Note 912 — Chapter IX · UNLUCKY DAYS

These Toda taboos suggest at once the Jewish sabbatarian regulations and the methods of evading or mitigating them devised by the rabbis (above, p. 264). Until the present day the Bene-Israel, a body of Jews domiciled for many centuries in the Bombay Presidency, have preserved the old Hebrew fasts and festivals, though under Indian names and with Indian features superadded. Their habit of observing Saturday as a Sabbath and of giving their oxen rest from the oil-mills on that day has gained for them among their Hindu neighbours the name of “the Saturday oil-men” (J. H. Lord, “Bene-Israel,” Hastings’s Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, ii, 470 sq.).