The Last Days of Kolkata’s Baghdadi Jews

People from Kolkata’s many religious communities gathered Nov. 10 at the Maghen David Synagogue for a memorial service honoring Flower Silliman, the oldest member of the city’s tiny Baghdadi Jewish community, who died in October.

Besides the memorial prayers by Flower’s granddaughter Sikha Silliman Bhattacharya and daughter Jael Silliman, the event featured some of Flower’s favorite hymns and songs. The tunes echoed off the walls of the synagogue’s grand edifice, creating a surreal atmosphere. The often empty synagogue was again full of life, filled with people whose lives Flower touched in one way or another.

Hebrew and English songs were performed by Catholic students, originally from Mizoram, attending college in Kolkata. A family friend, Aparna Guha, sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” while Muslim students of the city’s Jewish Girls School—Flower had been the school’s oldest living alumnus—sang “Shalom Aleichem.” This rendition of a traditional Jewish song by Muslim girls may seem unthinkable in other parts of the contemporary world marked by rising polarization between the two communities, but this form of interreligious harmony has been the hallmark of Kolkata since the city developed as a cosmopolitan commercial hub of the British Empire in the late 18th century. Even today, the remnants of the city’s past can be found in its microminority communities: Anglo-Indians, Armenians, Chinese, Parsis, and Jews.

Born in 1930 in Calcutta—as Kolkata was then known—Silliman witnessed the heyday, gradual decline, and the slow disintegration of her community. After she attended the Jewish Girls School, her secondary education at a missionary school in Nagpur and college in Delhi exposed her to the prevailing currents of Indian nationalism. She was particularly influenced by Gandhian ideals. But she remained an integral part of the Jewish community. She was also an educator, and an entrepreneur—opening the first kosher Indian nonvegetarian restaurant in Israel, The Maharajah, in the early 1970s, and authoring a cookbook on Calcutta’s unique Jewish cuisine, comprising such delicacies as aloo makallah, a fried potato dish. “We had the dishes from the past and we saw what our neighbors were making and what looked good, and we invented a new dish,” she told Tablet in 2018. “That is how recipes evolve.”

“Flower was the most curious person I have ever met,” Sikha remarked at the memorial service. “She delighted in new ideas.”

The three-century-old Baghdadi Jewish community of the city regards Shalom Cohen, a jeweler from Aleppo who arrived in Calcutta in 1798, as its founder. However, the community was established on a firm footing by Moses Dwek Cohen (Shalom’s son-in-law) and Joseph Ezra. Community members acted as middlemen in the triangular trade in opium and tea between China, India, and Britain. The fortunes earned from this trade were reinvested into industries (tobacco, indigo, jute) and real estate. Members gradually Anglicized themselves, giving up their Arabic culture, dress, and Judeo Arabic language in favor of British culture, clothes, and the English language. Three Jewish families from Calcutta dominated the city’s commercial space: the Ezras, the Gubboys, and the Eliases. Some of the most prominent buildings of Calcutta were owned by Jews, such as Esplanade Mansions, Ezra Mansions, Chowringhee Mansions, and Sri Aurobindo Bhaban. The city’s Baghdadi community maintained more or less cordial relations with the other two historical Jewish communities of India that had arrived before them: the Bene Israel of Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the Cochin Jews of Kerala.

The city’s Jewish community reached its zenith of 5,000 individuals in the mid-1940s. But their Anglicized culture, inability to fully comprehend Indian languages, the Indianization of the education system, and the socialist and protectionist policies of the Indian government proved detrimental to the prospects of the Baghdadi Jews. They primarily migrated to English-speaking countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia, with just a few going to Israel. By the 1960s, the community was reduced to about 1,000 people.

Those who chose to remain in India didn’t face difficulties on account of their Jewishness. Lt. Gen. J.F.R. Jacob, for instance, became a hero of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan. Baghdadi women were among the first women in India to achieve higher education and enter professional lives. Regina Guha, for example, was one of the first female lawyers in the country. The small Baghdadi community also contributed to the political culture of the city in the form of David H. Cohen (a member of the undivided Communist Party of India, perhaps the only Jew to serve a jail sentence), and Hannah Sen (a member of the Congress Party who later served with the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation in the aftermath of 1947 partition). Baghdadis also left their mark in the Indian film industry: Some of the earliest female actors of Bollywood were Baghdadi Jews who adopted Indian screen names—such as Pramila (Esther Victoria Abraham), who became the first winner of the Miss India beauty pageant, and was perhaps the first woman in Bollywood to start her own production company.

The community established three synagogues, two schools, a cemetery, and other social service institutions such as the Ezra Hospital (currently run by the National Medical College and Hospital). The grandest of the three synagogues, Maghen David was established by Elias David Joseph Ezra, and was named in his father David Joseph Ezra’s honor in the 1880s. Built in a European Renaissance architectural style, it looks like a red church from the outside (hence it is locally called lal girja, or red church) with a tall spire housing a clock tower. Located in the crowded Burrabazar neighborhood, the three synagogues are a stone’s throw from the Portuguese Church, Armenian Church, and the Nakhoda mosque.

Today, Kolkata’s Baghdadi Jewish community has fewer than 20 members.

The Nahoums bakery is the only Jewish-run business that continues its operations; it recently stopped selling nonvegetarian products due to the unavailability of kosher meat.

Nearly all the remaining Jewish institutions (synagogues, schools, and cemetery) of Kolkata are now maintained by Muslim caretakers. Moreover, most of the students in the city’s two Jewish schools are Muslim. Due to similarities in religious and dietary rituals, Jews in Kolkata primarily employ Muslims as house helps and cooks. The ongoing conflicts in the Middle East have not had much effect on the cordial relations between the local Jews and Muslims. Shaikh Wasim, one of the caretakers of Beth El synagogue, recently told the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year: “I pray for the violence and bloodshed to end, so that Jewish and Muslim communities can coexist in peace like they do in Kolkata.”

Sadly, the global surge in antisemitism in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks has also affected India, where the number of Jews is negligible (just 5,000 out of 1.2 billion, according to the 2011 census). In Kolkata, pro-Palestinian protesters have organized demonstrations, and put up posters calling for boycotts of Israeli products. These have remained primarily nonviolent. However, the local government authorities ordered the closure of the three synagogues to non-Jewish visitors to prevent any untoward incident since November 2023.

When non-Jewish visitors returned to the synagogue for the memorial service for Flower Silliman, authorities were careful to prevent any problematic incidents, as evident in the presence of a few policemen within the premises of the synagogue in addition to the synagogue’s regular security personnel.

Nearly all the Jews of Kolkata will testify that they have never faced any form of persecution in India, including the late Flower Silliman, who told an interviewer several years ago: “India can hold her head high and proudly say that we have never discriminated against the Jews.” In 2024, her daughter Jael Silliman similarly echoed her mother’s word: “As an Indian Jew, I am blessed and different from Jews in the rest of the world as we have never faced antisemitism.”

However, most of the remaining members of the community are elderly and suffering from various health and age-related ailments; the youngest member is a sexagenarian. Hence, regular prayer services are rarely held at the synagogues due to the absence of a minyan, which is only achieved when foreign tourists or dignitaries visit.

By the next century, Kolkata’s Jewish community will fade into oblivion with only their community institutions—synagogues, schools, and the cemetery—as a testimony of their glorious past and contributions to the city’s heritage. This will be one of the few instances of the extinction of Judaism in a place not due to outright persecution, but due to emigration.