Recommended listening: Oh, Lovely Parrot! Jewish Women's Songs from Kerala​

The Wife of Joseph Rabban

A wealthy Nāyar woman peers out from behind the sumptuous curtains of her palanquin. Her husband is a Jewish trader who married into her powerful family, giving her descendants rights in his merchant guild. Matrilineal families like hers were crucial to establishing alliances with foreign merchants in the Indian Ocean trade. Marriages like hers became the foundation for the community of Jews in Kerala that has existed for over a thousand years.

In other Women of 1000 news...

Behind the Scenes: Wife of Joseph Rabban

I had a great conversation with scholar Ophira Gamliel after posting my picture about the wife of Joseph Rabban. It turns out that in Gamliel's book Judaism in South India, she advanced a new theory about the identity of Joseph Rabban. Īssuppu Irappān, as his name is transcribed in the Malayalam inscription, may have actually been a Muslim! Gamliel's other research on the Jews of Kerala was crucial to the background I wrote for my piece, but I hadn't read her book so didn't include this possibility in the original writeup for the piece.

Women of 1000 in Oxford!

I have been accepted to present at paper in Oxford in September 2026. This will be my first time giving an academic presentation about Women of 1000! The conference is Gender and Creativity, run by the Gender & Medieval Studies Group. My paper is entitled "Drawing the Global Middle Ages: Women of 1000 AD." I am so honoured to have been accepted and thrilled to participate in a conference on this topic! I found out about it from the Guild of Medievalist Makers, a fantastic group I've been part of for the past year.

r/AskHistorians answer on African history

I recently answered a question on the public history subreddit r/AskHistorians about online primary sources on pre-colonial African history. I enjoyed pulling together various sources I'd used for Women of 1000 and came across some new ones too! The resource I'm most excited about that I didn't know before is Giovanni Ruffini's website, Medieval Nubia. This is a fantastic resource! I've drawn one Nubian story for Women of 1000 before, Martha Mother of Kings, and knowing about this website inspires me to do another sometime.

Coming Up Next

Our next picture will be set in the Andaman Islands. I watched a video about the North Sentinelese that got me going down this rabbit hole, as I hadn't realised there are several Indigenous groups closely related to the North Sentinelese who have had extensive contact with outsiders. Stay tuned to learn more about the Pučikwar people of Baratang Island.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!