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
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.
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.
*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*
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.
*Hadashot*
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: A Virtual Lab of Legal Anthropology*
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