Prof. Shalva Weil
About
shalva.weil@mail.huji.ac.il
Prof. Shalva Weil is a senior researcher at the Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she researches ethnicities, migration and femicide.
She is editor of several books on India’s Jews, including India's Jewish Heritage (Marg, 2002 & 2009), Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First Century (with Nathan Katz et al) (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), Karmic Passages (with David Shulman) (OUP, 2008), Baghdadi Jews in India (Routledge, 2019), and The Jews of Goa (Primus, 2021).
She has published over 120 articles, chapters in books, and encyclopedia entries spefically on Jews and Judaism in India, and a similar number of academic articles on other subjects.
Shalva Weil is Founding Chairperson of the first India-Israel Friendship Association (with Maestro Zubin Mehta as President) when diplomatic relations were established between the two countries in 1992.
In 2017, as GIAN Distinguished Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, she taught the first-ever semester course on Jews in India in India. In 2021, she was invited to research the Sassoon dynasty as Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Financial History at Darwin College, at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2022, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain.
Professor Weil will present a distinguished public lecture.
Credit: Photo by Naama Stern, Nashim Magazine
Lecture Abstract:
Research on the Indian Ocean, including the vast literature on the Geniza, has tended to focus on commercial networks, the exchanges of materials, and the diffusion of belief systems and religions in ancient and medieval times.
While the involvement of Jews in Indian Ocean maritime trade has been established, the role of Indian Jews in ocean exchanges has been little explored, particularly in modern times. Utilising social network theory, the lecture will examine the connectivity of people and ties to understand patterns of communication and exchange based on trust. It will provide two examples of two different Indian Jewish enclaves trading in different colonial periods under different colonial powers.
The Jews and New Christians (conversos) of Goa were prominent during the Portuguese colonisation of India in the sixteenth century. Escaping the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon, they flocked to Goa during the 1530s-1550s. Dona Gracia, for example, ran a huge maritime empire created on the basis of trust. By the time the Inquisition in India had ended in 1812, the Jews had migrated elsewhere.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Baghdadi Jews in India cooperated with, and eventually rivalled, the British East India Company. After 1842, the Sassoons and other Baghdadi merchantmen operated a triangular maritime trade: opium and tea were shipped from India to China; Chinese merchandise was sold in Britain; and Lancashire cotton was purchased in Britain and sold globally. Up to Indian independence, they administered one of the largest multinational corporations globally.
It is argued that both the New Christians and the Jews of Goa, and the Baghdadi Indian Jews, succeeded in their enterprises by connecting nodes and ties, by relying on a network of people who shared common belief systems based on a primordial concept of trust.