Our findings will be of interest to scholars of Jewish and South Asian Studies, anthropologists of religion, identity theorists, as well as to general readers.
In Jewish Studies, our conclusion about the way Jewishness can be seen as a form of social protest, may be used to scholars working int he field of critical identity theory.
Outside of academia, I findings will be of use to NGOs working with isolated Jewish communities. They will also be of use to university-level, school-level and community educators who teach about Jewish communities and Judaism.
Education
Other
Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Key Findings
What does it mean to be Jewish in the contemporary world? Our project has cast a new theoretical light on this question by exploring the Bene Ephraim community of Madiga Dalits from rural Andhra Pradesh, India, who at the end of the twentieth century declared their affiliation to the Lost Tribes of Israel. Our main argument is that by embracing the Jewish tradition the Bene Ephraim have both expanded conventional definitions of ‘Who is a Jew’ and found a new way to celebrate their Dalit heritage and to fight caste inequality. Publications stemming from the project (7 peer-reviewed paper and a monograph, published with OUP, New York) )have focused on the life of the community in the village, but also explored a wider range of ethnographic sites, including Israel and the USA, where we discussed how the time old Lost Tribes tradition is embraced today by groups and organizations which support the Bene Ephraim and similar communities that declared Jewish descent in the twentieth century. We have demonstrated how the example of the Bene Ephraim can throw light on a wide range of issues in national and international politics, such as the caste system and social mobility in India, the conflict in the Middle East, the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’, and debates surrounding the Law of Return in Israel.