Chapter 7 - Concluding Remarks

Summary

Traces of Historical Transformations

After 1489, the number of sources relating to Malabar Jews increased, not only in foreign accounts but also in internal sources—documentary and evidential alike—as out-lined for the transition and transformative periods in Chapter 1. Geopolitical processes internal to the region likely led to socioeconomic changes in the organization of coastal trading communities, resulting in the growth of the volume of source material. These changes are reflected in the Payyaṉṉūrpāṭṭu of Kōlattunāṭu, while at roughly the same period, the Perumpaṭappu dynasty of Kochi emerges out of obscurity, indicating par-allel shifts in the reorganization of state formations. The disappearance of Jews from Kōlattunāṭu must be related to these changes. Be it as it may, the Jewish community of Madayi vanished by the seventeenth century at the latest, in a process of internal migra-tions that may have started sometime around 1489, when a second synagogue commu-nity was established in Kochi. This synagogue, later known as Tekkumbhagam-Kochi, was most probably established by Jews emigrating from Madayi to Kochi in collabora-tion with a Castilian Jew, Jacob Castile. This speculation calls for further research into early-sixteenth-century records, but the likelihood of such a scenario is strengthened by the transregional links revealed through intertextual analysis of Old Jewish Malayalam literature.

If socioeconomic transformations resulted in the migration of Jews from Kōlattunāṭu to Kochi, they must have been related to a changing religious landscape. It is probably not a coincidence that the goddess worshipped by the royal family of Kochi to this day is named after Payyannur (paḻayaṉṉūr bhagavati), indicating imprints of ritual networks connected to Kōlattunāṭu. As discussed above in Chapter 4, it was in the early fifteenth century that a scion of the Perumpaṭappu royal dynasty settled in Kochi, prompting constant conflicts with his relatives in Edappally and their allies, the Zamorins of Cali-cut. However, the relation of the Perumpaṭappu dynasty, in particular in Kochi, to the Kōlattiri dynasty of Kōlattunāṭu requires further research into the royal chronicles of the ruling dynasties in Malabar, in particular the Kēraḷōlpatti, “Origins of Kerala,” and related texts such as the Kēraḷanāṭakam, “The Kerala Drama.” These titles do not repre-sent single-authored compositions but rather ethnohistories that circulated in Malay-alam from as early as the late fifteenth century and, subsequently, came to represent different sociopolitical perspectives.