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Code-switching is a linguistic term for when speakers of two languages (like say Chinese and English) who can each speak both languages mix words and phrases from the languages together. While code-switching is a still controversial area for linguists most agree that code-switching is a thing. For example, one of my classmates commented "the 天气 today is 不好" or in English English "the weather today isn't good" or my friends will say "yesterday the 阿姨 was 很麻烦" or "the maid was being troublesome." These sentences aren't really English but they also aren't really Chinese ether, they is a mix of both languages. I myself will great people, even my English speaking foreign friends, with a 你好, say goodbye with a 再见, and say "thanks" with a 谢谢. Sometimes people will also throw in whole Chinese sentences in an English conversation. So for instance today when I had to answer a question for a classmate I commented to my friends who I was talking to "他是我的同学" or "he is my classmate." In general, I have noticed the more confidence someone has in their Chinese the more code-switching happens. My friends who just started studying the language use Chinese words far less than my friends who have studied Chinese for some time. I even noticed I have been code-switching more in my second semester at ECNU than my first. Apparently this is just a normal part of speaking multiple languages with others who speak the same multiple languages. It is apparently super noticeable in Hong Kong where most of the population speaks Cantonese and English so they will often use English words or phrases embedded in otherwise Cantonese sentences. I have also noticed I will embed more Yiddish in my English the longer I spend at Chabad, at home, or talking with other Jews in general. At Chabad, a comment like "oy vai ist mir, he's a schmuch" or "ugh, he is an idiot" is not uncommon. I am glad most of the people at Chabad don't have the best Chinese, I don't even wan't to know what my English would be like then. I think some people back at Juniata will lose me when I mention "chhhh! Our 服务员 is a putz" or "ugh, our waiter/waitress is an idiot."
I wasn't planning on taking another trip this semester but my Neo-Confucian Philsophy professor set up a rather neat sounding trip to Hangzhou for this weekend. It will be a short trip, two days one night, and a very cheap trip, but it should be cool. Hangzhou is a city in Zhejiang Provence noted for its famous West Lake (西湖), Neo-Confucian philosophers, and increasing importance as a center of eCommerce. Wikipedia also says an extension of the Kaifeng Jews formally lived in Hangzhou but now there is no remains of the Hangzhou Jewish community.
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. Traditionally, the Passover festivities are a two day affair so I hit the Metro again to return to Pudong for another Passover Seder. This time it was at a American ex-pat friend's house, not the Kerry Hotel, and the Seder was the Rabbi Yonah Bookstein's 10 Minute Seder, not Chabad's 3 hour Seder. Finding the complex was easy enough, the buildings in the complex were laid out strange so it took a bit of effort to find the place but I made it on time (enough). While the Seder wasn't 10 minutes, it was pretty quick. Dinner was very good. I finally got home made matzo ball soup, the one major Passover dish Chabad forgot, with an IKEA smoked salmon. Both were very good, Passover simply doesn't feel right without smoked fish and matzo ball soup. We then did the traditional chicken, potatoes, and vegetables all of which were nice. Finally I had a excellent home made cheese cake, it wasn't too sweet which is how I like my cheese cakes. We all then chatted about the ex-pat life until about 11:00PM when I had to return to Puxi.
I would say my Passover experiences in Shanghai, while different from each other, were both nice. It is always cool to see how similar major Jewish holidays are, even when you are on the other side of the world. It is also nice that if you don't have family to spend Passover with, since you are in China and your family is in New Jersey, someone will invite you to their Seder. The Maggid (the reading of the Passover story) begins with a short paragraph proclaiming "this [matzo] is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat; whoever is in need, let him come and conduct the Seder of Passover. This year [we are] here; next year in the land of Israel. This year [we are] slaves; next year [we will be] free people." It is nice that this sentiment is more than just empty words. Happy Passover all. Last night was the first night of Passover, the two day Jewish holiday commemorating Exodus and Moses's flight from Egypt with the Jewish people. Since Passover is usually a larger affair, Chabad of Pudong usually decides to hold their annual Seder in the Kerry Hotel, Pudong. Getting there wasn't too hard, the hotel's mall and the subway hooked up so it wasn't that hard to find. Some of the nicer Chinese hotels, like the Kerry, end up a bit labyrinthine with malls connecting to restaurants connecting to business centers connecting to ballrooms. I did eventually find the correct ballroom, right on time but still too early. It is actually quite a small world, I met some of my both my American and Chinese neighbors, one guy form Morristown, NJ and another guy who lived in the building across from mine at ECNU (he will only be in Shanghai for a few weeks though). While Chabad does a full Seder they are actually quite efficient with it and there were enough twists to keep it interesting. Since the crowd was so international anyone who spoke a language that wasn't English, Hebrew, or Chinese (the three languages we read the Four Questions in) could read the first of the Four Questions (Why is this night different form all other nights?) in their native tongue; while there were the standard languages of Italian, German, and French we also had people read the First Question in Kurdish, Belorussian, Japanese, and Afrikaans. The food was pretty good and fully Kosher since the Rabbi Koshered one of the Kerry's kitchens and his wife supervised the cooking process. It was the classic chicken, soup, and salmon mix but familiar done well is sometimes nice. I still don't know why Israeli Kosher wines don't sell better in China. The Rabbi has a thing for a Zion Winery of Mishur Adumim, Israel (not to be confused for the Zion Wines of Zion National Park, Utah) which tastes like it could have been made by Great Wall Wines (my preferred Chinese brand of wine). The biggest issue I had was getting back to ECNU. I thought I was good, me and the other guy who was staying at ECNU decided to split a cab. Unforntually, we seemed to have found the one cabbie in all of Shanghai who didn't speak or read standard Mandarin. I ended up giving him my phone with a map just displaying the way to East China Normal. It worked out in the end, even if I ended up back on campus a bit later than I wanted too.
This evening is the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover in Shanghai. I have two Seders scheduled, a Seder at Chabad and a Seder at a local Jewish ex-pats house. I might do two posts or do one bigger Passover retrospective post, don't know yet. I will update you all after I do Passover.
So to those of you celebrating, have a good holiday. To those of you not, have a nice day anyway. In my recent post about the inclusive religions of China, I mentioned Puyi (溥儀) who was the last Emperor of China and the only Emperor of Manchukuo. I realized that not everyone might have the context for what Manchukuo was and how did Puyi end up as its Emperor. In short, the Great Empire of Manchukuo (大滿洲帝國) was the Japanese puppet state set up in Manchuria, northern China, after the Japanese took the region form the Chinese in the early 1930s. Legally Manchukuo was a constitutional monarchy with the Concordia Association of Manchukuo (滿洲國協和會) serving as its only legal party; minority groups were permitted to have their own political organizations (there were actually two Jewish political organizations, the Betarim Jew Zionist Movement and the Far Eastern Jewish Council under the direction of Dr. Abraham Kaufman but I can’t find much information on ether) but they could not contest the rule of the Concordia Association. In practice, Manchukuo was never independent form Japanese rule: the Manchukian military relied on the Japanese military, Japanese officials wrote most of Manchukuo’s laws, and Manchukuo was a member of the Japanese backed Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In Puyi’s book From Emperor to Citizen he describes the Manchukian Privy Council Meetings where the Council would meet to agree that the Japanese wrote awesome laws and that Puyi should sign them without question. The Japanese also attempted to make Manchukuo more Japanese: Japanese was an official language of Manchukuo, a large number of Japanese settlers moved to Manchukuo, the Emperor of Japan Hirohito was equally revered to Emperor of Manchukuo Puyi (in Form Emperor to Citizen Puyi mentions that all classrooms in Manchukuo had portraits of both himself and Hirohito), the Japanese tried to integrate the Manchukian Imperial family into the Japanese Imperial family (Puyi discusses how the Japanese were able to get his brother to marry a distant relative of Hirohito and how they wanted him to marry a Japanese women), and (as I mentioned in the inclusive religions blog post) the Japanese attempted to get the Manchukians to worship Shinto gods. While the Japanese did attempt to preserve some elements of China, for example Puyi became Emperor because having the former Qing Emperor be the Emperor of Manchukuo would give legitimacy to the new state, I believe that Manchukuo would have gotten less and less Chinese as time went on. I do not believe that Manchukuo would have remained independent for very long if the Japanese won the Second World War, Manchukuo would have eventually been annexed into Japan like Taiwan or Korea. Today Manchukuo is not remembered well, Chinese historians will often call the Great Empire of Manchukuo something like the “Illegitimate Manchu State” or the “Manchu Puppet Government” and write about the war crimes that took place there. Since 2004, there are a small number of people in Hong Kong who claim to be the Manchukuo Temporary Government (滿洲國臨時政府), but they are kind of a Poe’s Law type entity where it is hard to tell if they are serious about reestablishing the Empire of Manchukuo, commenting on the modern Chinese government, joking, or are basically a bunch of Chinese political historical LARPers. Oh ya, if you are worried about poor poor Emperor Puyi don’t. He died peacefully in a Beijing hotel 1967 after being pardoned by the People’s Republic working as a gardener for the Beijing Botanical Garden (Puyi quite liked gardening and spent a good deal of his time as Emperor of Manchukuo gardening).
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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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