[Avodah] Bene Israel of India

[Zev Sero]

On 30/05/2012 1:15 PM, Rich, Joel wrote:
> Interesting article in the current issue of Conversations on
> “Learning from the Bene Israel of India”. They have an oral tradition
> which Rabbi Shafner somewhat describes.

Is this article available online anywhere?  It was my understanding
that when the Baghdadim discovered them in the late 18th century the
only tradition they had was to gather every Friday at sunset and say
the Shema, which they had memorised but had no idea what it meant.
And that the reason we trust their yichus is because in India nobody
could marry outside their caste, and divorced women could not remarry.
Is that not the case?  What other traditions did they have before the
Baghdadim began to teach them?


>  My questions is how do we know we got it right and they need to switch
> to our understanding of halacha?

Because we have a continuous mesorah from the Tana'im and Amora'im
who had the authority to decide halacha for all Israel.


> If they need to switch, why did later deviations (e.g. ashkenaz vs.
> sfard) not have to pick one approach once they rediscovered each other?

Ashkenaz and Sefard didn't "rediscover" each other; they were always
in contact, and their differences in halacha, as opposed to minhag, are
merely a function of which poskim each gives more weight to.  If the BY
had talmidei chachamim and poskim, working from the same sources as ours,
then we would have to take them into account once we discovered them,
and they would be entitled to follow their psakim as they had done before.
But they had no TC or poskim; they were amei ha'aretz who did things out
of tradition, which was mostly lost or garbled over the years.  And the
opinions of amei ha'aretz don't count at all.  "Kulei alma lo pligi"
doesn't include AH.

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon