Abraham Barak Salem (1882–1967) was an Indian nationalist and Zionist, one of the most prominent Cochin Jews of the twentieth century.

Early life

Salem was born in 1882 to a Jewish family in Cochin (now Kochi), then a small princely state in British India and now part of the Indian state of Kerala. His family were meshuchrarim, a Hebrew word used, sometimes neutrally and sometimes with derogatory intent, to denote a manumitted slave. The few score meshuchrarim belonging to the White Jewish community, also known as the Paradesi, were discriminated against by other White Jews, being relegated to a subordinate position in the Paradesi Synagogue in Cochin. The White Jews also considered themselves racially distinct from the more numerous dark (or Malabari) Jews who had preceded them on the Malabar coast.

Brought up by his mother, Salem attended the Maharaja's College in Ernakulam and then moved to Chennai to earn his Bachelor of Arts degree, becoming the first college graduate among the meshuchrarim. Whilst in Chennai he also earned his law degree, the first Jew from Cochin to do so, before returning to practise as a lawyer in the Cochin Chief Court in Ernakulam.

Activism

The dark Jews had seven places of worship; the White Jews had only one, the Paradesi Synagogue, which for centuries had been barred to those whom they considered impure. Fernandes calls it "a bastion of white purity". The stratification in the Jewish community prevented the meshuchrarim from marrying other White Jews and forced them to sit in the back of the synagogue in a manner resembling the discrimination against converts from lower castes sometimes found in Christian churches in India. Salem fought against this by boycotting the synagogue for a time and utilised satyagraha as a means of combating discrimination within the community. This led some people to later refer to him as the "Jewish Gandhi". By the mid-1930s, Mandelbaum reported that many of the old taboos had fallen..

Salem served in the Legislative Council in the princely state of Cochin from 1925 to 1931 and again from 1939 to 1945. A supporter of the nascent trade union movement in Kerala and active Indian nationalist, at the end of 1929 he attended the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress which passed a resolution calling for complete independence from the Raj. However, especially after visiting Palestine in 1933, Salem came to focus more on the Zionist cause. After Indian independence, he worked to promote aliyah to Israel among the Cochin Jews, visiting Israel in 1953 to negotiate on behalf of Indian Jews who wanted to migrate. This also helped to diminish the divisions among the Cochin Jews

Although most of Cochin's ancient Jewish community eventually left for Israel (and, in the case of many White Jews, for North America and England), Salem remained in Cochin until his death in 1967. He was buried in the White Jewish cemetery in Jew Town in Cochin, and subsequently the road adjacent was named after him.

Footnotes

• James Chiriyankandath (2008). Nationalism, religion and community: A. B. Salem, the politics of identity and the disappearance of Cochin Jewry. Journal of Global History, 3 , pp 21–42, doi:10.1017/S1740022808002428
• Edna Fernandes. The Last Jews of Kerala. Portobello Books, 2008.