Lexington Books
Pages: 202
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7391-1646-3 • Hardback • December 2006 • $86.00 • (£66.00)
978-0-7391-1647-0 • Paperback • November 2006 • $47.99 • (£37.00)
Anthropologist Ruth Fredman Cernea has been researching the history of the Baghdadi Jewish communities of Southeast Asia since her first visit to Burma in 1987.
Chapter 1 Letter from Ellis Sofaer
Chapter 2 Introduction: The Baghdadi Diaspora
Chapter 3 Adventurers and Entrepreneurs
Chapter 4 Beautiful Burmese Days
Chapter 5 Three Cheers for the King and the British Empire
Chapter 6 The Comforts of Home
Chapter 7 Bene Israel vs. Baghdadis: The Court Case
Chapter 8 Desperate Passage to India: The War in Burma
Chapter 9 Return to Burma
Chapter 10 Burma and Israel
Chapter 11 Embers
Chapter 12 Appendix A: Proceedings of the High Court of Judicature, Rangoon, 1935-1936
Chapter 13 Appendix B: List of Families to Be Evacuated from Burma to Israel
Chapter 14 Appendix C: Additional List of Potential Emigrants to Israel, 1949
Chapter 15 Appendix D: Jewish Community of Burma, 1959
Chapter 16 Appendix E: Jewish People and Their Descendents in Burma, c. 1986
The author has done a service to Jewish studies by this engagingly written book, documenting a community that has largely disappeared. She has also done a service to the descendants of the people described, who are enabled through this book to recognize their ancestral roots.
— Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Of Jewish Studies
Well-written with hardly a trace of politically-correct jargon or formulaic social-science talk . . . quite literary in its style. . . . [Cernea] seems to write . . . for general readers as well as the people it directly concerns.
— 2008; Asian Journal of Social Science
Almost Englishmen offers a painstaking record of the rise, flourishing, and slow death of the prosperous community of Baghdadi Jews in Burma (today's Myanmar.) With the keen eye and sympathetic ear of the anthropologist, Cernea has gathered the memories and contemporary impressions of a lost world of merchants at once devoted to tradition and enchanted by the cosmopolitan modernity of British India.
— H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online
The book is of interest to academics as well as non-academics who are personally committed to the history of the Jewish diaspora in South(East)-Asia. . . .Cernea’s analysis provides material for comparative anthropological as well as sociological and political research which is concerned with the establishment of religious minorities abroad. It offers a contribution to the analysis of international migratory movements in terms of patterns of assimilation, and the socio-political role and rights of religious minorities within the contexts of statehood and citizenship before and after colonialism.
— Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World
This newly published volume is a delight: an easy read offering a fascinating account of the lives and times of the small but significant Jewish community—numbering some 2,100 at their peak—of Baghdadi origin in Burma (Myanmar) during and immediately after the Raj. It is illustrated with evocative photos and inventories of community members and their subsequent emigration details.
— David Simon; Hadashot