Jewish (And Sri Lankan) Identity

By Charles Sarvan -February 28, 2015

Charles Sarvan

The title of Shlomo Sand’s book, How I Stopped Being A Jew (2014), intrigued me. Isn’t it as impossible for a Jew to cease to be a Jew as it is difficult and unusual for a man to become a woman or vice versa? Isn’t identity in these terms inscribed at birth and, in most cases, unalterable? A Jew is a Jew, and there is no way a person can escape an identity given at birth. It is not within the range of free choice (Sand, pages 1-2.) However, Tamils can become Sinhalese; often it is as simple as changing the consonant ending of the surname into a vowel, Rajaratnam becoming Rajasinghe; Gunaratnam becoming Gunaratne. I quote from my Public Writings on Sri Lanka, Volume 2:

“Professor Yasmine Gooneratne (born Bandaranaike; a niece of SWRD Bandaranaike) suggests in her Relative Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka that the family name may have come from a Tamil officer, Neela Perumal, made high priest of the Temple of the god Saman, and in 1454 ordered to take the name of Nayaka Pandaram, that is, Chief Record Keeper. With time, the name changed to Pandara Nayaka, and thence to the present Bandaranaike. Similarly, there is evidence that the Salagama, Durava and Karava castes were originally Tamil, from South India, and that ‘Hettiarachige’ derives from ‘chief of the Chettis’. (The chettis are described as “a Tamil trading caste”.) End of quote.

Shlomo Sand, born in a displaced-persons’ camp in Austria in 1946 to parents who had survived the Shoah, is now Professor of History at the University of Tel Aviv and the author, among other works, of The Invention of the Jewish People: see, Sarvan, ‘Groundviews’, Colombo, 3 July 2013. Professor Sand is an atheist and holds that human beings created god or the gods, and not vice versa. But, as he observes, a Christian who gave up her religion would not be classified as a Christian – so too, in the Sri Lankan context, a Buddhist who gave up Buddhism – but a Jewish atheist still remains a Jew.Read More