Joseph Rabban
Joseph Rabban · Foundations of Civilization
Chef de la communauté juive de Cranganore, bénéficiaire des « plaques de cuivre de Cochin » par lesquelles le roi chera lui accorda vers l'an 1000 des privilèges héréditaires — le plus ancien document attestant la présence juive en Inde
vers l'an 1000, côte de Malabar (Kerala, Inde)
Inde
Joseph Rabban is recognized among Jewish contributors to Foundations of Civilization — Chef de la communauté juive de Cranganore, bénéficiaire des « plaques de cuivre de Cochin » par lesquelles le roi chera lui accorda vers l'an 1000 des privilèges héréditaires — le plus ancien document attestant la présence juive en Inde
Origins and early life
Joseph Rabban, in Malayalam Issuppu Irappan, was a Jewish merchant magnate of Kodungallur, the port the Europeans called Cranganore, on the Malabar coast of what is now Kerala, and he lived around the year 1000.
Work and career
Whether his family had come from Yemen, Persia or Palestine, or had been on the coast for centuries, the sources do not establish; what is certain is that he was a Jew and the recognized head of the Jewish traders of the port. The Chera king Bhaskara Ravi Varman granted him, on two engraved copper plates that survive to this day in the synagogue of Cochin, the revenues and honors of the merchant guild of Anjuvannam: exemption from certain taxes, the right to ride an elephant, to be preceded by a herald and by drums, to use a palanquin and a ceremonial parasol, and to hold these privileges 'as long as the world and moon exist', hereditarily.
These plates are the oldest documentary evidence of Jewish presence in India and among the oldest surviving documents of any Jewish community in Asia; the community held them as its charter of liberties for nine centuries and produced them to every new ruler, including the Portuguese, as proof of its standing. Later Cochin tradition made Rabban a prince of Anjuvannam and traced the leading families to him, and this fiche states plainly that those genealogies are tradition rather than record, while the grant itself is solid, dated by historians to the reign that ended around 1021. The synagogue of Paradesi in Cochin, built in 1568, still keeps the plates.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: M.G.S. Narayanan, Perumals of Kerala ; Nathan Katz, Who Are the Jews of India? (University of California Press, 2000)
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Chef de la communauté juive de Cranganore, bénéficiaire des « plaques de cuivre de Cochin » par lesquelles le roi chera lui accorda vers l'an 1000 des privilèges héréditaires — le plus ancien document attestant la présence juive en Inde
Source: M.G.S. Narayanan, Perumals of Kerala ; Nathan Katz, Who Are the Jews of India? (University of California Press, 2000)
