The Paradesi synagogue in Kochi, built in 1568, is the oldest active synagogue in the Commonwealth, and a monument to a Jewish community with unusually deep and peaceful roots in India.
The Kerala Jews
Jews have lived on the Malabar coast of Kerala for a very long time; the community traces its presence back many centuries, and, unusually among diaspora communities, was never subject to a local persecution, living under the protection of Hindu rulers. The synagogue holds a set of copper plates on which a Kerala ruler granted the Jewish leader Joseph Rabban a series of hereditary privileges, dated by modern epigraphy to around 1000 CE, a charter of the community's standing.
The building
The Paradesi synagogue was built beside the Mattancherry palace by the Paradesi Jews, "foreigners", descendants of later arrivals from Iberia and the Middle East who formed a distinct group alongside the older Malabar Jews. Its floor is laid with hundreds of hand-painted blue-and-white Chinese tiles, no two alike, and it is hung with coloured glass lamps; a clock tower stands beside it. The interior is among the most distinctive of any synagogue, a blend of Jewish, European and local elements.
A community all but gone
After the founding of Israel most of Kerala's Jews emigrated, and the Paradesi congregation can no longer reliably assemble the quorum of ten adult men that communal prayer requires, so that "active" is generous. The synagogue is maintained as a place of worship and a monument, and it stands as the principal witness to a community that lived in India for the better part of two thousand years largely free of the persecutions that marked Jewish history elsewhere.