But Maina Chawla Singh is right to note in Being Indian, Being Israeli (2009) that “much existing scholarship seems to linger in … a ‘nostalgic mode’-singing a ‘requiem’ to the story of Indian Jews, as a story which ostensibly ended when they emigrated from India,” and that this narrative can and should be called into question (39). There can be no doubt that the Cochin Jewish community has decreased in size, which presents a variety of challenges. Edna Fernandes’s The Last Jews of Kerala (2008), for instance, in keeping with the title, describes the subject community in the book’s opening pages as “dwindling” (x), “diminishing” (xi), its “demise … an inevitability” (xi). If, as I have already argued in Chapter 2, diasporic South Asian writers have sometimes tended to associate Jewishness with the past, and to transform Jewish characters into a haunting presence, their representations are also inextricably bound up with the narration and understanding of Indian Jews within other disciplines, such as journalism and history.
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