Chapter 3 - The Genizah India Traders in Malabar

Summary

Introduction to Indo-Arab Jewish Maritime History

The Genizah records left by Jewish-Indian traders are dated between the 1100s and 1200s, constituting rich source material on Indian Ocean trade history and, in particular, on the formative period of Malabar Jewish history. The present chapter focuses on Indo-Arab kinship alliances as reflected in Genizah records and on the gradual evolution of Malabari Jewish identity as shaped by conversion, enslavement, manumission, and con-cubinage. Ostensibly, such adjustments led to the emergence of distinctively religious communities along the coastline with overseas affiliations, not only of Jews but also of other Indo-Arab communities, especially Māppiḷa Muslims. Moreover, it is quite likely that these processes were entangled with similar inter-and intrareligious dynamics among Indic communities albeit for different reasons and to varying degrees. Collating pieces of evidence gathered from Genizah records and Old Malayalam inscriptions sheds new light on these entangled processes engendering distinctive socioreligious formations on the Malabar Coast.

The India trade Genizah period starting in the eleventh, culminating in the twelfth, and declining by the late thirteenth century roughly parallels the later phases of the sec-ond Cēra kingdom, with the emergence of polycentric political organization and templecentred society typical of the Malayalam-speaking region until as late as the nineteenth century. While this period witnessed burgeoning socioreligious formations, Indo-Arab maritime networks remained by and large pluralistic and multiethnic, indifferent to reli-gious differentiation, even as religion was playing an important role in the social and political life of all trading communities. Himanshu Prabha Ray’s observation that “the role of religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam, in motivating and supporting seafaring activity needs to be recognized and accepted” is especially germane to this period. Rather than taking it for granted that religion always played a role in maritime networks, I propose asking when, how, and why religion becomes a networking tool in long-distance trade connections.

In his review of studies on religion and cross-cultural trade, Leor Halevi explores approaches of premodern Muslim jurists to trade with non-Muslims, advising against generalizations and presuppositions as follows:

In certain places at certain times, objects passed relatively freely from one polity to another—without encountering a powerful symbolic or institutional barrier. There is no good reason to describe such trades as happening across a cultural or religious barrier. Doing so distorts the past, making culture and religion seem more divisive and more significant than they really were.