David Rahabi

Origins and early life

David Rahabi was born in the middle of the eighteenth century in Cochin, on the Malabar coast of India, into the leading family of the ancient Jewish community there: his father, Ezekiel Rahabi, was the merchant-prince who managed the Dutch East India Company's trade at Cochin and corresponded with the Jews of Amsterdam.

Work and career

After his father's death in 1771 he took over the family business, and in 1785 he published in Amsterdam a Hebrew work of his own, Ohel David, a treatise on the origin and rules of the Hebrew calendar — the scholarly monument of a merchant of Cochin. One caution belongs here, and this fiche states it as the sources do: the name David Rahabi was borne by three generations of the family, and the celebrated tradition of the Bene Israel of the Konkan coast — that a David Rahabi of Cochin found them, recognized them as Jews by their Sabbath and their dietary laws, taught them Hebrew and rabbinic practice and trained their first religious teachers, the 'first awakening' of that community — is not securely his.

Scholars attach it now to this David, now to an ancestor, and its details are legendary rather than documented. What is certain is the book, the family, and the bond between the Jews of Cochin and the Bene Israel that the tradition enshrines.