Terror, Race, Security

The chapter engages with the two main themes of the book by focusing on the way in India the relationship between Jews and Muslims and imageries of Jewish and Muslim communities became affected by the Mumbai attacks and the general post 9/11 rhetoric of the “war on terror.” The chapter shows that these events and the securitization discourses that emerged in their aftermath created new challenges for local Jewish and Muslims groups, but it also complicates accounts that reduce Jewish-Muslim relations to problems of security. The ethnographic examples presented in this chapter suggest that concerns about the perceived Muslim threat that some of the Jewish respondents exhibited in relation to Indian Muslims ultimately had very little to do with Islam and were embedded in the wider problematics of security issues facing Jewish communities around the world, the politics of Jewish identity arbitration in the State of Israel, and even the reality of caste discrimination in India.