By the time he disembarked from a ship in Bombay in 1929, Vienna-born writer and journalist Wolfgang von Weisl was a strong proponent of Zionism. Living as a young Jew in Austria at a time when Nazi ideas were germinating had convinced him that there was no future for Jews in Europe.
Travelling to India on documents issued by Britain, which had established Mandatory Palestine in 1920, von Weisl was keen on contacting the Jewish communities in the western parts of the country. One of his aims was to draw Baghdadi Jews and Bene Israel into the movement for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine.
But his interactions with these communities, and overall experience of India, left him in shock. He wrote down his thoughts in a January 1930 article for the Buffalo Jewish Review.
No proselytising policy
Von Weisl claimed he crossed the Himalayas into Tibet dressed as a Hindu monk. When people asked him his religion, his answer befuddled them. “A Jew – by most this was taken to be a sub-caste of Brahminism or something of the sort – with the tacit assumption that by the colour of my skin, I must be a Brahmin for….they had never heard of Jews,” he wrote….
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