The Jews of India are the least well-known of all the Jewish communities in the world. They are one of the tiny minorities in the country.
The Book of Esther is the first Jewish source to mention Jews in India. It chronicles the Persian monarch’s directives relating to the dispersal of Jews throughout his empire’s 127 provinces, “from India even unto Ethiopia” (Esther 1:1).
Jewish colonies on India’s western coast have been known to exist since at least 1000 C.E., and may even date from the time of the Second Temple; some academics believe the Jews may have arrived in India on King Solomon’s commerce ship. Others believe they are derived from traders who arrived in the 700s from Yemen and were welcomed by the local prince. When Marco Polo arrived in 1293, he met Jews. In his notebook, he wrote of meeting Jews on the southwest coast who had established a thriving colony. For millennia, Indian Jews have coexisted peacefully with their non-Jewish neighbors while maintaining their own identity. Their population has never topped 30,000 people, a peak attained in the early 1950s, and today stands at less than 5,000 people or 0.0004 percent of India’s entire population.
Source: https://www.jewishcurrents.org/the-jewish-passage-to-india/
