Kaifeng Jews
The Kaifeng Jews are members of a small Jewish community in Kaifeng, in the Henan province of China, whose members had largely assimilated into Chinese society while preserving some Jewish traditions and customs. Their origin and time of arrival in Kaifeng are a matter of debate among experts.
History
Most scholars believe that a Jewish community has existed in Kaifeng since the Northern Song Dynasty, though some scholars date their arrival to the Tang Dynasty, or earlier. Kaifeng, then the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, was a cosmopolitan city on a branch of the Silk Road. It is surmised that a small community of Mizrahi Jews, most likely from Persia or India, or perhaps fleeing the Crusades, arrived either overland or by a sea route, and settled in the city, building a synagogue in 1163.During the Ming Dynasty, a Ming emperor conferred eight surnames upon the Jews, by which they are identifiable today: Ai, Shi, Gao, Gan, Jin, Li, Zhang, and Zhao. By the beginning of the 20th century, one of these Kaifeng clans, the Zhang, had largely converted to Islam.
Leaders among this community were called "mullahs" in a stone inscription giving the community’s own account of itself and its origins.
A catastrophic flood in 1642 destroyed the synagogue, and considerable efforts were made to save the scriptures. One man of the Gao clan, Gao Xuan, dove repeatedly into the flooded synagogue to rescue what he could, and afterward all seven clans helped restore and rewrite the 13 scrolls. Floods and fire repeatedly destroyed the books of the Kaifeng synagogue; they obtained some from Ningxia and Ningbo to replace them, and another Hebrew Torah scroll was bought from a Muslim in Ning-keang-chow in Shen-se, who acquired it from a dying Jew at Canton.
The existence of Jews in China was unknown to Europeans until 1605, when Matteo Ricci, then established in Beijing, was visited by a Jew from Kaifeng, who had come to Beijing to take examinations for his jinshi degree. According to his account in De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, his visitor, named Ai Tian, explained that he worshipped one God. It is recorded that when he saw a Christian image of Mary with Jesus, he believed it to be a picture of Rebecca with Esau or Jacob. Ai said that many other Jews resided in Kaifeng; they had a splendid synagogue and possessed a great number of written materials and books.
About three years after Ai's visit, Ricci sent a Chinese Jesuit lay brother to visit Kaifeng; he copied the beginnings and ends of the holy books kept in the synagogue, which allowed Ricci to verify that they indeed were the same texts as the Pentateuch known to Europeans, except that they did not use Hebrew diacritics.
When Ricci wrote to the "ruler of the synagogue" in Kaifeng, telling him that the Messiah the Jews were waiting for had come already, the archsynagogus wrote back, saying that the Messiah would not come for another ten thousand years. Nonetheless, apparently concerned with the lack of a trained successor, the old rabbi offered Ricci his position, if the Jesuit would join their faith and abstain from eating pork. Later, another three Jews from Kaifeng, including Ai's nephew, stopped by the Jesuits' house while visiting Beijing on business, and got themselves baptized. They told Ricci that the old rabbi had died, and.
Later, a number of European Jesuits visited the Kaifeng community as well.
The Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s led to the dispersal of the community, but it later returned to Kaifeng. Three stelae with inscriptions were found at Kaifeng. The oldest, dating from 1489, commemorates the construction of a synagogue in 1163. The inscription states that the Jews came to China from India during the Han Dynasty period. It cites the names of 70 Jews with Chinese surnames, describes their audience with an unnamed Song Dynasty emperor, and lists the transmission of their religion from Abraham down to Ezra the scribe. The second tablet, dating from 1512 details their Jewish religious practices. The third, dated 1663, commemorates the rebuilding of the Qingzhen si synagogue and repeats information that appears in the other two stelae.
Two of the stelae refer to a famous tattoo written on the back of Song Dynasty General Yue Fei. The tattoo, which reads "boundless loyalty to the country", first appeared in a section of the 1489 stele talking about the Jews’ “boundless loyalty to the country and Prince”. The second appeared in a section of the 1512 stele talking about how Jewish soldiers and officers in the Chinese armies were “boundlessly loyal to the country.”
Father Joseph Brucker, a Roman Catholic researcher of the early 20th century, notes that Ricci's account of Chinese Jews indicates that there were only in the range of ten or twelve Jewish families in Kaifeng in the late 16th to early 17th centuries, and that they had reportedly resided there for five or six hundred years. It was also stated in the manuscripts that there was a greater number of Jews in Hangzhou. This could be taken to suggest that loyal Jews fled south along with the soon-to-be crowned Emperor Gaozong to Hangzhou. In fact, the 1489 stele mentions how the Jews "abandoned Bianliang" after the Jingkang Incident.
Despite their isolation from the rest of the Jewish diaspora, the Jews of Kaifeng preserved Jewish traditions and customs for many centuries. In the 17th century, assimilation began to erode these traditions. The rate of intermarriage between Jews and other ethnic groups, such as the Han Chinese, and the Hui and Manchu minorities in China, increased. The destruction of the synagogue in the 1860s led to the community's demise. However, J.L. Liebermann, the first Western Jew to visit Kaifeng in 1867, noted that "they still had a burial ground of their own". In 1868 it was reported that their liturgy consisted only of pieces from the Bible. S.M. Perlmann, a Shanghai businessman and scholar, wrote in 1912 that "they bury their dead in coffins, but of a different shape than those of the Chinese are made, and do not attire the dead in secular clothes as the Chinese do, but in linen".
Today
In China, due to the political situation, research on the Kaifeng Jews and Judaism in China came to a standstill until the beginning of the 1980s, when political and economic reforms were implemented. In the 1980s, the Sino-Judaic Institute was founded by an international group of scholars to further research the history of the Jewish communities in China, promote educational projects related to the history of the Jews in China and assist the extant Jews of Kaifeng. The establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Israel in 1992 rekindled interest in Judaism and the Jewish experience, especially in light of the fact that 25,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai during the Nazi period.It is difficult to estimate the number of Jews in China. Numbers may change simply because of a change in official attitudes. The last census revealed about 400 official Jews in Kaifeng, now estimated at some 100 families totalling approximately 500 people. Up to 1,000 residents have ties to Jewish ancestry, though only 40 to 50 individuals partake in Jewish activities.
Some descendants of Kaifeng's Jewish community say their parents and grandparents told them that they were Jewish and would one day "return to their land", others are only vaguely aware of their ancestry.
The Kaifeng Jews intermarried with local Chinese sufficiently to be indistinguishable in appearance from their non-Jewish neighbors. One trait that differentiated them from their neighbors was not eating pork. Qu Yinan, a Chinese woman who discovered her Jewish ancestry after her mother attended a conference on minorities in 1981, says her family did not eat pork or shellfish and her grandfather always wore a blue skullcap.
Within the framework of contemporary rabbinical Judaism, matrilineal transmission of Jewishness is predominant, while Chinese Jews based their Jewishness on patrilineal descent. As a result, in Israel they are required to undergo conversion in order to receive Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.
After contact with Jewish tourists, some of the Jews of Kaifeng have reconnected to mainstream Jewry. Recently a family of Kaifeng Jewish descendants formally converted to Judaism and accepted Israeli citizenship. Their experiences are described in the documentary film, Kaifeng, Jerusalem. On October 20, 2009, the first group of Kaifeng Jews arrived in Israel, in an aliyah operation coordinated by Shavei Israel.
In the 21st century, both the Sino-Judaic Institute and Shavei Israel sent teachers to Kaifeng to help interested community members learn about their Jewish heritage, building on the pioneering work of the American Judeo-Christian Timothy Lerner. However, in 2014, the authorities closed down the Jewish school and by the summer of 2015 both organizations' teachers had been expelled, community gatherings were prohibited, the various museum exhibits on the Kaifeng Jews closed to visitors, Jewish group tours forbidden, and the synagogue well filled in and closed off. Difficulties with the authorities continued in the following years. Advocates for the Kaifeng Jewish descendants are currently exploring ways to have Chinese authorities recognize the antiquity of the Kaifeng Jews and allow those interested a way to practice their Chinese Jewish way of life.
Kaifeng manuscripts
A number of surviving written works are housed at Hebrew Union College's Klau Library in Cincinnati, Ohio. Among the works in that collection are a siddur in Chinese characters and a Hebrew codex of the Bible. The codex is notable in that, while it ostensibly contains vowels, it was clearly copied by someone who did not understand them. While the symbols are accurate portrayals of Hebrew vowels, they appear to be placed randomly, thereby rendering the voweled text as gibberish. Since Modern Hebrew is generally written without vowels, a literate Hebrew speaker can disregard these markings, as the consonants are written correctly, with few scribal errors.Also at the Klau Library is a haggadah from the 17th century and another from the 18th century, one written in Jewish-Persian hand, the other in Chinese Hebrew square script, using text primarily from an early stage of the Persian Jewish rite. The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China has a facsimile of one manuscript and a sample of the other, the full text of the Hebrew/Aramaic and Judeo-Persian haggadah, as well as an annotated English translation.
The British Library houses a Torah scroll from the Kaifeng Synagogue.
Controversy
The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions
In The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions: The Legacy of the Jewish Community in Ancient China, Tiberiu Weisz, a teacher of Hebrew history and Chinese religion, presents his own translations of the 1489, 1512, and 1663 stone stelae left by the Kaifeng Jews. Based on the new information gleaned from this translation, Weisz theorizes after the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE, disenchanted Levites and Kohanim parted with the Prophet Ezra and settled in Northwestern India. Sometime prior to 108 BCE, these Jews had migrated to Gansu province, China and were spotted by the Chinese general Li Guangli, who was sent to expand the borders of Han Dynasty China. Centuries later, the Jews were expelled from China proper during the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution, where they lived in the region of Ningxia. Weisz believes they later returned to China during the Song Dynasty when its second emperor, Taizong, sent out a decree seeking the wisdom of foreign scholars.In a review of the book, Irwin M. Berg, a lawyer and friend of the Kaifeng Jewish community, claims Weisz never figured the many religious documents—Torah, Haggadah, prayer books, etc.—into his thesis and only relied on the stelae themselves. Such documents can be roughly dated from their physical and scribal characteristics. Even though he refers to Persian words utilized in the stelae, Weisz did not include a study on when the Judeo-Persian language of the liturgical documents first came into use in his thesis. Judeo-Persian first developed in Central Asia during the 8th century, well after the author supposes the Jews first entered China. Berg questions the historical reliability of the three stone inscriptions themselves. He gives one anachronistic example where the Jews claim it was an emperor of the Ming Dynasty who bequeathed the land used to build their first synagogue in 1163 during the Song Dynasty.
Authenticity of the Kaifeng Jews
In 2004, Dr Xun Zhou, a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, published doubts regarding the authenticity of the Kaifeng community. Zhou asserts that the apparent presence of the Jews was largely a Western cultural construct, which grew following the publication by James Finn of The Jews in China and The Orphan Colony of Jews in China whose initial research was based upon the accounts of the 17th century Jesuit missionaries. She maintains that the community had no Torah scrolls until 1851, when they suddenly appeared to be sold to eager Western collectors. She also states that drawings of the synagogue were doctored in the West because the original did not look like one, and that the Kaifeng community claimed to have kept some Jewish practices since before they are known to have begun. Xun Zhou's conclusion is that the Kaifeng community was not Jewish in any meaningful sense. Her hypothesis is countered by historical evidence, artifacts now residing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and by the persistence of memory among the Jewish descendants themselves.Recent findings
Yu Peng completely rejects the Song-entry theory, which is widely accepted by many Chinese scholars. The Sinologists Chen Changqi and Wei Qianzhi argue that the Jews went to China in 998, as Song History records that in the year 998 monk Ni-wei-ni and others had travelled for seven years from India to pay homage to Emperor Song Zhenzong. They take it as given that Ni-wei-ni was not a Buddhist monk but a Jewish rabbi. Zhang Qianhong and Liu Bailu even cite one statement in Song History as proof that a large population of Jewish expatriates, having followed monk Ni-wei-ni all the way from India, went to Kaifeng on 20 February 998. However, after careful research in Fo-zu Tong-ji, a Buddhist book composed by monk Zhi-pan in the Song Dynasty, Yu Peng finds the following statement: "In 998, the Central Indian monk Ni-wei-ni and others came to China to meet Emperor Song Zhenzong with Buddhist relics, scriptures, banyan leafs and several banyan seeds." The description in the book uses the term Sha-men Ni-wei-ni rather than Seng Ni-wei-ni, as used in Song History, though both words mean "Buddhist monk" in Chinese. That said, monk Ni-wei-ni did not bring Western cloth with him, and that he was not a Jewish rabbi.Yu Peng proposes a Yuan-entry theory that the Kaifeng Jews entered China together with the Hui-hui people during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, as Chinese sources do not mention the existence of Chinese Jews until the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. He argues that the Kaifeng Jews were from Persia.
Based on a sentence on the 1679 stela that mentions An-du-la of Kaifeng Jewish Chao clan as Jin-yi Gong, Yu points out that the synagogue was initially built rather than rebuilt or restored in 1421, and that two figures in the 1489 inscription, An-du-la of Song Dynasty and An Cheng of Ming Dynasty, were actually one person. According to the genealogical sequence of the Kaifeng Jewish Li clan in a book, Diary of the Defence of Pien, he ascertains that the earliest reliable date for Jewish arrival in Kaifeng is the Hung Wu Period of the Ming Dynasty. Yu also claims that the imperial policy of discrimination and forced assimilation toward the Semu people during the early Ming Dynasty that forcibly accelerated the assimilation of the Kaifeng Jews into the Chinese population. The Jews pushed their phase of immigration from Mongol Yuan to Song Dynasty, Han Dynasty or even Zhou Dynasty to make it seem that the Jews had been settled in China for almost as long as the Han Chinese and to avoid being discriminated against or persecuted as foreigners.
Books and films
Literary references
American novelist Pearl S. Buck, raised in China and fluent in Chinese, set one of her historical novels in a Chinese Jewish community. The novel deals with the cultural forces gradually eroding the separate identity of the Jews, including intermarriage. The title character, the Chinese bondmaid Peony, loves her master's son, David ben Ezra, but cannot marry him due to her lowly station. He eventually marries a high-class Chinese woman, to some consternation of his mother, who is proud of her unmixed heritage. Descriptions of remnant names, such as a "Street of the Plucked Sinew", and of customs such as refraining from the eating of pork, are prevalent throughout the novel.The Broadway musical Chu Chem is a fictional tale that revolves around the Kaifeng Jewish community. In the show, a group of European actors join a troupe of Chinese performers to present the story of Chu Chem, a scholar who journeys to Kaifeng with his wife Rose and daughter Lotte to learn about his ancestors and find a husband for the girl.