Stumbled across the topic thanks to this post: https://www.theapricity.com/forum/sh...=1#post6048315

Obviously needs to be researched more w/ better motherfucking sources because the wiki article is subpar at best. Still interesting.

Meshuchrarim are a Jewish community of freed slaves, often of mixed-race African-European descent, who accompanied Sephardic Jews in their immigration to India following the 16th-century expulsion from Spain. There all became known as the Paradesi Jews.

The descendants of the meshuchrarim were historically discriminated against in India by [other Paradesi] Jews. They were at the lowest of the Cochin Jewish informal caste ladder. The Paradesi came to use the Paradesi Synagogue; while they allowed the meshuchrarim as Jews to worship there, they had to sit in the back, could not become full members, and were excluded from the community's endogamous marriage circle. At the same time, they were excluded by the Malabar Jews, the much larger community of Jews who had lived in Cochin for perhaps 1,000 years.

Speaking Ladino language and having Sephardic customs, they found the Malabari Jewish community as established in Cochin to be quite different. According to the historian Mandelbaum, there were resulting tensions between the two ethnic communities. The [Sephardi] Jews had some trade links to Europe and useful languages to conduct international trade, i. e., Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish, later on maybe Dutch. These attributes helped their position both financially and politically.

In the early 20th century, Abraham Barak Salem became one of the most prominent Cochin Jews.[1] A descendant of meshuchrarim, he was the first to earn a college degree and the first Cochin Jew of any sort to become a lawyer. He fought against the discrimination against his people. By the 1930s, social discrimination against the meshuchrarim began to diminish. Most Cochin Jews, including the meshuchrarim, emigrated to Israel by the mid-1950s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshuchrarim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochin...o_independence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradesi_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indians_in_Israel