Activism
The Malabari Jews had seven places of worship; the White Jews had one, the Paradesi Synagogue, which for centuries had been barred to those whom they considered impure. The contemporary historian Edna Fernandes calls it "a bastion of white purity". The White Jews practised endogamous marriage, which excluded both the meshuchrarim and Malabari Jews (who also practised endogamy that excluded theother groups). The meshuchrarim had to sit in the back of the synagogue or outside. The separation resembled Indian discrimination against lower castes, which was sometimes repeated in Christian churches in India.
Salem fought against this discrimination by boycotting the synagogue for a time. He used satyagraha (or non-violent protest) as a means of combating discrimination within the community. This led some people to later refer to him as the "Jewish Gandhi". By the mid-1930s, Mandelbaum reported that many of the old taboos had fallen, reflecting wider changes in Indian society as well.
Salem served in the Legislative Council in the princely state of Cochin from 1925 to 1931 and again from 1939 to 1945. A supporter of the nascent trade union movement in Kerala and an active Indian nationalist, at the end of 1929 he attended the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress. It passed a resolution calling for complete independence from the Raj.
After visiting Palestine in 1933, Salem was attracted to the Zionist cause. After Indian independence, he worked to promote aliyah to Israel among the Cochin Jews. In 1953, he visited Israel to negotiate on behalf of Indian Jews who wanted to migrate. This also helped to diminish the divisions among the Cochin Jews. After emigration they were all considered foreigners to Israel, and many struggled to assimilate.
Although most of Cochin's ancient Jewish community eventually left for Israel by 1955 (and, in the case of many White Jews, for North America and England), Salem lived in Cochin until his death in 1967. He was buried in the White Jewish cemetery in Jew Town in Cochin.
Read more about this topic: Abraham Barak Salem