14 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 26 NO 6, DECEMBER 2010 Yulia Egorova and Shahid Perwez Yulia Egorova is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Durham. She is the author of Jews and India: Perceptions and image (Routledge 2006) and co-author (with T. Parfitt) of Genetics, mass media and identity: A case study of the genetic research on the Lemba and the Bene Israel (Routledge 2006). Her email is Yulia.egorova@durham. ac.uk. Shahid Perwez is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Durham. Following completion of the study on the Bene Ephraim, he is now working on a book based on his PhD thesis, on female infanticide and sex- selective abortion in Tamil Nadu. His email is shahid. perwez@durham.ac.uk. Fig. 1. Bene Ephraim elders presiding over a wedding. The Children of Ephraim Being Jewish in Andhra Pradesh In February 2010 Zoek de Verschillen, a programme produced by the Dutch Jewish TV channel, featured an episode on the Bene Ephraim of Andhra Pradesh. Zoek de Verschillen, which translates as ‘Spot the difference’, could probably be described as a reality TV show in which young Jewish men and women from Holland visit Jewish communities in different parts of the world. In each episode, the protagonist is taken to the airport and handed a sheet of paper with the name of an ‘exotic’ place where they will be spending a week with a local Jewish family. In the case of Eli, a young Orthodox Jewish man from Amsterdam, it was the village of Chebrole in India, the home of the Bene Ephraim – a community of Madiga untouchables in Andhra Pradesh. In the late 1980s the Bene Ephraim declared that they belonged to one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and expressed a wish to repat- riate to the Jewish state. 1 The community is led by the two brothers – Shmuel and Sadok Yacobi – and maintains a synagogue, which is now regularly attended by about 100 people from the Madiga community. In the programme, after spending a week with the Yacobis and other community members, Eli arrives at the conclusion that although he sympathizes with the Bene Ephraim movement and appreciates their devotion to Judaism, he doubts that they could be considered Jewish from the Orthodox perspective. He accepts that he ‘can see them as his brothers’, but not as ‘Jewish brothers’. Eli’s explanation for his position is that they lack a genealogy to prove ‘beyond doubt’ that they are Jewish. He therefore concludes that the desire of the Bene Ephraim to move to the state of Israel will remain a dream that is unlikely to be realized. * * * One of us (Yulia) first learnt about the Bene Ephraim in 2001 while researching the more ‘conventional’ Jewish communities of India and Indian attitudes towards Judaism. 2 We have now been working with this group for over a year and have had a chance to observe their prac- tice and to discuss the life and history of the community at length with the Yacobi family and other Bene Ephraim. Like Eli, we were impressed with the level of sincerity and devotion to Judaism and Jewish culture that the com- munity amply demonstrated. In their everyday life com- munity members strive to observe Jewish dietary laws (kashrut), rules of circumcision, and the main Jewish holi- days and Sabbath, notwithstanding the fact that this has led to them losing the support of their previous Christian ben- efactors (back in the 19th century the ancestors of the Bene Ephraim were converted to Christianity by an American Baptist mission). For many of them it has also meant having to sacrifice Saturday wages, as the majority of the Bene Ephraim are agricultural labourers and are now expected to work six days a week. Community members have been actively learning Hebrew and studying Jewish law. One significant outcome of these practices is that many Bene Ephraim children and young people now consider themselves to be first and foremost Jewish, as this is the tradition that they grew up with. All the community members have unequivo- cally expressed the desire to live in the state of Israel. Why, then, did Eli posit that their migration to Israel was not likely to happen, and why did he think that, despite their devotion to Judaism, the Bene Ephraim were not Jewish after all? Firstly, he suggested that their practices were still not entirely orthodox. Indeed, community members them- selves admit that since their ancestors did not have a chance to practise Judaism openly, they had forgotten We would like to thank Gwynned de Looijer and Jan de Ruiter for their help in translating episodes of the Zoek de Verschillen programme into English. The study on which this paper is based was funded by the Rothschild Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (reference AH/G010463/1) and we are grateful for this support. We also wish to thank the two anonymous AT reviewers for their helpful comments. SHAHID PERWEZ