Malayalam Zionist songs, which incorporate melodies and rhetoric from Indian cinema and political music from the twentieth century, are a noteworthy example of Jewish integration and contribution to Kerala’s diverse culture. Kerala Jews composed songs in Malayalam right up until they departed for the newly formed nation of Israel, and ten modern Zionist songs were copied down in hand-written song notebooks maintained by community women and carried with them as they left.
These songs are among the 330 Malayalam-language Jewish songs collected from Jewish women’s notebooks in India and Israel — some with several variants, some centuries old, and many with important intersections with the folk literature and music of other Kerala populations. Unlike earlier songs that expressed a messianic religious longing for Jerusalem, these are directly linked to twentieth-century events, such as the early Zionist movement, the end of the Ottoman Empire, and finally the mass emigration of the majority of their community to Israel between 1949 and 1954.
