So I got a request to write a blog post about the Jews of Kaifeng. While I have written about Sino-Judaic stuff before I have avoided the Jews of Kaifeng largely because I didn't feel like I knew much about them and that I have never been to Kaifeng. Since I have brought them up a few times I guess I should say something about the small but important community of ethnically Chinese Jews. I would like to note though that basically everything I know on this topic is from the research and work of Prof. Xu Xin (徐新) of the University of Nanjing (南京大学), he is a far better source for this type of thing than I am and all of his work in the field of Jewish Studies is extremely interesting.
While the vast majority of China's Jews, particularly within the last 100 years, are ethnically foreign (the Chinese tend to lump all whiteish foreigners together) this has not always been the case. In the days of the silk road, Jews, probably for Persia, made their way over to China as merchants and traders. Like the Hui people, the ethnically Chinese Muslims who make my favorite noodles, some Jews decided to stay in China, marrying Chinese women becoming less and less Persian and more and more Chinese. What is interesting about the Jews of Kaifeng though is while they became more and more Chinese they stayed as Jewish as they began for quite a long time. In Prof. Xin's book The Jews of Kaifeng he described the Kaifeng Jewish Community's synagogue with its bilingual Chinese/Hebrew inscriptions asking the one Jewish G-d to bless the Chinese Emperor and explaining how to use the teachings of Confucius to help forfill the 10 Commandments Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. During the community's golden age in the Sung Dynasty, the Jews of Kaifeng produced several graduates of China's intensive civil service exams and were as pillars of the community. Unfortunately, China's increasing isolation and a series of catastrophes that wrecked the once great city of Kaifeng destroyed the Jewish community there. Fortunately, a good deal of scholarship was done on the community before they disappeared. Some Chinese missionaries believed that the Old Testament was incomplete, because it fails to mention Jesus and the New Testament quotes several Old Testament passages that don't seem to actually be in the Old Testament at all, so were hoping the Kaifeng Jews, being a relatively isolated community for most of their history, would have these lost sections. To their displeasure, they found that the Kaifeng Jews were Jew Jews, using the same Old Testament the Jews of Europe and the Middle East were using even after a long period of isolation from those communities. By the 19th Century, the Kaifeng Jews almost totally forgot their heritage; the knowledge of Hebrew and Torah died with their last Rabbi. Still to this day there is a Teaching Torah Lane in Kaifeng (it was formally called the Lane of the Sinew Removing Religion, another Chinese reference to Jews) marking the site of the community's former synagogue. Some of the Kaifeng Jews never forgot their roots however, remembering that they are different from the majority Han Chinese and, unlike most Chinese, avoided eating pork. The small community of about 100 people is having a mini-renaissance with increased interest in their community from the Jewish world and China's new infatuation with the Jews following the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and the State of Israel. Last year, a few Kaifeng Jews even made Aliyah to the State of Israel. While their story might be strange, Am Yisrael Chai Zai Zhongguo.
2 Comments
Dad
5/3/2017 08:18:26 am
That was fascinating. But do the Jews of Kaifeng still go out for Chinese food on Christmas eve?
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Famed Purveyor of Rice
5/3/2017 01:37:55 pm
This post was great -- even better than the one about the piano museum
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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