A Mother’s Longing: Performances of Sarah in the Bene Israel Akedah

This paper examines Sarah’s maternal role in Bene Israel songs of the Binding of Isaac, where she emerges as a repository of emotion, a divine protector, and an absent yet enduring presence. Drawing on Marathi Jewish texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—composed in verse and influenced by Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and secular musical traditions—the author explores how Sarah’s absence from the biblical Akedah is reinterpreted through song and performance. These adaptations, shaped by South Asia’s multireligious milieu, draw on lyrical tropes of longing central to regional devotional and secular traditions. Through close literary analysis, musicological study, and ethnographic research with Bene Israel women in Bombay, this paper argues that song and performance were not ancillary to Bene Israel religious life but central to shaping scriptural interpretation, gender roles, and community identity in the context of Indian nationalism and Jewish diaspora consciousness.