Shalva Weil

Prof. Shalva Weil is a Senior Researcher at The Research Institute for Innovation and Education at the Hebrew University. She focuses on Indian Jewry, Ethiopian Jewry, and the Ten Lost Tribes and specializes in qualitative methods, violence, gender, ethnicity, education, religion, and migration.

Shalva Weil was born in London and studied sociology (B.A. Hons.) at the London School of Economics. She received an M.A. at the Centre for Multi-Racial Studies, Sussex University, on a double identity conflict among Bene Israel Indian Jews in Britain, supervised by the psychologist Prof. Marie Jahoda. She went on to study for a D. Phil. in Social Anthropology at Sussex, under the supervision of Prof. A.L. Epstein. Her doctoral thesis on The Persistence of Ethnicity and Ethnic Identity among the Bene Israel Indian Jews in Israel (1977) was based on three years' fieldwork among the Bene Israel in the town of Lod.

Shalva Weil has published widely on the Bene Israel, Cochin Jews, Baghdadi Jews, and the Shinlung (“Bnei Menasheh”). She is editor of India's Jewish Heritage: Ritual, Art, and Life-Cycle (Marg 2002; 3rd edition 2009). Additionally, she is a co-editor (with Nathan Katz, Ranabir Chakravarti and Braj M. Sinha) of Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First Century: A Perspective from the Margin (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007); and co-editor (with David Shulman) of Karmic Passages: Israeli Scholarship on India (Delhi: Oxford University Press 2008).

She is the founding Chairperson of the Israel-India Cultural Association, the official friendship association between the two countries, and is a board member of the new Israel-India Friendship Association. In 1991, she curated an exhibition at Beth Hatefutsoth: the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora on the Ten Lost Tribes, in which India was prominently featured. In 1996, she was invited by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to attend the India Studies Symposium, where she lectured on Co-Existence in India: the Case of the Cochin Jews. In 2002, she organized an international conference on Indo-Judaic studies at Oxford University, a field in which she is a forerunner. She is on the editorial board of Indian and international journals, including the International Journal of Hindu Studies and the Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies. In 2006, she co-curated an exhibition on the Jews of Chendamangalam in the newly restored village synagogue in Kerala. and is involved in the restoration of the Cochin Jewish synagogue in Parur, and the Muziris Heritage Project.

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