to the South Asian custodianship question that has no precise parallel in any of the previous national cases. The partition created two new national literary and intellectual cultures organized around different religious formations, the Hindu-majority Indian state and the Muslim-majority Pakistani state, and the trauma of the partition itself became the central subject of a body of literary work that is among the most important in the post-colonial world. The partition literature, produced in multiple languages including Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and English, engages with the experience of communal violence, displacement, and the destruction of mixed communities in ways that are structurally similar to the Holocaust literature in the German, French, and Dutch cases.
The Jewish intellectual communities of South Asia experienced the partition primarily as an acceleration of the emigration that was already underway as Indian independence approached. The Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta, which had been organized around the commercial opportunities of British colonial India, found its economic and social position significantly altered by independence and partition, and most community members emigrated to Israel, England, or Australia in the years following 1947. The Bene Israel community of Maharashtra and the Cochin Jews of Kerala remained somewhat longer, with significant emigration to Israel occurring primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, but the overall trajectory of all the South Asian Jewish communities was toward emigration, leaving behind communities that are today tiny fractions of their former sizes.
The emigration of the South Asian Jewish communities to Israel illustrates the internal Jewish custodianship question in its South Asian form. The Bene Israel community’s integration into Israeli society brought their specifically South Asian Jewish formation into contact with the Ashkenazic dominated Israeli cultural establishment in ways that parallel the Ethiopian Jewish case your African analysis examined. The Bene Israel’s specifically Indian practices, their Marathi language, their specific liturgical traditions that had developed in relative isolation from the mainstream rabbinical tradition, and their specific relationship to Indian culture, were all challenged by an Israeli establishment that defined Jewish authenticity in primarily Ashkenazic terms and that found the specifically South Asian character of the Bene Israel formation exotic and in some respects problematic.
The figure of Shalva Weil is important here as a scholar who has worked to document and preserve the Bene Israel cultural formation and to argue for its recognition as a legitimate and distinctive Jewish tradition rather than a deviant form that needed to be corrected by exposure to mainstream rabbinical practice. Weil’s work is a form of the zachor applied to a specifically South Asian Jewish tradition, the obligation of memory engaged in the service of preserving a cultural formation that the dominant Israeli institutions were inclined to dismiss or absorb rather than preserve and celebrate.
The relationship between Indian literary culture and the post-colonial theoretical tradition that developed partly through Jewish intellectual formation is the most important contemporary dimension of the South Asian custodianship question. Post-colonial theory, associated primarily with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, developed partly through engagement with specifically Jewish intellectual frameworks, including Derrida’s deconstruction, the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, and Foucault’s genealogical method, and brought these frameworks to the analysis of colonial and post-colonial literary culture in ways that have transformed South Asian literary studies internationally.
Edward Said was Palestinian rather than Jewish, but his engagement with Jewish intellectual frameworks, particularly with Derrida and with the Frankfurt School, and his specific position as a Palestinian intellectual in American academic institutions, created a form of the insider-outsider positioning in a specifically Middle Eastern and American colonial form. His Orientalism, the founding text of post-colonial theory, is simultaneously indebted to the specifically Jewish intellectual tradition of reading official discourse against the grain of its own self-presentation and organized around a critique of Western representations of the Arab and Islamic world that is shaped by his specific Palestinian formation. The relationship between the Jewish intellectual formation that contributed to the theoretical framework of Orientalism and the Palestinian intellectual formation that provided its political urgency is one of the most complex and most contested dimensions of post-colonial theory’s intellectual history.
Homi Bhabha is the most important South Asian intellectual in the post-colonial theoretical tradition and his work is directly relevant to your custodianship analysis because it engages with the question of cultural hybridity, of the in-between position, of the third space that is created when two cultural formations encounter each other in the colonial context, in ways that are structurally continuous with the analysis your comparative study has been developing throughout. Bhabha was born into the Parsi community of Bombay, one of the small minority communities of South Asia that occupied a specific position in the colonial hierarchy analogous in some respects to the position of the Jewish community, and his theoretical framework reflects this specific formation while drawing on European philosophical and literary theoretical resources developed partly through Jewish intellectual formation.
His concept of mimicry, the way in which the colonial subject who adopts the colonizer’s culture produces something that is almost the same but not quite, is a form of the defamiliarization operating in the colonial context rather than the diaspora context. The colonial subject who speaks English with an Indian accent, who adopts British cultural forms while remaining irreducibly Indian, produces a form of cultural hybridity that is simultaneously a strategy of survival and a form of critical distance that reveals the arbitrary character of the colonial cultural hierarchy.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work adds a specifically feminist and specifically Bengali dimension to the South Asian post-colonial theoretical tradition. Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which introduced deconstruction to the English-speaking world, is an act of cultural transmission that illustrates the custodianship question in its translational form, the transmission of a specifically Jewish intellectual formation through the mediation of a specifically Bengali feminist intellectual who brought her own formation to the translation in ways that transformed the original in the process of making it available to a new audience. Her subsequent development of subaltern studies, and particularly her essay Can the Subaltern Speak, which asks whether the most marginalized and most silenced figures in post-colonial societies can make themselves heard through the institutional frameworks available to them, is a form of the zachor applied to the specifically colonial context, the obligation of memory and of speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves.
The Tamil literary tradition is the oldest continuous literary tradition in South Asia and represents a literary achievement of extraordinary sophistication and beauty that is independent of any influence from the Sanskrit tradition or from the Abrahamic traditions. The Jewish intellectual encounter with the Tamil tradition is minimal in the historical record.
The Urdu literary tradition is the most important Muslim dimension of the South Asian custodianship question because Urdu, which developed as the literary language of the Mughal court and which served as the primary vehicle for Muslim intellectual and literary culture in South Asia, is organized around a specifically Persian and Arabic literary inheritance that connects it to the Middle Eastern literary tradition. The relationship between the Jewish communities of South Asia and the Urdu literary tradition is primarily one of parallel rather than direct engagement, both traditions operating within the colonial institutional framework without significant direct intellectual exchange.
The figure of Mirza Ghalib, the greatest Urdu poet of the nineteenth century, is relevant here as a counter-case that illustrates what the insider’s custodianship of a tradition looks like in the South Asian context. Ghalib’s poetry, organized around the Persian ghazal form and saturated with the Persian and Arabic literary inheritance that the Urdu tradition drew on, represents a form of literary custodianship that was simultaneously deeply insider, rooted in a formation that Ghalib had absorbed through decades of immersion in the Persian literary tradition, and critically distanced, bringing a philosophical skepticism and a personal irony to the tradition’s conventions that was possible precisely because Ghalib was secure enough in his formation to interrogate it without fear of losing it. The contrast with the Jewish intellectual’s relationship to the Christian or Islamic literary traditions is instructive because Ghalib’s security in his formation produced a different kind of critical distance than the defensive distance that the Jewish intellectual’s outsider position required.
