The Jewish Gandhi and Barack Obama - Barack is a Muslim name

'Barack is a Muslim name!' my American interlocutor insisted.

'Oh no, it isn't,' I shot back, 'We had one in India long before the name was famous in the United States, and he was called the 'Jewish Gandhi'.'

The Jews who gave the 'Old Jew Town' in Kochi its name are a rapidly diminishing presence. By some accounts there may now be fewer than a hundred left in Kochi of a thriving community that once numbered in the thousands. But they were still a visible presence in the town up to the 1950s, and there is still an A B Salem Road in Kochi.

A B Salem is now all but forgotten, so much so that even the small road named in his honour after his death is occasionally called 'Abu Salem Road'. It is an easy enough mistake to make I suppose, but it is completely incorrect. The initials 'A B' stood for 'Abraham Barak,' and the man himself was still alive up to the mid-1960s.

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