ABSTRACT
The Jewish communities of India have always been microscopic. At their peak, around 1950, they included at most 30,000 persons out of a total population of 350,000,000. Half a century later, there were perhaps 5,000 Jews out of an Indian population of close to one billion. In Israel by the 1990s there were over 50,000 Jews of Indian descent, still a tiny community in that they constituted only a little over 1 percent of the total Jewish population in that country. At the end of 1996, it was estimated that 85 percent of the Jews in India lived in the state of Maharastra, with about 2100 in greater Bombay, 1600 in nearby Thane and its suburbs, 320 in Pune, and 200 in the Konkan villages. The Konkan villages have almost entirely emptied out in the last few decades, with most of the Jews moving to Bombay or Israel.
