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

Research Questions

How does Sarah, as mother, figure in Bene Israel songs of the Binding of Isaac—as a repository of emotion, a divine protector, and an absent yet enduring presence? In what ways are these interpretations informed by the performance practices cultivated within a multireligious South Asian milieu?

Theoretical Framework 

As a foundational myth of Jewish identity, narratives on The Binding of Isaac (Akedah) have proliferated across time, texts, and traditions, extending far beyond the biblical account. We might see Akedah variants in literature and song as modalities by which Jewish communities forge unique identities within the global Jewish diaspora. For the Bene Israel, a Marathi-speaking Jewish community from western India, the onus to articulate a Jewish identity that was also Indian became particularly strong as Indian nationalism was gathering ground in the late nineteenth century. Bene Israel publishing flourished in the late nineteenth century, particularly biblical translation into Marathi metrical forms, a field previously dominated by protestant missionaries. These Bene Israel authors and performers simultaneously carved out a uniquely Jewish space within the emerging nation and reclaimed biblical translation from missionary influence. Most Marathi Jewish literature of this period was composed in verse, designed for performance, and influenced by pre-existing Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and secular musical traditions. 

The Bene Israel text that inaugurated this wave of publication and performance centered on the Binding of Isaac, with Sarah emerging as a pivotal figure—both a grieving mother and a guardian. In these narratives, she is physically absent from Isaac and Abraham; indeed, her separation from Isaac forms the emotional core of the story. Through song and letters, Sarah and Isaac express their longing across the distance.

The presence of Sarah in this and other Bene Israel Akedah narratives suggests an engagement with midrashim that seek to explain Sarah’s absence from Genesis. Additionally, this talk argues that Bene Israel versions of the Akedah draw on lyrical tropes shared across South Asian devotional and secular genres, in which love is represented through longing and certain genres index maternity and the mother goddess. In Marathi storytelling, maternal song genres perform what we might think of as emotional labor within the narrative.

This paper focuses, thus, not on the fact of religious hybridity—a feature of Jewish religious practice throughout the diaspora—but rather on how performance informs the development of biblical figures as characters in the theatrical/performative sense. Sarah, then, emerges in the Bene Israel Akedah(s) not only as a paradigmatic figure of the rich and varied religious landscape of nineteenth century Bombay; she also performs a role within the gendered affective arc of performance. In sum, I argue that song and performance were not merely ancillary to Bene Israel religious life but were central to shaping canonical understandings of gender, scripture, and community identity.

Sources and Background

In 1880, a group of Indian Jewish friends of the Marathi-speaking Bene Israel community attended a Hindu kirtan in Bombay. Inspired by what they heard, Benjamin Shimshon Ashtamkar and his friends resolved to adapt kirtan for Jewish topics and audiences. That same year, Ashtamkar performed the first Jewish kirtan, Abraham Charitra (The Life of Abraham), which was published as a chapbook in 1882. Within just a few years, kirtan had become the most popular form of Bene Israel performance and it remained so for the next forty years.  Abraham Charitra was reprinted posthumously in 1920 within the new name of Isahak Yadnya (The Sacrifice of Isaac), reflecting the fact that even the 1882 version focused entirely on the Binding of Isaac. More specifically, it details Sarah’s grief when she believed her son had been sacrificed, and Isaac’s plea for his mother’s comfort, even when she was nowhere near the sacrificial altar. This theme was later elaborated in Isahak Shalom Awaskar’s 1900 kirtan, Isahak Tanvarpan (Isaac’s Self-Sacrifice), which begins with a lullaby by Sarah and reaches its apotheosis when Isaac’s call to his absent mother. Today, women still sing songs in Marathi about the Akedah. Some of these do not include Sarah, but I argue that even in these cases, she is an absent presence shaping how the story is heard and understood. 

Methodology

This talk interprets three Marathi texts on the Binding of Isaac from the turn of the twentieth century, and draws on eleven months of ethnographic research with Bene Israel women in Bombay who sing Marathi Jewish songs. The author combines close literary readings with musicological and ethnographic analysis to chart a range of Bene Israel understandings of Sarah’s role in the Akedah across the past 150 years. The talk’s theoretical framing is constructed in dialogue with research in ethnomusicology, religious studies, South Asian history, comparative literature, and gender theory.