On Becoming Impossible: A Colonial History of Arab Jews in British India

• In Event: Jews around the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas

Abstract

“You occupy an impossible subject position.” These words were spoken to me by a colleague in response to a disclosure I made about my identity: That I am Middle Eastern—an “Arab Jew.” This paper combines cultural history, postcolonial theory, and critical autobiography to ask how, when, and why Arab Jews like me became “impossible”—unthinkable, oxymoronic, or in the evocative words of seminal Mizrahi studies scholar Ella Shohat, “existentially nauseating” (Shohat 2017). Scholars like Shohat, Mahmood Mamdani (2020), and Avi Shlaim (2023) have explored the Zionist erasure of Arab Jewish identity in Israel, linking its discriminatory practices towards Mizrahi citizens to its broader nationalist and settler-colonial project. I expand on this line of inquiry by turning to a different history: the diaspora of Arab Jews in India between 1800 and 1960, known as the Baghdadi Jews of India. Like Shohat and Shlaim, my choice of historical and geographical coordinates is personal: I am the daughter and granddaughter of Baghdadi Jewish immigrants from India. How did the history of British colonial rule in India contribute to creating the conditions of impossibility that I experience today? How might we look beyond the Zionist context to that of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Empire to understand the colonial and nationalist formations that made Arab Jewish history, culture, and identity marginal and obscure? To answer these questions, I focus on a single archival document: a certificate of racial identity issued to my grandfather by the Jewish Association of Calcutta in 1953 that declares he is “of pure Sephardic Jewish origin and has no admixture of Indian blood.” Although this certificate was issued in the postcolonial context of the Republic of India, I argue that it reflects a much longer history of Indian Arab Jews positioning themselves as culturally and ethnically European in order to bargain for legal rights, economic opportunity, and social privileges under British rule. By closely analyzing and historically contextualizing this certificate, my paper tells the story of how the political and administrative infrastructure of the Raj compelled Arab Jews in India to disavow their Arab origins.

Author

• Amanda Shubert, University of Wisconsin-Madison