The Halegua Family

The Jewish presence on the Malabar Coast reaches back to an antiquity that is difficult to date precisely but undeniably ancient. Local tradition traces it to the era of King Solomon and the spice trade, or even to the dispersals that followed the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. What history establishes with certainty is the existence of an organized Jewish community at Cranganore (Kodungallur, called Shingly by the Jews) during the first millennium.

The founding document of this history is constituted by the celebrated "copper plates" (copper plates) of Cochin: engraved charters granted by a local Hindu ruler to a Jewish leader named Joseph Rabban, conferring upon him hereditary privileges — fiscal rights, honors, and a quasi-princely status. These plates, preserved by the community and regarded as its collective title of nobility, are generally dated by historians to the tenth and eleventh centuries. They constitute the oldest material evidence of recognized Jewish autonomy on Indian soil.

Following the decline of Cranganore — linked to the silting of the port, local conflicts, and the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century — the community relocated to Cochin (Kochi), under the protection of the Rajah of Cochin. It was there, in the quarter known as Jew Town in Mattancherry, that the Jewish life crystallized which would go on to welcome and integrate the Sephardic newcomers, among whom were the ancestors of the Halegua. This Malabar Judaism was characterized by remarkable ritual fidelity, a distinctive liturgy blending Eastern traditions with Sephardic influences, and a linguistic rootedness in Malayalam, the language in which Jewish women composed a rich corpus of songs.

It should be noted that this Indian Judaism lived — an exceptional fact in the history of the diaspora — largely sheltered from antisemitism: the tolerance of the Hindu rulers made the Malabar Coast one of the rare havens where Jews knew neither an imposed ghetto nor systematic persecution, save during the brief episode of Portuguese domination.

The term Paradesi designates the Jews who arrived in Cochin from the 16th century onward, primarily from the Iberian Peninsula, but also from Aleppo, Baghdad, Amsterdam, Livorno, and other centers of the Sephardic and Mediterranean diaspora. Fleeing the expulsion from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497), and subsequently the rigors of the Inquisition, these refugees made their way eastward along trade routes and joined the pre-existing Malabar community.

It is within this movement that the origins of the Halegua family most likely lie. The surname, Iberian in resonance, and its association with the Paradesi group point the analysis toward a family emerging from this western diaspora, who reached Cochin in stages — possibly by way of Sephardic centers in the Levant or the Mediterranean before taking root on the Malabar coast. This trajectory, common to many Paradesi families, rests here on a probable reconstruction rather than on any single notarized document.

The institutional heart of the Paradesi community was the Paradesi Synagogue of Cochin, built in 1568 in the Mattancherry quarter, adjoining the Rajah's palace. It is today celebrated as the oldest active synagogue in the Commonwealth, remarkable for its floor of blue-and-white porcelain tiles imported from China (Canton) in the 18th century, its Belgian glass lamps, and its clock tower. This synagogue became the exclusive spiritual home of the "white" families, among whom the Halegua held their place across the generations.

The history of the Paradesi nevertheless contains a shadow side that modern historiography has brought to light: the distinction, long rigidly maintained, between "white" Jews (Paradesi) and "black" Jews (Malabari), as well as the existence of a third group descended from freed slaves (the meshuchrarim). These separations, which prohibited intermarriage and regulated access to synagogal honors, were the subject of intense internal controversy and did not truly fade until the 20th century. The memorial tradition of the Paradesi families and the critical readings of historians thus speak to one another, at times corroborating, at times qualifying each other.

Under successive dominions — Portuguese, then Dutch from 1663, then British — the Jewish community of Cochin experienced varying fortunes. The conquest of Cochin by the Dutch East India Company marked a favorable turning point: the Dutch, Protestant and pragmatic, proved tolerant toward the Jews, several of whom became prominent commercial and diplomatic intermediaries.

The emblematic figure of this golden age was Ezéchiel Rahabi (1694–1771), merchant and agent of the Dutch Company, who played a considerable role in the spice trade and in relations between the community and the colonial authorities. Around families such as the Rahabi, the Koder, the Hallegua, and the Cohen, a merchant and learned elite took shape. These Paradesi families maintained epistolary and matrimonial ties with the great centers of the Sephardic diaspora — Amsterdam, Livourne, Alep — forming part of a network that linked the Malabar coast to the Jewish worlds of the Mediterranean, much like the Livornese diaspora studied by historians of Western Judaism [Lévy, 1996].

Community life was organized around the Paradesi synagogue, but also around several other synagogues in Kerala (Kadavumbhagam, Thekkumbhagam, in Cochin and Ernakulam, as well as those of Parur and Chennamangalam), each housing its own congregation. The community produced scholars, scribes, and memorialists, and preserved a deep attachment to Zion: the nostalgia for Shingly — the ancient Cranganore — found expression in a liturgy and songs in which the Memory of India and the hope of return to Jerusalem intertwined.

This relative prosperity was coupled with an intense activity of documentary preservation: registers of births, marriages, and deaths, communal records, correspondence. It is within this tradition of archiving that the role attributed to Isaac Hallegua-Koder, keeper of the registers, is situated — a figure to whom the following chapter will turn.

The most singular trait of the Halegua lineage, as reported in the notice, lies in the role of Isaac Hallegua-Koder, who "kept the communal registers." This mention, belonging first to transmitted memory, aligns with a well-documented historical reality: the Paradesi community of Cochin was, remarkably, a community of archivists. The double name Hallegua-Koder signals moreover the alliance of two of the most illustrious Paradesi families, the Hallegua and the Koder, united by matrimonial ties — a common practice within a small group intent on preserving its cohesion.

The Koder family, to which the Halegua were thus related, is notably associated with Satu (Shabdai) Koder, a leading figure of the community in the twentieth century, businessman, patron, and guardian of communal heritage, long regarded as the spokesman for the Jews of Cochin before the authorities and visitors. The transmission of registers, ritual objects, and liturgical Memory passed through these interconnected families.

The registers kept by the Paradesi — among them those entrusted to the care of Isaac Hallegua-Koder — constitute a precious source for the genealogy and demography of the community. They allow researchers to reconstruct the alliances, births, and deaths of a numerically small yet culturally dense group. This memorial vocation brings the Halegua closer to other Séfarade families of the diaspora who, in Tlemcen, in Fès, or in Sousse, kept cemetery records, rabbinical archives, and mellah acts — sources that contemporary historiography has drawn upon to reconstruct vanished worlds [Schwarzfuchs, 1997] [Botbol, 2000] [Rubinstein-Cohen, 2011].

Here, family tradition (the memory of an ancestor archivist) and historical inquiry (the attested existence of these registers) confirm one another, without it always being possible to attribute each document with certainty to a specific hand. The status therefore remains that of a transmitted memory, corroborated by the documentary context.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 upended the destiny of the Jews of Cochin. Driven by an ancient messianic and Zionist fervor, the great majority of the Jews of Kerala — primarily the Malabari — emigrated to Israel during the 1950s. There they founded, among other places, agricultural communities (moshavim) in the Negev and elsewhere, where their liturgical traditions and songs in Malayalam were perpetuated.

The Paradesi, more attached to their mercantile positions and urban way of life, emigrated more slowly and in smaller numbers, yet the movement swept them along as well. From several thousand people at the mid-twentieth century, the Jewish community of Kerala shrank to a few dozen souls, then to a handful. The Paradesi synagogue, a listed heritage site, continued to function symbolically, but the absence of a minyan (a quorum of ten men) gradually rendered regular worship impossible.

It is within this context that the entry situates the Halegua "among the last descendants of the white Jewish community of Kerala." The Hallegua, Koder, and Cohen families were indeed among the very last Paradesi households of Jew Town. Their recent history is one of slow extinction in place, coupled with a dispersal toward Israel, the United States, and England. The ancient dwellings of the Jewish quarter of Mattancherry, the antique shops, and the synagogue itself have become sites of Memory, visited by travelers from around the world who come to contemplate what was once one of the oldest Judaisms of Asia.

The decline of the Paradesi of Cochin is part of a broader phenomenon: the disappearance, in the twentieth century, of centuries-old Jewish communities — from Livorno to Tlemcen — of whom there often remains only "the last of" their witnesses, keepers of a heritage that History now strives to gather [Lévy, 1996].

The patronym Halegua displays a remarkable diffusion that extends well beyond the Indian subcontinent. It appears, under closely related spellings, in several centers of the Sephardic and Oriental diaspora, which argues in favor of a common Iberian or Mediterranean origin, refracted through the routes of exile. Thus, Halegua families are found both in the Egyptian and Levantine world and in the Cochini branches — a sign of a family network that may have connected, over the centuries, the trading posts of the Indian Ocean to the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean.

This diffusion is explained by the very logic of the post-1492 Sephardic diaspora: dispersed yet bound together by commerce, correspondence, and matrimonial alliances, families bearing the same name spread from Amsterdam to Aleppo, from Livorno to Baghdad, and all the way to Cochin. The Paradesi of Cochin were precisely embedded in this transoceanic web, which makes plausible — without formally proving it for every branch — a common trunk of Iberian origin.

Within the Cochini community, the Halegua contracted alliances with the other great Paradesi families — Koder, Cohen, Rahabi — according to a group endogamy aimed at preserving identity and standing. The double name Hallegua-Koder, already mentioned, is the clearest illustration of this. These tightly woven alliances explain the density of genealogical ties within a group that, at its height, numbered only a few hundred individuals.

Contemporary genealogical work, supported by collaborative databases and trees reconstructed by scholarly communities, now makes it possible to trace certain of these filiations, in the manner of what has been undertaken for other Sephardic lineages [Arbre Encaoua, 2024]. Caution remains warranted, however: reconstructing an unbroken genealogy of the Halegua from medieval Spain to Kerala still falls, for the most part, within the realm of hypotheses grounded in converging evidence rather than uninterrupted documentary demonstration.

The Halegua lineage condenses in its name an exemplary trajectory of the Jewish diaspora: born in all likelihood within the Iberian crucible, scattered by the expulsions of the late fifteenth century, carried along the routes of Mediterranean and Eastern trade to the Malabar Coast, and finally rooted within the singular Paradesi community of Cochin. There, among the "white" Jews of Kerala, the Halegua held their place in a community that lived — a rare circumstance — sheltered from persecution, under the benevolent protection of Hindu sovereigns.

The role attributed to Isaac Hallegua-Koder, keeper of the communal registers, encapsulates the deepest vocation of this family: to preserve the Memory of a world. And it is indeed as memorialists that the Halegua enter History today, at the very moment when the Jewish community of Kerala is dying out in place, its last members dispersed among Israel, America, and Europe, leaving behind a synagogue of blue porcelain and a silence inhabited by songs in Malayalam.

The Great Book of the Halegua cannot claim to offer a closed and certain genealogy; it proposes an honest reading, in which established archive, transmitted tradition, and acknowledged conjecture stand side by side. It remains to be hoped that the systematic exploitation of the Cochini registers and genealogical databases will make it possible, in time, to clarify what this work could only sketch: the exact place of the Halegua within the great chain of the generations of Israel.