Patrick Comerford
After an evening in the Tai Tai Restaurant on Jalan Tabuan in Kuching, while I was researching the history of the building, I came across some rumours that there was once a Jewish cemetery. However, they proved to be no more than rumours, and I could find no historical evidence for any Jewish presence in Kuching or in Sarawak.
The city of Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of neighbouring was once named Jesselton in honour of Sir Charles James Jessel (1860-1928), a British barrister, magistrate and businessman, who was vice-chairman of the British North Borneo Company (BNBC) in 1903-1909.
Baghdadi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews were integral to the development of Sabah or North Borneo and were pioneers, planters, merchants, political refugees and prisoners of war. Rosalie (Lala) Corpuz has been researching the hidden and diverse history of North Borneo and has told their story.
But I could find no other documented account of a continuous Jewish presence or Jewish community in Kuching or in wider Sarawak. In pursuit of that Jewish story, I had coffee one afternoon last week in the Commons in the Old Court House in Kuching with Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory, the author of The Last Jews of Penang (Petaling Jaya: Matahari Books, 2021).
His book is now out of print, but with its illustrations by Arif Rafhan it recalls Jewish life in George Town, and we talked that afternoon about the history and the legacy of the Jews in Malaysia, stretching back to the 1700s.
There has been little research on the history of the Jews of Penang, and Zayn Gregory relied on local newspaper and magazine articles and one study written in 2002 by an Australia-based researcher, Raimy Ché-Ross. Penang was the home to a Jewish community until the late 1970s, but over the decades these families have left Malaysia.
The first and largest Jewish settlement in what is now Malaysia was found in the bazaars of Malacca, and the Jews of Malacca included Sephardic Jews from Portugal and some Jews from around the Red Sea and Malabar in India.
Due to Portuguese persecutions that continued after the Inquisition, many Jews in Malacca assimilated into the Malacca Portuguese Eurasian community. That creole community is often referred to as Kristang and their Portuguese dialect as Papia Kristang. It is said a number of Kristang-Eurasian families maintain some aspects of Jewish culture, knowingly or unknowingly.
As the British-controlled port in Penang expanded in the early 19th century, it attracted Jewish trading families such as the Sassoons and Meyers from India and Jews Ottoman-ruled Baghdad arrived there fleeing persecutions by Dawud Pasha when he was governor from 1817 to 1831.
Figures from the 1890s show 150-170 Jews living in Penang, although Ezekiel Aaron Manasseh, who migrated from Baghdad in 1895, claimed to have been the only practising Jew in Malaya for 30 years.
After World War I, more Baghdadi Jews moved to Malaya, and at its height the Jewish population of Penang was about 200. As well as the descendants of Baghdadi Jews and of Malabar Jews who roots in India for over 800 years, there were Mizrahi Jews and families whose ancestors came from Armenia and small numbers of Ashkenazi Jews from England, Poland and Romania.
Penang’s only synagogue opened in a former shophouse at 28 Nagore Road in 1929. It had 12 Torah scrolls, its own hazan or cantor to lead services, and the community had its own shohet or ritual butcher.
Joseph Hayeem Jacobs, who was the hazan, the shohet and the mohel who performed ritual circumcisions, came to Baghdad in 1929 with his father Abraham and grandfather Hayoo.
During the Japanese invasion of Malaya, many of the Jewish community was evacuated from Penang to Singapore. Those who remained in Penang were interned by the Japanese during World War II or forced to wear identifying red and white striped tags on their sleeves. After the war, a majority emigrated to Singapore, Australia, Israel and the US, and by 1963 only 20 Penang Jewish families remained in Malaysia.
One of the most prominent Jews from Penang families was the former Chief Minister of Singapore, David Marshall (1908-1995), who played a pivotal role in the negotiations leading to the independence of Malaya. He was the inaugural Chief Minister of Singapore from 1955 to 1956 and was a Malaysian citizen briefly when Singapore was part of Malaysia from 1963 to 1965.
The synagogue in Penang, closed in 1976 when the community could no longer find a minyan, a quorum of ten or more adult Jews needed for public worship. Zayn Gregory recalls how the former synagogue first became a photography shop, then a pharmacy, a florist’s, and then a print shop. Today it is a coffee shop.
The Jewish community in Penang died out when Mordecai (Mordy) David Mordecai, the former manger of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, died on 15 July 2011.
The Jewish Cemetery in Penang dates from 1805 and is believed to be the oldest Jewish cemetery in Malaysia. It is a plot of land measuring 38,087 sq ft (3,538.4 sq m) on Jalan Zainal Abidin, formerly Yahudi Road, a small link road between Burmah Road and Macalister Road in George Town. The oldest tombstone, dated 9 July 1835, is of Shoshan Levi, an English Jewish benefactor who donated the site after she recovered from an illness.
There are about 107 graves in the cemetery, most in the shape of a triangular vaulted-lid casket. Jewish people from Penang buried in the cemetery include members of the Manasseh, Mordecai, Jacob, Ephraim and Moses families.
The graves of the Cohens are in a separate corner of the cemetery, and they include the grave of Eliaho Hayeem Victor Cohen, a lieutenant in the British Indian Army killed in an accident on 10 October 1941. It is the only grave in the cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
The most recent grave is that of Modi Mordecai, the last Jewish permanent resident of Penang, who died in 2011 shortly before his 90th birthday. His parents, David and Mozelle Mordecai, came from Baghdad to Penang in 1895.
Officially, the cemetery is still open for burial and is managed by a board of trustees established in 1885. It was once a green lung, but much it has been cemented over. Yahudi Road (or Jewish Road) in Penang, where the majority of the Penang Jewish population once lived, has since been renamed Jalan Zainal Abidin after a local politician, erasing another part of the Jewish legacy in Malaysia.
Many of the descendants of the Jewish families of Penang now live in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the US, especially in New York. The only significant presence remaining is the Jewish cemetery and the old synagogue, now a coffee shop.
Zayn Gregory’s book The Last Jews of Penang, with illustrations by Arif Rafhan, was published by Matahari Books in 2021. He is a US-born data analyst, a lecturer in landscape architecture at the University of Malaysia Sarawak and a television host, and he writes and translates Malay poems.
When we met in Kuching last week, he told me how most of the people in Malaysia today who have some Jewish origins or ancestry somewhere in their family trees are descended from people converted to Islam to marry into the Malay community.
He is American-born with a Polish Catholic father and a Jewish mother. He converted to Islam to Islam at age 17, and later moved from Detroit, Michigan in 2002, with his Malaysian-born wife to Kuching, where they are the parents of seven children.
Zayn Gregory’s book tells the history of the once-vibrant Jewish community in old George Town, and refers to some of its famous figures like David Marshall and . Modi Mordecai. He speaks of his book as a requiem of sorts for a community that used to be.
The book tells a story that contributed to the rich multicultural life and religious diversity that was part of Malaya until the early 1960s. Although the book is now out of print, Zayn Gregory hopes it continues to help to build bridges.
After our conversation in Kuching last week, I realised a new edition would be major contribution to religious pluralism, tolerance and diversity in Malaysia today.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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