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The 'modern' Western world was introduced to Indian Jews in 1665 when Menasseh Bene Israel of Amsterdam petitioned Oliver Cromwell's government to permit Jews to return to England from where they had been expelled in 1290, citing the tolerant maharajas of Cochin as examples of pragmatic and tolerant leadership to be emulated in England. Over the next 350 years, books, magazine and newspaper articles, travel diaries, and a variety of government and commercial ...
All forms of Buddhism - the Theravada, the Mahayana and the Vajrayana - affirm the perfectability of the person, and one finds this notion of perfection embodied in three images the arahant, the bodhisattva and the mahasiddha. One also finds, in scholarly treatments of Buddhism, much made of the perceived differences among these three 'vehicles' (yana). Katz criticizes this emphasis on differences and prefers to treat Buddhism as a whole, a position he finds in ...
This book about Indian Jewish identity is an attempt 'self definition'. It raises basic questions like - who the Jews of India are, are they Jewish or Indian? It then proceeds to answer them by delving deep into cultural mechanisms by which India's Jews came to define themselves and how they were defined by other. In doing this it explores the conditions by which a group's identity is established and maintained. How it responds to changing conditions and ...