School of Critical Studies

Wednesday 30 March 2022, 2-3pm (UK time)

Dr Ophira Gamliel, Theology and Religious Studies, University of Glasgow
Respondent: Dr Julia McClure, History, University of Glasgow

The presentation takes Malabar (Southwestern India) as a case study for investigating the history of disconnections brought about by colonialism from the early modern period onwards. Malabar was a central hub for the Indian Ocean trade networks dominated by Arabs between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries. Arabic-speaking Jews were an integral part of the Muslim networks. The arrival of the Portuguese in Malabar in 1498 signifies a watershed moment in the connected history of Malabar and the Arab-Muslim world, affecting also the small Jewish communities in and around the medieval port town of Cochin, and effectively erasing their centuries-old history of connections with the Jews of the Arab world and beyond.

The disconnected history of Malabar Jews is embedded in a larger history of disconnections, as Malabar and its Muslim communities became increasingly withdrawn from the Indian Ocean maritime trade networks once dominated by Arabs. Arguably, these historical disconnections affected by colonialism and orientalism result in disciplinary compartmentalization of the sociocultural histories of the trade Diasporas of Jews and Muslims in Malabar, not only in relation to their connected histories in the precolonial period, but also in relation to the disconnections and their impact on Jewish-Muslim relations in the Indian Ocean world. The presentation will focus on the historical significance of these disconnections to the history of religious networks in the Indian Ocean world.

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First published: 16 March 2022