 blow it out your bumhole Hey, welcome back to our stupid drag scene. It's this is Corbin. Hi Corbin. Hi. How are you? I'm well good And you can follow us on Instagram Instagram and Twitter Twitter from all juicy come to see go She is on the way juicy content is here today Today you just you just saw full-blown Broadway musical didn't you yep? What? Today we are reacting to a video react to this it's called The last Jews of Calcutta one more time the last Jews Yeah of Calcutta. That's what I thought you said unique stories from India. I want to read this for me The history of the Jews in India reaches back to ancient times Judaism was one of the first foreign religions to arrive in India and recorded history Indian Jews are a religious minority of India But unlike many parts of the world have historically lived in India without any insistence of Antisemitism from the local majority populace the Hindus however Jews were persecuted by the Portuguese during their control of Goa Their population rapidly declined due to their emigration to Israel. Yeah, so this is interesting very interesting You're Jewish you've I am I have been to Calcutta You can relate on two fronts and yes before you understand there's a differentiation between people who are Jewish by blood and Jewish by faith because that happens to be that Jew Judaism and being Jewish is a religious belief system the the Jewish religion But then there are also people who today are basically called Israeli that at the time There wasn't a differentiation between the Jews being a belief and the Jews being a race So like genetically you check my DNA with ancestry It shows you Jewish as a people group A lot of people here get really confused by that that you could say you were Jewish But you're also a Christian you're Jewish, but you're Hindu. Yeah, so you what? Yeah, so there you have it little 101 information about Judaism. Thank you. You're welcome. Here we go It might not be London as some claim, but the architecture of Calcutta is a bit. Yeah And not many know that some of Calcutta's major landmarks were built not by the British but by Jews The Jewish community in Calcutta still owns three Senegal's three schools and Cemetery in Narkin, Lomba Jews go anywhere for trade So the Jews who came to Calcutta the first you to come to Calcutta that was a shallow Mubadia corn came for trade They moved between Bombay Colombo Calcutta Rangoon Singapore Singapore, Hong Kong Hong Kong Shanghai and all the way down to Jakarta small Merchantships that went up and down doing trade in timber in animals and birds Plants It's largest which was During the Second World War. We were between five and six thousand About 22 different seabirds Seriously after the Second World War, there were three things that happened One was the places colonies like Australia and Canada opened their doors to immigration Then you had Indian independence And the year after that you had the establishment of the state of Israel This is people and landowners and things like that. I'm afraid that they might Properties their businesses might be nationalized and they might not get Satisfactory compensation for that very sold out and left some of them gave up very good jobs here to go and live in Basically in tents in Israel in the early years Jews at this time lived in the area that is bounded by the synagogues the Masjid Go barracks and The police station there was China power the Jewish area Parsis and Armenians. This was what what the British called the gray area That there was Indian white was European and the middle people were great Came to a point when one Jewish girl was nearly baptized You forget that this is a British time of proselytizing was big The insular Jewish society built their own schools open their own clubs and kept their social mingling strictly kosher And in the 1940s when the country burned they will have done touched 1946 I went to New Delhi. That was like today going to the moon For a girl a Jewish girl, what do you want to go to Delhi of all places so far away? 1000 miles away took me two and a half days to get to Delhi I saw everything. I saw the bloodshed. I saw the partition. I saw the famine of Bangor and for me It was very impressionable Because it was impressionable age. I saw Great Calcutta killing here in Gandhiji came to try to stop it. It was something I Never forget this scene. There is a pregnant woman heavily pregnant And she was on the road and there was a mob around her and the man had a knife to her stomach And it was just about to kill her I ran out and I tried to save her me and my brother and they we were so we were so naive because we knew that they would not Touch us not one will frighten because it was it told us. Yeah, I'll kill a really I'd never forget what I saw and I often wonder what happened to that woman Flasky lemon lives with the daughter. Yeah in a house. That's almost like a museum of Jewish artifacts During the state of their numbers Yale decided to create a digital archive of the Jews of Kolkata Capitalism my blood. So when I retired prematurely, I made a direct beeline to get back to Calcutta and love being here Yeah, Simon is a fourth generation character in you who unlike her pills decided to come back But for the rest, Kolkata was just another stopover on the journey So what happens to the Jewish heritage after them? We have just set up about six months ago controlling trust which will be like a holding company for all our institutions and I was in the States a month ago trying to find Possibly an organization there that might be interested in supervising what goes on in Kolkata So we are also looking towards the communities that still exist in Singapore and Hong Kong, which are much closer to us We are also looking to towards them to see whether they might be interested in Uncapable of supervising what would be happening here And that's the tragic truth The last remnants of Jews on Calcutta soil will be looked after by those sitting in foreign lands From the time of the Romans or the Babylonians or the Greeks to the Germans to everybody has done something against the Jews But not the Indians Indians can hold a head India can hold a head high and proud to say that we were never never discriminated against and not only that Jews have had big positions general Jacob became the governor of two states General Jacob it was the army general who is a Jew DJ Cohen with a judge in the High Court one thing that living in India gives you is a strong sense of Possibly fatalism the Bengali has an expression for it Yeah, Copala, La Cache Sheyha, but if it is our fate to be the last flicker of the Jewish That's it. It happens everywhere. There are Many synagogues have been destroyed and damaged at least here ours are still standing in spite of the ASI Laffey, but it is the city's loss because the city is losing its cosmopolitan edge But beyond that as far as we're concerned Sylvie Yes, it is the city's loss a City that became home to its guests from Baghdad Now holds on to the remains of the last Jews of Kolkata So what 23 they said 25 something like that. That's a pretty elite core of Happened discriminated against the Jews. Mm-hmm. Here's what India there's probably not a more I Mean, there's lots of people that have been discriminated against for a long long time. Oh, yeah, the Jews have a long history Pretty much everywhere. They've ever gone. Yeah I can think just off the top of my head and I may be completely incorrect because I could be ignorant to the history of the Jews for example and that are in Australia Australia started with criminals Yeah, yeah, like face discrimination there and some in some way, but yeah, that is one of the beautiful things and I It would be a loss to I No, no, because it's about the history of the no, and I think that's because the it's because they're such a small contingent And I don't know where in Kolkata. This is Located because that's how cut is quite large. So There's there's there's only 23 Jews in Kolkata. What do they say only two or three synagogues? it's and it You know, it would be any any place that would lose but Something like this is losing a piece of global history history and culture To a certain extent that no one's there to actually teach and show it to them and be made aware of in the same way that There's so little exposure that we have to a lot of things, you know, so yeah, yeah My dad asked he said I hear pronounced Calcutta and Kolkata Yeah So what's it? Well, it depends on who you talk to Because it's my understanding that the and I have from reputable sources that it was like Bombay became Mumbai Calcutta became Kolkata. It was anglicized by the Brits in order to become I guess I don't know Mumbai Bombay, I don't know why you need to make the change same thing with Calcutta to Kolkata. I Personally, I don't mind that spelling I'm actually fond of it because it's what I was introduced to but I've always I was new of Calcutta and new of Calcutta as Calcutta So my natural inclination is to pronounce it as Calcutta That's in Johnny's natural inclination is to call it Calcutta But don't have a problem with people calling it cool cut. Ah many people do that are there And that's what they've known it as is cool cut that but don't have a problem with people saying Calcutta