Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 6:42 AM
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Subject: JSN: REVIEW: Roland on Bhatti and Voigt (eds.), _Jewish Exile
in India: , 1933-1945_

THE  *  JEWISH  *  STUDIES  *  BOOK  *  REVIEW
Book Reviews and Cross-Posted Book Reviews
Published by H-Judaic: The Jewish Studies Network
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Book Review XVI [n.s.]  * October 1999  *  Readership = 6200+
for additional information: http://h-net.msu.edu/~judaic
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Bhatti, Anil and Voigt, Johannes H.  (eds.) _Jewish Exile in India:
1933-1945_.  New Delhi: Manohar/Max Mueller Bhavan, 1999. 195 pp + b/w
photographs. Cloth, Rs.300. ISBN 81-7304-237-3.

Reviewed for H-Judaic by Joan G. Roland, Department of History, Pace
University, New York, NY. E-mail: jroland @pace.edu


Although the story of Central European Jewish refugees in Europe, the
Americas and even in China in the l930s and l940s has been
well-documented, relatively little has been written about those who found
their way to India during this period. Their experience has been covered
in only a few studies of Jews in India and there has been no book-length
treatment of this subject. Nor has there been an enormous amount of
interest in Jewish history or the Holocaust on the part of Indian
scholars. This interdisciplinary collaboration between Indian and German
scholars (augmented by the contributions of a Czech journalist/
musicologist and an Israeli anthropologist) is therefore especially
welcome, although there are still many gaps to fill.

As far as numbers are concerned, it is difficult to know how many Jewish
refugees from Central Europe found sanctuary in India in this period, as
not all were registered with the various agencies who were counting and
some stayed for a very short time. Figures range from one thousand and
more; one of the contributors, Shalva Weil, estimates that there may have
been over two thousand who touched Indian soil.

The twelve essays in the book are wide-ranging and vary in length and
interest; they include papers presented at a symposium held in New Delhi
in l995 and additional contributions. In the introduction, "Persecution of
the Jewish People: Prelude to the Holocaust,"  Johannes Voigt gives some
background on Hitler and his policies and a summary of western (including
British India's) response to the need of the refugees for sanctuary. From
this point, the book is divided into three sections: British-Indian and
Indian policies and Jewish and Indian responses; the work and achievements
of individual Jewish emigrees; and analyses and descriptions of literary
works and reminiscences on the situation of Jewish refugees in India. Some
comments on this organization and efforts to tie up the diverse papers,
either in the introduction to the book, in brief introductions to each
section, or in a epilogue would have been helpful.

In the first of four essays in Part I, "British Policy Towards German-
Speaking Emigrants in India, 1939-1945," Joachim Oesterheld offers a
careful reconstruction of policies based on materials from the National
and various State Archives of India, the India Office Library and Records
Office in London. He begins abruptly with the visa issue in 1938, without
giving any background, and does not develop this as much as he might have
in terms of the increasing pressure of the Jewish refugees' applications
for visas.  Since the book is primarily about Jews, he needed to say more
about British policy toward their immigration and naturalization. Although
he mentions the fears of economic competition, the issue of the refugee
doctors, with pressure being exerted by the Central Legislative Assembly
on the Home Department to restrict their immigration, could have been
better developed. Focusing on the internment question, Osterheld notes
that the tough policy of wholesale internment of all enemy aliens adopted
by the Government of India became embarrassing for the Foreign Office,
which was being pressured to modify this policy by the United States and
the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Here Oesterheld
might have emphasized the role of the Jewish Relief Association in the
release of interned German Jewish refugees. The issue of naturalization
also needed to have been discussed in light of the efforts of Jews who had
been in India for five years to become British subjects and the
government's refusal to grant naturalization during the war years despite
the contributions that many of the refugees, especially the physicians,
had made to the war effort.

The second essay, Majid Hayat Siddiqi's brief "Jews and Central European
Nationals in Exile in Colonial India between the Two World Wars," is a
post-colonialist analysis of British policy. He argues that British
xenophobia, emerging from the imperial-colonial syndrome "in which its
first fractures were introduced by contemporary nationalisms in the First
World War," was rampant during the Fascist period and determined colonial
attitudes toward even Jews and other refugees. The Colonial Indian
Government's handling of the problem of European exiles between 1934 and
1945 was an exercise in the management of pressures conditioned by the
mentality of exclusiveness and was prompted by utilitarian rather than
humanitarian concerns. Siddiqi gives a few examples, not particularly
focusing on the Jews.

A different analysis of the Indian Government's restrictive policy toward
the admission of Jewish refugees is offered in "Indian Responses to the
Holocaust," by Tilak Raj Sareen. He believes that the policy was
determined by its leanings toward the Muslims of India; that is, the
opposition to the Jews came from the Muslim leaders in India who were
pro-Arab and the policy of the Indian National Congress of appeasing the
Muslims. This is a complex issue and, as Sareen himself suggests, needs
further study. Actually, Muslim opinion, even on Palestine, was quite
diverse and there were some Muslim officials who were sympathetic to
admitting Jewish refugees to India just as there were Hindu (and even
Sikh) leaders who opposed it in the press and in the Central Legislative
Assembly. Given the choice, most Muslim leaders probably would have
preferred to see Jewish refugees come to India than go to Palestine. The
author emphasizes Nehru's sympathy for the Jewish refugees and his
willingness to accept a few "Jewish experts and specialists" despite his
feeling that land hunger and unemployment in India mitigated against the
acceptance of a large number of refugees and their settlement on land. (He
does not mention, however, that the Government was wary of Nehru's
schemes, fearful that he might bring in "Jewish communists.")The author
also touches on the attitudes of Mahatma Gandhi to the problems of the
Jews of Germany, as do other contributors to this book, but fuller
treatments exist elsewhere. He points out that the daily reports about the
persecution of Jews in Germany resulted in the widespread boycott of
German goods and German firms, much to the embarrassment of German
diplomats who were posted in India, but at the same time acknowledges that
there were also some voices in favor of German's propagation of the theory
of "Aryan race."

In the last essay in Part I, "From Persecution to Freedom: Central
European Jewish Refugees and their Jewish Host Communities in India,"
Shalva Weil paints a broader picture than do some of the other
contributors. She points out the contrast between the Jewish host
communities in India, who never suffered from anti-Semitism and those
emigrants who came to live among them in the 1930s and 1940s, who were
escaping racist persecution. Weil also distinguishes between those Jewish
emigrants who came by choice, attracted by Hinduism or Indian culture or
politics and those who came to escape the rise of Fascism. She summarizes
the complex relationships between the host Jewish communities and the new
groups of European and oriental (Persian, Bukharan and Afghan) Jews.
Unfortunately, many of the German Jews considered themselves superior to
most of the local Baghdadi and Bene Israel Jews with whom they came in
contact in Bombay and Calcutta, and indeed interaction was limited.
Nevertheless, it needs to be mentioned that wealthy Baghdadi Jews such as
Sir Victor Sassoon, Sir Alwyn Ezra and Sir David Ezra contributed
substantially for the relief of these refugees in India -- and for those
in Shanghai as well. It is probably true, as Weil claims, that most
Indians were ignorant of the arrival of hundreds of Jews to India before
and during the Second World War. She makes some reference to jealousy and
anti-Semitism, but here too more needs to be said about the complaints
about these refugees and anti-Semitic attitudes expressed in the Central
Legislative Assembly and certain segments of the Indian Press from 1939
onward. Even Voigt, in his introduction, suggests that the protests of
various sections of Indian society against the immigration of European
Jews may have contributed to the Indian Government's decision to close it
gates as early as 1938.

Part II consists of portraits of four individuals, Walter Kaufmann, Willy
Haas, Alex Aronson, and Dr. Margarete Spiegel, who lived in India during
these years. Photos accompany some of the accounts.

Anita Schindler's essay on Walter Kaufmann focuses on the Indian period of
this German-speaking musician/musicologist who had studied and worked in
Prague and Berlin. Attracted by Indian music, Kaufmann went to India in
1934 and stayed for twelve years. Schindler has made the most of the
limited material that exists for this period. Kaufmann gave concerts and
founded the Bombay Chamber Orchestra, which consisted mainly of immigrants
-- the father of Zubin Mehta was a member -- and served as director of
European music for All-India Radio in Bombay and composed concerti,
chamber music, and scores for commercial films incorporating Indian and
Nepalese motifs for both European and Indian instruments. Much later in
his life, Kaufmann wrote extensively on Indian music, including two
standard reference books on the ragas of North and South India. Schindler
quotes a colleague and friend of Kaufmann's as saying that he was highly
influenced by Buddhism; it would be interesting to know more about this
aspect.

Another well-known Jewish refugee from the multicultural Austro-Hungarian
empire who ended up in India was Willy Haas, a leading literary editor in
Weimar Germany and an avant-garde film critic and film scriptwriter. Anil
Bhatti's "Willy Haas and Exile in India," perhaps the most subtle and --
for this reviewer (a historian) -- difficult essay in the book, is a
portrayal of this man of letters through his writings. Invited to Bombay
by Kaufmann, Haas arrived in 1939 at the age of 48 and spent the next
eight years there. Except for mentioning that Haas became a film
script-writer, collaborated with Kaufmann on two operas which were
produced by All-India Radio, and wrote a number of essays and sketches
that were published in Indian journals, Bhatti does not say much about his
activities in India. Instead, reflecting his interest in problems of
literature, colonialism, and orientalism, he offers a post-modernist
literary analysis of the narrative of Haas's autobiography and his
attempts as a litterateur to come to terms with 'India'. He writes, "Like
all reconstructions his autobiographical recollection of India is also a
construct in which the site of India as a place of exile is justified by
an achieved awareness between conscious individual choice and
inevitability." (p. 115) Bhatti elucidates the central role of Kipling's
_Kim _ and Gandhi in Haas's understanding of his affinity for India. He
also deals with some comparative cultural reflections expressed in Haas's
essays.

Martin Kampchen's "Alex Aronson: Refugee from Nazi Germany in
Santiniketan" discusses the period (1937-1946) that this multilingual,
multicultural researcher, academic, and poet spent in India, most of it at
Santiniketan ("abode of peace"), Rabindranath Tagore's ashram and
international educational center. Underlying the profile of Aronson is the
implication that although this young scholar, who had entered the ashram
at the age of 25 as a teacher at its Visva-Bharati university rather than
as a refugee, was highly regarded, and although Tagore's intercessions
seem to have had an effect in shortening Aronson's first internment and
preventing the second, in general Santiniketan was not that aware of
and/or concerned with developments in Europe and did less than it might
have to offer employment and sanctuary to Jewish refugee intellectuals. To
Aronson, Santiniketan was not the utopia of its reputation. He felt that
aside from Tagore, C.F Andrews, Krishna Kripalani, and Amiya Chakravarty,
many of the persons there were quite average.  Despite his efforts to
study Indian philosophy and art, Aronson realized that "He was and would
remain essentially a European."  (p. 134)  Nevertheless, he was extremely
productive while in India, writing many essays and several books,
including two on Romain Rolland. Kampchen feels his most important book
was _Rabindranath through Western Eyes_, a study of the origins of
cultural attitudes that focused on popular response to Tagore during his
travels to Europe and the United States..  Aronson joined his family in
Palestine in 1946, and enjoyed a successful career as a professor and
writer in Israel until he died in 1995. He recalled his exile at
Santiniketan as "that part of my life which I most vividly remember," and
yet also wrote, "I have been an alien and an exile wherever I went."
(p.131).

The one portrait of a female exile in this section, Johannes H. Voigt's
"Under the Spell of the Mahatma: Dr. Margarete Spiegel," is somewhat less
interesting than the stores of her male counterparts, partly because of
what is revealed about the character of the person herself and partly,
perhaps, because the author had to work with very limited material.
Spiegel, a philologist born in Berlin at the turn of the century, was a
great admirer of Gandhi and emigrated to India in 1933.Voigt reconstructs
her experience of a year and a half at the Mahatma's ashrams, at Sabarmati
and at Wardha, from correspondence between Spiegel and Gandhi, although
for the most part only the latter's letters have been preserved, and they
reflect the problems of integration that this Jewish refugee faced.
Spiegel "venerated [Gandhi]as a god-like person"  (p.  150) but he was
critical of her inability to adapt well to manual work, even though he did
appreciate her talent for learning and teaching languages. She soon left
the ashram and settled down as a teacher in Bombay, but little is said of
her life thereafter (she died in 1968).. From the essay, it seems that the
answer to the question Voigt poses, "Who was Margarete Spiegel?", is that
she was a rather sad, psychologically unstable woman whose emotional
attachment to Gandhi the Mahatma had to discourage.

Two of the essays in Part III provide additional insights into the
experience of Central European Jews in India through the lens of
literature. Given the few studies hitherto available, the work which has
probably familiarized the most readers with this subject is Anita Desai's
novel _Baumgartner's Bombay_ (Heinemann: 1988). Its protagonist, a
German-Jewish emigrant named Hugo Baumgartner, sees no other alternative
but to stay on in India after the war (as did only a few actual refugees).
He remains, in the words of Rainer Lotz and Rekha Kamath in their essay
"Interculturality: A View from Below, Anita Desai's _Baumgartner's
Bombay_", "the eternally exiled, the existential outsider" (p. 166), words
that evoke Alex Aronson's description of himself. Lotz and Kamath argue
that he lacks a self-defined identity and becomes the victim of different
identities that are thrust on him. He seems indifferent to issues of
cultural identity, and yet, ultimately, it is his German heritage that
leads to his brutal death. Unlike some of the prominent, self-reflective
exiles of history, the fictional Baumgartner, Lots and Kamath point out,
was the "insignificant"  immigrant.  He had to adapt to the realities of
life in a foreign country in a way best suited to his own existence,
without thinking about 'deeper' cultural meanings. One wonders how many
"real-life" Baumgartners there may have been among the refugees in India.

_Ranangan_ is a novella written by Visham Bedekar in Marathi, which was
extremely well received when it was published in 1939 because of its
style, structure, technique of narration, and subject matter. In
"_Ranangan_ or Response in Marathi Literature to the Theme of Jewish
Emigration," Rajendra Dengle examines "transcultural, human, secular,
anti-Fascist and nuanced nationalist implications." The story, partly
stemming from Bedaker's own observation of 150 Jewish refugees on a ship,
revolves around the relationship of Chakradhar, a young Maharastrian man
returning home from Europe as the Second World War approaches and Herta, a
young German Jewish woman who, with her elderly mother, is on the same
ship, which is headed for Shanghai. From Herta and the other refugees on
the ship, Chakradhar begins to understand what Jews are, moving from
stereotypical European anti-Semitism to an appreciation of their heritage
and problems. According to Dengle, the segment containing the narrative of
Herta's story, told by Chakradkar, is a masterpiece, "a sensitive
picturization of the deadly atmosphere of fear in Fascist Germany and the
travails and tribulations of the Jews on the run," (p.180) probably never
attempted in Marathi before this. A soliloquy by Herta presented in the
form of three letters reveals the desperate position of the Jewish people,
particularly German Jews, who now must hope for the defeat of the country
they had loved. Foreseeing the annihilation of the Jews, Chakradkar begins
to consider Germany's policies and wonders, prophetically, if the
persecution of the Jews will be repeated in different countries, if Hindus
and Muslims in India will experience the same ethnic hatred. . One would
like to know more about how the Marathi critics responded to the content
of the book.

The final piece in this section, and in the book as well, "To Rudolf von
Leyden: A Letter out of Season," is composed in the form of a letter by
the artist Krishen Khanna. It is a warm recollection of von Leyden's years
in India and his later life in Vienna as well as a reflection on his role
as the art critic of the _Times of India_ and his support of Indian modern
artists of the l950s.  He recalls the time when von Leyden successfully
defended the painter Akbar Padamsee against an accusation of obscenity
leveled against his work, the "Lovers," by producing photographs of the
erotic sculptures of Khajuraho and Konarak, two of India's most revered
sites of ancient art. Although Khanna makes only oblique references to von
Leyden's position as a Jewish refugee, earlier in the book Shalva Weil
describes the critic as a "non-Jewish Jew" who had no affiliation with the
established Jewish communities of India.

On the whole, _Jewish Exile in India_ , with its multi-disciplined
approach, is a worthwhile contribution to what is a very scant literature.
There are, however, certain omissions. Although the work of the local
Jewish Relief Association in India is mentioned in two chapters, perhaps
more could be said about its operations; even though this organization's
archives have not been found, there is enough material available elsewhere
on its efforts to help the refugees financially and politically -- through
interventions on issues of internment and naturalization -- to warrant
fuller treatment.  Secondly, the attitudes of the refugees themselves
towards political currents in India are important. They did not get caught
up in the issue of Indian nationalism that was raging at this time. In
fact, they were too preoccupied with their own problems of absorption and
acceptance, were dependent on the British government, and in any case,
considered themselves to be only transients in India. On the other hand,
some of them brought with them more extensive experience with Zionism --
and now, the personal awareness of the need for a Jewish homeland -- than
most Indian Jews had. And although the fund-raising efforts of the Zionist
Movement and those for refugee assistance sometimes clashed, the refugees'
plight heightened the Indian Jewish communities' sense of Jewish
consciousness. This phenomenon, which contributed to the bonding of the
local Jews with their co-religionists elsewhere, probably played a role
after the war as Indian Jews debated on whether or not to emigrate to the
newly established Jewish homeland, the State of Israel. These issues need
further discussion.

Finally, one wishes that the voices of ordinary emigrants -- not just
those of the literary figures -- could be heard more strongly. Their lives
were not easy and although the doctors and other skilled individuals
eventually found a niche, for many others the years in exile were quite
difficult. A large-scale project of in-depth interviewing of those who are
still alive about their sojourn in India (as well as about what happened
to them after they left India -- or stayed on-- after the war, as Weil
proposes) would be required. Such an oral history project would have to
encompass Israel, Britain, North America, and possibly Australia. The
organization of Jewish Immigrants from China in Israel includes European
refugees who spent the war years there as well as members of the older
Baghdadi community and they are certainly engaged in writing memoirs and
preserving their history. To this reviewer's knowledge, Central European
Jews who found sanctuary in India before arriving in Israel are not
members of the Indian Jewish organizations in Israel, although some may
attend events sponsored by the Israel-India Cultural Association. Although
they are far fewer in number than those refugees who went to China, many
European Jews remained in India for up to twelve years. Their stories, in
their own words, remain to be told.

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