Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 2.djvu/534

JEW lived formerly some Jews, who even now have a synagogue allow'd them without the Fortifications; they are neither White nor Brown, but quite black. The Portuguese Histories mention that at a certain time certain blasphemous papers against our Saviour, with some severe reflections against the Jesuit Gonsalvus Pereira (who afterwards suffer'd Martyrdom at Monopatapa) being found in a box set in the Great Church for the gathering of Alms; and the same being supposed to be laid there by some European Jews, who now and then used to resort thither privately, this gave occasion to introduce the Inquisition into Goa." It is noted by the Rev. J. H. Lord* that "Jacob Saphir, a Jewish traveller, who visited his co-religionists in Cochin in recent years, having described some of the Jews resident there as black, hastens to tone down his words, and adds, they are not black like the raven, or as the Nubians, but only as the appearance of copper. But Hagim Jacob Ha Cohen, another modern Jewish traveller, chastizing the latter for calling them black at all, declares that he will write of this class everywhere as the non-white, and never anywhere (God forbid!) as the Black." The Black Jews claim to have been the earliest settlers, while the White Jews came later. But the latter assert that the former are pure natives converted to the Jewish faith. These two difficult, yet important, issues of priority of settlement and purity of race have divided antiquarians and historians quite as much as they have estranged the two classes of Jews themselves from one another. According to the Rev. C. Buchanan,† the White Jews dwelling in Jews' town in Mattāncheri are later settlers than the Black Jews. They had only