Back from Shingly: revisiting the premodern history of Jews in Kerala

Jewish history in Kerala is based on sources mainly from the colonial period onward and mostly in European languages, failing to account for the premodern history of Jews in Kerala. These early modern sources are based on oral traditions of Paradeśi Jews in Cochin, who view the majority of Kerala Jews as inferior. Consequently, the premodern history of Kerala Jews remains untold, despite the existence of premodern sources that undermine unsupported notions about the premodern history of Kerala Jews—a Jewish ‘ur-settlement’ called Shingly in Kodungallur and a centuries-old isolation from world Jewry. This article reconstructs Jewish history in premodern Kerala solely based on premodern travelogues and literature on the one hand and on historical documents in Old Malayalam, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic on the other hand. Sources of the early modern period are then examined for tracing the origins of the Shingly myth, arguing that the incorporation of the Shingly legend into the historiography of Kerala Jews was affected by contacts with European Jews in the Age of Discoveries rather than being a reflection of historical events

Review of Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and its Significance for Ritual Theory by Axel Michaels

No abstract available

Ethnofiction and Interior Protest: Scholar-Activism in the Yemenite Children Affair

In this article, ethnofiction is discussed as a scholar-activist methodology that offers advantages for interior protest within community borders. The case study centers on the affair of the abducted Yemenite-Jewish children in Israel. Ethnographic studies and the researcher’s experience with members of the community serve as sources for a dramatic dialogue that reflects the definition of, and coping with, a problem as the topic of protest in the affair. The connection between the case study and its sources of information is stressed and the ethnodrama is instantiated as a transformative methodology. The findings on the acceptance of this ethnofiction in the community show that the transformative methodology allowed the researcher to send a clear and empathetic message of protest to social activists in the affair and did not endanger the researcher-activist as an agent of change. Ethnofiction accommodates the unconventionality of scholar-activism by reflecting the challenge of an interior protest among social activists in a community of victims of a collective trauma, expressed by an encounter with the supernatural. The discussion centers on the efficacy of ethnofiction as a dramatic strategy and the advantages of subverting the “aesthetics of objectivity” in matters of victims’ representation and agency

Who was the Fadiyār? Conflating textual evidence in Judeo-Arabic and Old Malayalam

No abstract available

Aśu the convert: a slave girl or a Nāyar land owner?

Aśu was a twelfth-century woman from the West Coast of South India. She is mentioned as a Tuḷuva “slave girl” (šifḥa) in a deed of manumission authored by Abraham Ben Yijū, a Jewish merchant who lived with her for nearly eighteen years and had children with her. It is thus accepted that Aśu was a manumitted slave. However, there is evidence to the contrary suggesting that Aśu was a member of a matrilineal household of the Nāyar caste of landlords, and that by allying with her, Ben Yijū was establishing a transregional network in collaboration with hinterland Indian merchants. In what follows, I examine the textual evidence from the Cairo Geniza related to the couple and reevaluate it against the anthropological history of Nāyars, especially in relation to their matrilineal inheritance customs and intercaste matrimonial alliances. Arguably, familial alliances such as those of Aśu and Ben Yijū matured into full-fledged communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the region. A better understanding of the relations between these two individuals, Aśu and Ben Yijū, can shed light on the history of the transregional maritime networks and, consequently, on the history of interreligious relations in the Malayalam-speaking region

Textual crossroads and transregional encounters: Jewish networks in Kerala 900s-1600s

A Hebrew letter sent from Cochin to Alexandria in ca. 1520 sought legal advice on intracommunal conflicts between a minority group of impoverished but “pure” Jews, who “out of jealousy and hatred” outcaste the majority of Cochin Jews on grounds of non-Jewish slave origins. Similar allegations are recorded much later in 1687 by a Dutch Jewish trader, Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva in his "Notisias dos Judeos de Cochim". This time the allegations are embedded in a legend of a lost Jewish kingdom in Cranganore (Kodungallur). The lost kingdom is mentioned in several Hebrew texts composed in Europe since the 1500s, contrasting it with Calicut. Recorded exclusively by European Jews and missionaries, the legend emerges as a narrative countering Arab-Muslim dominance over the Indian Ocean trade networks and acting upon the realignment of Jewish networks with the growing influence of Christian Europe in maritime South Asia. Centuries-old business partnerships with Arab Muslims and local Māppiḷa merchants are gradually suppressed in Cochin, giving way to new alliances with European— Jewish and Christian—traders. These new alliances are not merely reflected in narrations of an imagined Jewish history in Malabar, they are also shaped by the same narrations. The legends of a glorious Jewish past and unfortunate destruction are woven into interreligious textual networks across regions. By contextualizing these Hebrew texts in maritime Malabar, the paper presents a historical analysis of intra- and intercommunal conflicts and exchanges at the maritime crossroads of early modern Cochin

Who was the Fadiyār? Conflating textual evidence in Judeo-Arabic and Old Malayalam

No abstract available

Cohen\u27s d vs Alternative Standardized Mean Group Difference Measures

Standardized effect size measures typically employed in behavioral and social sciences research in the multi-group case (e.g., η2, f2) evaluate between-group variability in terms of either total or within-group variability, such as variance or standard deviation – that is, measures of dispersion about the mean. In contrast, the definition of Cohen’s d, the effect size measure typically computed in the two-group case, is incongruent due to a conceptual difference between the numerator – which measures between-group variability by the intuitive and straightforward raw difference between the two group means – and the denominator - which measures within-group variability in terms of the difference between all observations and the group mean (i.e., the pooled within-groups standard deviation, SW). Two congruent alternatives to d, in which the root square or absolute mean difference between all observation pairs is substituted for SW as the variability measure in the denominator of d, are suggested and their conceptual and statistical advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Accessed 14,413 times on https://pareonline.net from June 28, 2011 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right