The Jews of Chennai

It wasn’t easy to find the Jewish cemetery of Chennai.

The problem began when we couldn’t recall the local word for “Jews” (if there was one) while asking for directions. We were directed first to a Sunni Muslim cemetery, then to a Christian cemetery, and following that, to a Baha’i cemetery, all through progressively worse traffic.

As we soldiered on through the overpowering smells of a fish market, we finally spotted a Star of David on a wall behind a stall, obscured by items of laundry on a clothesline. A fishmonger’s wife let us in, and we walked into a small, treed enclosure, containing about nine graves in total, the earliest dated 1709—offering up peace in the middle of the chaos.

Why all this fuss, you may be wondering.

The forgotten Jews of Chennai changed the course of history.

But how did they end up here?

In the Middle Ages, Portuguese seafarers were active participants in Asian trading networks, transporting goods between Asia and Europe. Among these Portuguese traders, the Portuguese Jews dominated the Indo-European diamond trade. The Golconda mine in India was at the time the only known source of diamonds in the world. Meanwhile, the Jews, having been shut out of most professional guilds in Europe because of religious prejudice, leveraged ancient trading networks to import diamonds from India in exchange for silver and coral from Europe.

Centuries later, following the Inquisition in Portugal, Jews were expelled not only from Portugal, but also from Portuguese settlements overseas such as Goa. Within Europe, the Portuguese Jews fled to Amsterdam and London, and within India, they fled to Chennai (formerly “Madras”)—at the time a minor concession of the British East India Company.

The English, then relative newcomers to global trade, were delighted to exploit Jewish capital, knowledge and networks. In London, the Portuguese Jewish diamond merchants increasingly provided the financing for the East India Company’s voyages to India. Meanwhile in Chennai, the East India Company called into service Portuguese Jewish intermediaries, pilots, interpreters and ships (it was regular practice in Chennai for English ships to sail into hostile waters disguised in Portuguese colors).

This was a short interlude in world history — the last Jewish merchant in Chennai left barely a hundred years after the first one came. The Chennai diamond trade was overtaken by the trade in diamonds from Brazil. Yet its consequences were far-reaching. 

Take the example of James de Paiva, one of the first important London Portuguese Jewish merchants to make his home in Chennai. Together, he and his compatriots enriched the coffers of the East India Company's officials beyond their wildest dreams. Upon his death, his widow and successor in business, Jeronima, became the mistress of Elihu Yale, a Company official who was the Governor of Madras. Yale capitalized on her knowledge and connections to make a fortune in the diamond trade, going on to become a key benefactor of the university that bears his name today. The rest, as they say, is history.

Sources:

Mildred Berman in “The Location of the Diamond-Cutting Industry,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1971.

Francesca Trivellato in “From Livorno to Goa and Back: Merchant Networks and the Coral-Diamond Trade in the Early-Eighteenth Century,” Portuguese Studies, 2000.

Iberians in the Singapore-Melaka Area and Adjacent Regions: (16th-18th Century) (South China and Maritime Asia), ed. Peter Borschberg, 2004.