In this story, we’ll learn about the rise and fall of Jews in the world’s biggest movie business. Bollywood makes a thousand movies a year, three times more than Hollywood does, in twenty different languages that are seen by three billion people around the world. This is three times more than Hollywood does.
Few people know that Jews played as important a role in Bollywood as they did in Hollywood, even though the roles were very different. Almost all of India’s first female stars were from the Jewish faith. Because they had never learned any Indian languages, they couldn’t speak them because they didn’t know them. The introduction of sound ended many of their movie careers quickly. The few people who were quick to learn lived.
In the second-most populous country in the world, there are a lot of different ethnic and religious groups. But these early female stars of India came from a small group of people who belong to India’s smallest religious group, the Jews, which makes up less than 0.0004 percent of the country’s total population. When the Baghdadis (Jews who came from many Middle Eastern countries, not just Baghdad) came to India, they were called “Baghdadis.” They were one of the three Jewish communities in India. Parsi (Zoroastrian) women weren’t the first to act in movies, but they were the only minority group that did so in both numbers and money. Even prostitutes didn’t want to act in movies at the time, and Parsi women weren’t the first. The Baghdadi Jewish women, who were very Westernized in their lifestyle and thought, took the lead. Because of this, they didn’t have the same concerns about performing arts as women from other communities in India, such as the Bene Israel and the Cochini, who had been in India for a long time. People who did this set the stage for women from good families in other places to do the same.
Source: https://www.asianjewishlife.org/asia/india/ajl-issue17-the-jews-of-bollywood/
