This paper examines how the specificities of place, particularities of the subject, and the Indian experiences and encounters of Bombay-based Britons could generate representations that undermine the totalizing agentive and generative power attributed to colonial discourse through an examination of Bene Israel Jews in the East India Company’s Bombay army. The study illustrates that, contrary to popular perceptions of Jews as greedy and avaricious merchants, financiers, and moneylenders, nineteenth-century Britons regularly portrayed Bene Israel Jews as valiant sepoys and trustworthy native officers. These disparities were linked to the distinct employment characteristics of Bene Israel Jews and British Jews. This situation, combined with an imperial vision that linked colony and metropole within a unified British world, spawned a previously unnoticed element of Jewish emancipation rhetoric in which British Jews sought to demonstrate that they were or should be trusted, brave, and patriotic British soldiers, subjects, and citizens by pointing to India’s Bene Israel Jews. The study exposes undiscovered ties between Bombay and Britain, as well as aspects of South Asian, Jewish, and British history that have been mostly disregarded and rarely linked, by bringing together issues that have been overlooked or studied individually.
