Abraham Barak Salem

Origins and early life

Abraham Barak Salem was born in 1882 in Cochin, into the Meshuchrarim — the branch of the ancient Cochin Jewish community descended from manumitted slaves, kept for generations at the margins of its own synagogue.

Work and career

He became the first Cochin Jew to earn a university degree and practice law, at the bar of Ernakulam. Inspired by Gandhi, whom he met at the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress in 1929, he turned Satyagraha inward: from the 1930s he used non-violent protest, boycotts and hunger strikes against the discrimination that barred 'Black' and Meshuchrarim Jews from equal seating and participation in the Paradesi synagogue — and he won, earning the name of the 'Jewish Gandhi'.

He sat in the Cochin Legislative Council from 1925 to 1931 and again from 1939 to 1945, active in the independence and trade-union movements.

Later years

Late in life he embraced Zionism and helped organize the emigration of the Cochin Jews to Israel, largely completed by 1955, while himself remaining in Kochi, where he died in 1967.