In his lecture at the Library of Congress, Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Chair in Social Sciences at University of California, Los Angeles, explains that crypto-Jews were especially attracted to India because not only was it a center of trade, but India had established and ancient Jewish settlements along its Western coast.

The presence of these communities meant that crypto-Jews, who had been forced to accept Catholicism but did not want to emigrate to tolerant countries, could operate within the Portuguese Empire with the full freedom of Catholic subjects but away from the Inquisition while collaborating with existing Jewish communities to hide their true beliefs.

He concludes that once the Portuguese Inquisition began, Goa, along with Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and North Africa initially received most of the fleeing Jewish population (regardless of whether they had converted or not), and this situation continued till the middle of the 1500s.

Indeed, as the Professor Saraiva also explains, in "The Marrano Factory", the Conversos of Goa were able to achieve such quick, and remarkable prominence that the Portuguese King, on the advice of the Christian clergy, enacted a law disallowing New Christians from holding positions of high authority.

[4] In Kerala they learned Judeo-Malayalam, the dialect developed by the Malabar Jews, descendants of immigrants who had been there for more than 1,000 years from Israel and Yemen.

In addition, some settled in Madras, now known as Chennai Jews, they worked with the English East India Company in Fort St. George.

By the late 18th century, they had mostly shifted their trading companies to London, and the Jewish community in Madras declined.