Apart from being close to MATLAB, a goal of Julia is to make it easy to just type mathematical formulas straight off the page and into your code. 1-based indexing makes this so much easier, even if it seems somewhat depraved to a computer scientist.
In my experience, 0-based indexing is way more common in mathematics. Maybe it depends on the field you're working in. Off the top of my head, dimensions are numbered from zero in relativity and particle physics, Fourier series only make sense with 0-based indexing, coefficients of polynomials are numbered from zero, Taylor series, indexing by taking the modulo ...