Prof. Arye Edrei
About
edreia@tauex.tau.ac.il
Arye Edrei is a Full Professor at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law, specializing in the history and philosophy of Halakha.
His research investigates the evolution of Jewish law from the early modern period to the present, focusing on the intersection of jurisprudence and cultural history.
A significant portion of his current work examines the definition of Jewish identity and the status of "lost" Jewish communities.
Specifically, he explores the legal and social debates surrounding the Bene Israel of India, analyzing the theoretical dimensions of renewing connections with historically isolated Jewish groups.
Lecture Abstract:
Three distinct encounters between the Bene-Israel community in India—long isolated from Jewish communication networks—and the broader Jewish world took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first was with the Jews of Cochin, their closest neighbors. The second was with Jews from the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean regions—primarily Iraq and Yemen—who had migrated to India. The third was with European Jewish travelers arriving either directly from Europe or after settling in the Land of Israel. The encounter with the Cochin Jews initiated a process of reconnection with the Jewish world. In contrast, the encounter with Jews from Iraq and Yemen generated differentiation and distancing, as they hesitated to recognize the Bene-Israel as Jews. European travelers, however, embraced them and sought to reconnect them with the wider Jewish world. My lecture asks what motivated European travelers to journey to the East and to India in particular; what considerations guided them; and what led them to recognize the Jewishness of the Bene-Israel. Did they perceive something Iraqi Jews did not? Conversely, I examine the arguments that motivated Iraqi Jews to reject the Bene-Israel. I situate the discussion within theoretical literature on Diaspora, as a framework for understanding the position of Iraqi Jews regarding the possibility of restoring a lost diasporic connection—beyond the common colonialist explanation of distancing from “natives.” I then examine the views of the travelers, the rabbis of Safed influenced by them, and the European Jewish press that intervened in favor of the Bene-Israel, against the backdrop of the diverse processes of identity formation within early nineteenth-century European Jewry.