THE POLITICS OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN ANTON SHMAMAS'S ARABESQUES

New directions have been found in the study of Jewish topographies. This article attempts to relocalise Jewish space and move it beyond European and American cityscapes to encompass a wider Jewish geographical horizon. The article explores the summer resort of Alwaye (or Aluva), the holiday home to the Cochin (or Kochi) Jews of south India, as an example of a hitherto unexplored Jewish location. In this holiday space, social divisions influenced by hierarchical perceptions of society in India between Paradesi (“White”), Malabar (“Black”) and “Meshuchrarim”, manumitted slaves, were replicated. It was in Alwaye in the year 1909 that the death of the two‐year old Rivka, nicknamed Dolly, occurred. An elegy in Hebrew written by Dolly’s father, community leader Isaac Elias (I.E.) Hallegua, is mentioned for the first time in Cochin Jewish history. It is hoped that the awareness of the space in which the death occurred and the interconnectedness between Jewish holiday space and Jewish quotidian space will contribute to the ever‐growing field of the study of Jewish landscapes.