Lija Joseph
About
lijamarykjoseph@gmail.com
Lija Mary Kambakkaran Joseph is a Cosmos Malabaricus Fellow at the University of Leiden, where she is part of the broader project of decolonization of Dutch Archives.
Her research focuses on maritime social and cultural history, specifically transnational cultural exchanges and the history of Christianity in the Indian Ocean.
Currently, she is investigating Malabar society during the transition from Portuguese to Dutch rule, focusing on caste dynamics, intra-religious power struggles, and cultural expressions.
Her work provides a critical perspective on how colonial transitions influenced the social hierarchies and religious negotiations of coastal communities in South India.
Lecture Abstract:
This paper looks at the Malabar Jewry, one of the oldest Jewish diasporas outside the Middle East, to explore how the extensive maritime connectivity across the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, and Atlantic, the latter primarily through the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), served as a decisive factor in the consolidation of socio-economic divisions within the community into the racially powered, color-based terminologies of ""Black Jews"" and ""White Jews"" during the eighteenth century.
Following an archival intensive approach, this paper analyzes three categories of sources, the Jewish community-generated documents, administrative documents of the VOC in Malabar, and European ethnographic accounts to trace how elite Paradēśi (White) self-assertion was communicated and legitimized through global diasporic channels. The paper argues that the Black/White binary was fundamentally a product of local political and maritime economic power.
Drawing from multilingual sources and archives, this paper attempts to establish how the Paradēśi (White) Jews, with their superior trade connections to the Middle East (Basra, Yemen) and Europe (Amsterdam), leveraged this wealth and foreign pedigree to exert financial and political dominance under the VOC. This material advantage allowed them to actively assert and codify racial claims of foreign purity against the local, older Jewish populations. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the circulation of these claims through global Jewish and European print networks, facilitated by the same trade routes, lent crucial bureaucratic and intellectual legitimacy to this racial hierarchy. This research thus illustrates how maritime geography provided the infrastructure for a decisive shift in self-identity and social structure.