Introduction: Inscriptional Evidence and Historical Linguistics

This chapter examines the earliest evidence of Jews settling in the region towards the end of the thirteenth century, a century-odd after the Genizah records gradually fell silent about India trade. This period also saw the emergence of vernacular Judaism which eventually matured into Jewish congregations in Malabar towards the late fif-teenth century. It is only in 1344 that a distinctively Jewish community clearly mani-fests itself in the landscape with the establishment of a synagogue in Kochi. That said, it is highly likely that Jewish sociocultural formations have preceded the construction of this Kochi synagogue, even if evidence of these early formations is mostly intangible and circumstantial. This probability is suggested by historical analysis of the Malabari Jewish religiolect that reveals linguistic fossils, as it were, preserved in the fast-fading Jewish Malayalam language variety. Two interrelated linguistic phenomena provide the data for this historical analysis; the first is the use of the Hebrew language and script in inscriptions and in liturgy, and the second is archaic retentions typical of Jewish Malayalam in its spoken and literary forms alike. Both Hebrew and Malayalam are not only important source languages but also carriers of linguistic data significant to the sociohistorical analysis of Jewish networks over the centuries.

The thirteenth century saw a growing body of regional Malayalam literature, as Brahminic hegemony is increasingly promulgated beyond its more traditional strong-holds—the temple and the palace—where Sanskrit features as the major literary medium, even as Malayalam is the dominant inscriptional language for over four centu-ries by that time. According to Kesavan Veluthat, these regional linguistic trends deviate from the Sanskrit cosmopolis model conceptualized by Sheldon Pollock to account for the dominance of Sanskrit in imperial centres across South and Southeast Asia through-out the first millennium C.E. Veluthat argues that “[t]he model of a ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ affiliating regional cultures to it before the ‘vernacular transformation’ of regions, is not empirically valid for the situation obtaining in Kerala.”

The interplay between vernacular religiosities and cosmopolitan affiliations of Indo-Arab communities, however, is quite complex and uneven, possibly due to the polycen-tric and diffused nature of their social formations, predating the emergence of the Ara-bic cosmopolis in the 1400s. By the late thirteenth century, Indo-Arab transoceanic alli-ances dominated the maritime trade connections across the Indian Ocean.