Artist: Indian Postal Service
Date: 1968
Museum: National Centre for Biological Sciences (Bengaluru, India)
Technique: Paper
This first day cover and stamp were issued by the Indian Postal Service in 1968 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the rebuilding of the Kochi synagogue (on the site of an earlier synagogue dated to the end of the first millennium). There were several waves of Jewish migrations into India, and historical records suggest that there were communities of Jewish traders in Malabar by the middle of the first millennium. Copper plates dated to the 10th century CE describe privileges and protection afforded to the Jewish trading community by the Rajah of Kochi. And a large number of documents found at the depository of the Ben Ezra synagogue at Al Fustat, Cairo, dated to the 11-13th CE show that spices and medicines and manufactured metal products were major items that Jewish merchants exported from India to the Middle East (S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza, “India Book” Brill, Leiden, 2008).
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