Jews in China

The exhibition “Jews in China”, organised by the Confucius Institute in Madrid in tandem with the Sefarad-Israel Centre, offers a chronological journey through the fascinating and barely known history of the Jewish presence in China. By means of images, documents and testimonies, the exhibition shows how, after spreading throughout Central Asia, Jewish migrants arrived in China to settle permanently, and some communities remained there to this day, such as the waning, long-lived Kaifeng community.

The first part of the exhibition, “From Judea to China”, traces this migratory journey back to the expansion of Jewish communities across Central Asia along the trade routes of the Silk Roads, from the 4^th to the 10^th centuries. The history of the Jews in China begins in the middle of the 2^nd century, in Judea, after the Third Jewish-Roman War, when a considerable part of the surviving Jews fled to the neighbouring Parthian Empire, where they settled in different regions such as Radhan, near modern Baghdad, or further east, in the Central Asian city of Merv, among others. Centuries later, the Radhanite Jews, descendants of this wave of migrants, wound up controlling the Steppe Silk Road, establishing trade networks that linked Kiev with the prosperous coastal cities of Tang China between the 9^th and 12^th centuries.

The second part of the exhibition focuses on “The Kaifeng Jewish Community”, founded during the Song dynasty (11^th century) after a group of Judeo-Persian merchants arrived in the city in 1100. About 500 Jewish merchant families established a community there that endured for almost a thousand years, until its gradual yet steep decline in the 20^th century. The exhibition delves into their traditions and examines their integration into Chinese society, their interaction with Jesuit missionaries in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, as well the causes of their gradual assimilation.

Finally, the epilogue illustrates how the decline of the Kaifeng community coincided with new waves of Jewish emigration to China in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Factors such as the British Empire’s expansion in Asia, conflicts in Eastern Europe and anti-Semitic pogroms resulted in the arrival of Jews to cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Harbin, turning them into hubs of the Jewish diaspora. Hence, this exhibition not only recalls the history of Jews in China but also highlights its legacy in the cultural identity and historical memory of both peoples.

From Judea to China

Chronology:

From colonial Judea to the Persian Empire

In the year 136 CE, after quelling the rebellion led by Simon bar Kokhba, Roman legions prevailed in the Third Jewish-Roman War, thus putting an end to the cycle of Jewish-Roman Wars which culminated in the execution of revered religious leaders such as Rabbi Akiva, and the calamitous deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents of the former province of Judea. Barred from Jerusalem by imperial decree, decimated by the wrath of Emperor Hadrian (r. 117-138), many of the surviving Jews emigrated eastward to the Parthian Empire, at the time ruled by the Arsacid dynasty.

In less than two centuries, Jewish migrants scattered about, settling across the length and breadth of Parthian territory, from the capital at Ctesiphon, a few kilometres south of modern Baghdad, to the distant oasis-city of Merv, near the Caspian Sea, where a Jewish community was already flourishing by the 4th century. Over time, members of the thriving community at Merv opted to head eastward. By the 8th century, the outline of established Jewish communities began to emerge in the most important regions of Central Asia.

Images:

Inner panel of the Arch of Titus, close-up of the fall of Jerusalem

Map detailing the border between Rome and the Parthian (Arsacid) Empire, ca. 116 CE

Early Jewish communities in Central Asia

The lure of expanding their trade into new markets likely prompted several members of Jewish communities throughout the Persian Empire to venture into ever more remote regions of Central Asia. During the 7th and 8th centuries, new Jewish communities appeared in Central Asia’s major urban centres, such as Samarkand and Panjikent (cities that endure as part of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, respectively).

The audacious Judeo-Persian diaspora, however, advanced even further eastward, settling in the oasis-kingdoms that surrounded the treacherous Taklamakan Desert, the former threshold between Central Asia and East Asia, now located in the northwestern portion of the People’s Republic of China. In the ruins of the Buddhist oasis-kingdom of Khotan, for example, more than a century of excavations have corroborated a significant Jewish presence in what used to be the final stage of a teeming, arduous trade route linking northwestern China with the heart of Central Asia.

At the outset of the 20th century, the intrepid British-Jewish explorer Aurel Stein (1862-1943) discovered in the ruins of Khotan a curious trade letter written in the Judeo-Persian dialect, dated to the late 8th century. In Khotan too, more than a century later, in 2004, a team of archaeologists excavated a second, well-preserved Judeo-Persian letter – two sides of the same correspondence between Jewish merchants well-established in the region. The letter found in 2004, dated to around 790 and translated by the scholar Zhang Zhan, concerns the sheep trade, while also recording the various kinds of bribes that Jewish merchants reportedly handed out to officials of various ranks in the Khotanese kingdom’s hierarchy.

Testimony:

“In the name of the benevolent Lord God, a hundred thousand greetings… O Rabbi, regards and healthiness!… The gifts that we ordered to bring are appropriate… The gift for the ruler: a vase, one kafiz of capers, five Chinese pints of dwgbyx, one Chinese pint of dmbyr, one stater of the Chinese scent… In the letter you wrote: “They still wanted money for the sheep, and I did not give it.” You did not do well. If this letter reaches you, and the ruler’s daughter does not come to an agreement with you, however much money she may ask for the sheep, please give it to her, and make an agreement with her”.

   From The Silk Road: A New History with Documents, Valerie Hansen, 381-2

Image:

Judeo-Persian business letter found by Aurel Stein on the outskirts of Khotan in 1901. It concerns the sheep trade, as well as bribes paid to officials of the Khotanese kingdom

© From the collections of the British Library: Or.8212/166

Mentions of Jews during the Tang Dynasty

About 2,000 kilometres separate the oasis-kingdom of Khotan from the city of Dunhuang, one of the two main customs houses standing on the threshold between Central Asia and the sinitic world of East Asia. In the oasis-city of Dunhuang converged the main circuits of the Silk Road, before leading down to the Hexi corridor in Gansu province. By the 8th century, Dunhuang came to be a prosperous border town under the suzerainty of the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). Earlier Chinese empires had already annexed it to their possessions, such as the precursory Han dynasty (206 BC-220 CE) more than 800 years before. The first written reference to Jews in the Tang Empire dates to the 7th century. In one of their texts, Nestorian Christians based in Dunhuang adapted a Persian word that specifically referred to practitioners of Judaism to suit local usage.

Situated on the outskirts of Dunhuang, Mogao comprises an intricate system of hundreds of caves and grottoes that house splendid Buddhist temples and shrines. Nearly 50,000 manuscripts dating from the 5th to 11th centuries have been unearthed there. By chance, a Hebrew manuscript from the 8th or 9th century – written on paper, folded several times and carefully stored in a small case – happened to be preserved among them, under the hot desert sand. It proved to be a penitential prayer (selicha) turned into an amulet, composed of eighteen unconnected verses from the Psalms of David and the prophetic books of the Tanakh. It is thought to have originated in present-day Iraq, perhaps among the personal items of one the Jewish merchants who managed to traverse Central Asia to conduct trade in the thriving cities of East Asia.

Images:

Selicha, penitential prayer written in Hebrew, found at Dunhuang by the archaeologist Paul Pelliot

© Bibliothèque de France

North-wall mural of Mogao cave 217, early 8th century. It depicts the Sukhavati, the Western Pure Land, according to the sutra of Amitabha (or Amitayus), one of the most important buddhas in Mahayana Buddhism

(Public Domain)

Radhanite Jews

In the 9th century, the Radhanite Jews, descendants of those Jewish refugees who settled in the Mesopotamian district of Radhan after escaping from war-torn Judea, came to hold sway over one of the main branches of the formidable Silk Road trade network – namely its steppe route, which linked both Kiev and Scandinavia with opulent coastal cities on the East China Sea such as Yangzhou and Ningbo. Contemporary Arabic sources, particularly the Persian geographers Ibn Khordadbeh and Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadānī who lived between the 9th and 10th centuries, inventoried the kinds of goods traded by Radhanite Jews, arranging them into five groups: (1) spices and condiments, (2) northern European furs, skins and other such goods, (3) eunuchs and slaves, (4) silk and other luxury textiles, and (5) swords.

How did they achieve such a feat? The key to their rise lay in the close trade relations that both Radhanite Jews – subject to the Abbasid Caliphate, which had reigned in the former domains of the Sassanian Empire ever since 750 – and Turkic Khazars, by then settled in the Caucasus, had cultivated for centuries. The commercial ties between Jews and Khazars soon evolved into a kind of symbiosis. On the one hand, Khazars only allowed Jewish merchants to pass through their domains, since they had fought wars against expansionist Muslim armies for over two centuries; on the other, the vast and lucrative trade networks within Khazarian territory, over which Radhanite Jews presided, yielded enough tax revenue to fund both the salaries of Khazarian troops and the political organisation of the khaganate.

Images:

Judeo-Persian introduction to the commentary on Proverbs, 11th-12th century

© From the collections of the British Library: BL Or 2459, f.64v

Judeo-Aramaic Incantation Bowls found in the ruins of Nippur, at the time part of the Sassanian Empire, ca. 3rd-4th century.  © Penn Museum

The Khazarian Khaganate

The Khazars were a Turkic people who managed to take control of the Caucasus in 571 CE, after the First Turkic Empire, which had governed the region until then, disintegrated. The Khazars established their own khanate several decades later, around 650. After the fall of the Sassanid dynasty the following year, in 651, for more than two centuries the Khazars resisted the onslaught of Islamic expansionist armies, whose leaders had founded the Umayyad Caliphate in 661, on lands where the banners of both the waning Byzantine Empire and the defunct Sassanid Empire had once waved. Almost a century later, the Abbasid dynasty usurped the Umayyad Caliphate in 750.

By the mid-9th century, the Khazarian Khaganate stretched across much of the steppes spanning from Kiev to the Aral Sea. Its capital, the city of Itil (present-day Astrakhan, in Russia), thrived in the Volga River delta, near the Caspian Sea. To the south, the khanate bordered the Abbasid Caliphate, whose frontiers lay in northern Iraq, not far from the district of Radhan, home of the Radhanite Jews.

Among the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts found in the genizah (repository) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the mid-19th century, one manuscript document stands out, written in Hebrew around 930: a letter of recommendation composed in Kiev, still under Khazarian rule, which attests to the immense extent of the Eurasian trade networks over which the Radhanite Jews held sway from the 9th to the 11th century.

Images:

The “Kiev letter”, a 10th-century letter of introduction, probably from the Jewish community of Kyiv, ca. 930, found in the Cairo Genizah.

© Cambrigde University Library

Source: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-00012-00122/1

Map detailing the expansion of the Khazar Khaganate between 650–850 CE

The Steppe Silk Road

After a costly series of wars between the Khazarian Khaganate and the hosts of Islamic expansionism which lasted from the 7th to the 9th centuries, the Khazarian rulers and a part of the khaganate’s elites mysteriously converted to Judaism (it is still debated whether in the 8th or 9th century). Hence, the curious symbiosis between Khazars and Radhanite Jews deepened. The hostility that Muslim aggression had stirred not only among Khazarian elites, but also in much of the world outside Islam, would eventually lead to the exclusion of Muslim merchants from several of the most lucrative trading markets in the period, such as the Christian kingdoms of Europe, the Khazarian Khaganate itself, or even the Kingdom of Kashmir, in northern India.

The Radhanites had an insurmountable advantage over Muslim traders, as the Khazars openly favoured Jewish merchants, barring their commercial rivals from setting foot beyond the khaganate’s frontiers. Thus, the bond between Khazars and Radhanite Jews led the latter group to hold incontestable sway over the steppe branch of the multi-faceted Silk Roads: a gigantic network of trade routes stretching from Byzantium to Scandinavia, and from the Caucasus to the coast of the East China Sea. The Radhanites, therefore, seized a unique opportunity to serve as the main commercial intermediaries between Christian kingdoms, Central Asia and the Tang Empire.

Image:

Map detailing land-based Silk Road routes

Heirs to the Sogdians

By the 9th century, the Central Asian Jewish communities constituted a veritable network, linking the Radhanite Jews in Babylon (modern Iraq) with other Persian Jews rooted in the oasis-kingdoms that gave access to East Asia. However, numerous Judeo-Persian merchants had already travelled the Silk Road itineraries, visiting the thriving cities of China’s southeastern coast either by land or sea, as well as the imperial capitals of the Tang Empire, Chang’an and Luoyang. Jewish merchants came and went from China, but did not usually reside there. The emergence of Jewish communities meant, on the other hand, the permanence of hundreds of families who struggled to reproduce their way of life in a foreign cultural context.

Shortly before the Radhanites controlled the steppe branch of the Silk Roads, due to the consolidation of a Jewish Eurasian network that spread from Constantinople in the West to the heart of the Tang dynasty, the Sogdians, a people of Iranian origin, had dominated for centuries the trade routes that bound Central Asia to China. The Sogdians inhabited the region of Sogdia (or Sogdiana), which today encompasses parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and whose main urban centres included Samarkand, Bukhara and Panjikent. The conquest of Samarkand in 712 by Muslim troops foreshadowed the disappearance of their culture.

Image:

8th-century Chinese statue of Sogdian musicians on a camel

© National Museum of China

The Kaifeng Jewish community

Chronology:

Arrival in Kaifeng

The pre-eminence of Radhanite Jews on the steppe branch of the Silk Roads lasted from the 9th to the 12th centuries, through the decline of the Tang dynasty in 907 and the subsequent rise of the Northern Song dynasty in 960. Their preponderance in the textile and luxury goods trade prompted the arrival in Kaifeng of seventeen clans of Jewish cotton merchants (around 500 families) ca. 1100, who were granted permission from the Song court to settle in its capital. According to an inscription dated to 1489, engraved on a commemorative stele that used to stand in the Kaifeng synagogue’s courtyard, these merchants originally came from India, although their true origin probably lay in the domains of pre-Islamic Persian empires.

Following the steep decline in trade between Central Asia and the Tang dynasty from the late 8th century onward, maritime trade became predominant in China. Kaifeng’s strategic riverside location on the banks of the Yellow River in present-day Henan Province undoubtedly favoured the city’s commercial and industrial boom, as the Grand Canal of China linked it directly to bustling port cities such as Yangzhou. It served as the imperial capital for the Northern Song dynasty and had a population of just under a million. By the end of the 10th century, Kaifeng had become one of the most powerful emporia in the world. Such was the importance of maritime trade during the Northern Song dynasty that, by the 11th century, at least seven Jewish communities predating Kaifeng’s had sprung up in several of China’s major coastal cities, such as Hangzhou and Yangzhou. It is therefore likely that the founders of the Kaifeng community arrived via river, with the firm intention of taking up residence in one of the mainland’s major political and commercial hubs.

Images:

Kaifeng Synagogue stele, composed in 1489 (Public domain)

Map detailing the domains of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127)

The Kaifeng Synagogue

The community erected its synagogue in 1163. The names of the community leaders who supervised the construction of the temple were recorded on the 1489 stele as “Ustad Levi” and “Andula,” thus evincing the community’s Persian origins. “Ustad” is a Persian word for “rabbi,” and it seems that “Andula” refers to the name “Abdullah.” Among the inhabitants of Kaifeng, the synagogue was known in Chinese, among other names, as Tiaojin si, the ‘Temple of those who remove the sinew,’ an allusion to the passage in Bereshit (Genesis) in which Jacob’s hip becomes dislocated after wrestling with an angel, and according to which the Israelites were not to eat the sinews found in cattle hips. After its inauguration, the synagogue opened its doors daily, offering religious services three times a day.

The Kaifeng community endured for centuries, always revolving around the synagogue, its rites and the sacred books of the Tanakh. Its members were employed in all sorts of trades, as military personnel, bureaucrats of certain rank, merchants, craftsmen and minor officials. It survived the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty in 1127, after the Yurchen invasion, as well as the subsequent Mongol conquest in 1279, which swept across the Asian continent.

The community originated in a dynamic context of hectic trade routes and transnational movement. Over time, a gradual but persistent drift toward Chinese cultural seclusion, that had already begun during the Southern Song dynasty and consolidated during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), resulted in the isolation of the Kaifeng community, bringing about the peculiar synthesis of its members’ Judeo-Persian identity with its culturally Chinese surroundings. The stelae of 1489 and 1512 record the existence of at least seven other Jewish communities in China. Inland, in Ningxia, for example, or else in coastal cities such as Yangzhou, Hangzhou, and Ningbo. Towards the end of the Ming dynasty, these coastal Jewish communities faded into oblivion.

Images:

Interior of Kaifeng Synagogue, sketch by Jesuit priest Jean Domenge (1720-21)

(Public domain)

Kaifeng Jew reading from a Tanakh placed on the Seat of Moses, sketch by Jean Domenge (1720-21) (Public domain)

Customs of Kaifeng Jews

The Kaifeng community orbited around its synagogue. By regularly keeping the Sabbath and observing Yom Kippur, its members preserved their Jewish identity. They also celebrated Passover, baking unleavened bread (matzah) and even procuring a sacrificial lamb for the occasion. They merrily celebrated Sukkot, carrying the handwritten Torah scrolls in their hands during the procession that characterizes the feast of Simchat Torah.

Its members, however, acculturated and integrated into Chinese society in such a way that their peculiar brand of Judaism soon showed signs of syncretism. Over the centuries, the lively Kaifeng community assimilated into its environment, incorporating the worship of lineages and ancestors, characteristic of Chinese religiosity, to its set of Judaic beliefs, as well as making them compatible with the tenets of Confucianism. Thus, many of the surviving inscriptions from the synagogue abound with allusions to and borrowings from Confucian classics.

From the 15th century on, most members of the community identified themselves by their Chinese names, which even appeared in the genealogies compiled and stored by the synagogue, while their Hebrew names were used only in private. A few of them were granted official Chinese titles and ranks, which evinces their daily use of Chinese and the concomitant loss of their ancestors’ Judeo-Persian dialect. They consented, moreover, to polygamy and concubinage. In the early 18th century, for example, it was stipulated that the first wife of a Kaifeng Jew should also be Jewish, whereas his other wives or concubines could be, and usually were, of Chinese origin, further diluting their Jewish identity in the customs of their culturally Chinese environment.

Images:

Kaifeng Torah Scroll

© From the collections of the British Library: Add. 19250

Members of Kaifeng Jewish community listed in a prayer book, late Ming era, ca. 17th century. © Klau Library, Hebrew Union College

Kaifeng Jews and Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries

In 1605, the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) received an unusual visit in his study in Beijing: a Jew from Kaifeng named Ai Tian revealed to him the existence of his city’s Jewish community, which for centuries had preserved its identity and many of its customs, despite its isolation from the rest of the world. In one of the volumes of his travel book, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas (On the Christian expedition to China), published posthumously in Augsburg in 1615, Ricci mentions Ai Tian’s visit and champions the long-lived Kaifeng community.

It was the first time that the existence of the Kaifeng Jews became known in Europe, and such a novelty marvelled readers on the continent. The accounts of Jesuit priests Jean-Paul Gozani (1647-1732) and Jean Domenge (1666-1735), published in the first half of the 18th century, completed the picture sketched by Matteo Ricci a century earlier. For his part, Domenge managed to obtain a permit that allowed him to reside during ten months among Kaifeng Jews, between 1720 and 1721. Domenge, who was well acquainted with liturgical Hebrew due to his studies, mentions in his memoirs that he found the pronunciation of Kaifeng rabbis during religious services to be truly abominable.

Testimony:

“In the middle of their synagogue there is a magnificent high seat, with a beautifully embroidered cushion; it is the seat of Moses, upon which they place the Pentateuch and read from it on Saturdays (their Sundays) and other solemn days. There is also a van-sui-pai, or board, on which the emperor’s name is written, yet there are no statues or images. Their synagogue faces west, and whenever they pray to God, they turn in that direction, worshipping him as Tien, Cham-tien, Cham-ti, Teao-van-voe-tche, i.e. Creator of all things, as well as Van-voe-tchu-tcai, i.e. Ruler of the universe. They told me that they had taken these names from Chinese books, and that they used them to express [the notion of the] Supreme Being and the first cause”.

        From Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 1689-1722, ed. Louis Aimé-Martin, pgs. 333-334.

Images:

Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci during his years in China, 1582-1610

(Public domain)

Frontispiece of the book De Christiana Expeditio apud Sinas (On the Christian Mission among the Chinese by the Society of Jesus) (1615), by Matteo Ricci (Public domain)

The Kaifeng community crumbles

At the outset of the 18th century, in 1704, Pope Clement XI ruled that the church should condemn and forbid both ancestor worship and Confucian rites, thus contradicting the position that Jesuits had defended for decades. As a result of this papal verdict and the European censure of Confucianism, the Jesuits were unable to sustain their mission in China, particularly after Emperor Yongzheng outlawed Christianity in 1724, restricting its practice by imperial decree.

From a western point of view, the Kaifeng Jewish community seemed to vanish from sight for 126 years, resurfacing only in 1850. By then, the community had diminished and declined notably, disintegrating precipitously. Multiple factors led to its irreversible decline. Firstly, the community never managed to exceed 2000-2500 members. The most prestigious among them usually left the city to work as civil servants in more prosperous regions.

After a century of wars, revolts and natural disasters, by the middle of the 19th century the gradual and alarming impoverishment of the community had compelled others to leave as well. In 1902, the historian S.M. Perlmann recorded the oral testimony of eight Kaifeng Jews, whom the ‘Society for the Rescue of Chinese Jews’ had invited to Shanghai. They claimed that the dwindling Kaifeng community numbered just under a thousand members at the time, who persisted in worshipping a single god. They still observed a few of their Jewish customs. They did not eat pork and removed the sinews found in cattle hips. They baked unleavened bread on Passover. They wrapped up their dead in linen before burying them in wooden coffins. At some point between 1851 and 1902, however, they had forgone circumcision.

Testimony:

“Although the religion of Confucius and this/ religion are similar as a whole and different in details,/ Both are determined and set in ways./ Nevertheless they also/ worship the Heavenly Dao./ Honor the ancestors/ Respect the relationship between the Prince and Minister/ Filial to their fathers and mothers/ Peaceful to wives and children/ Have order in the social ranks/ Interact with friends/ And do not make exceptions to the Five Relationships”.   

From The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions, Tiberiu Weisz pg. 17

Image:

Kaifeng Synagogue stele, composed in 1489, photo by Harrison Foreman (1938)

© University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Loss of Hebrew and liturgy

In 1849, a catastrophic Yellow River flood wrecked the synagogue, which by 1866 had already been dismantled. The community came into view again in 1850, after a Shanghai-based Christian society named “Protestant Delegates” sent off two Chinese converts to Kaifeng, as most foreigners were not allowed inland. Their reports testify to the conspicuous decline of the community, the destruction of the synagogue and the loss of Hebrew, as there were no rabbis left in the community who could decipher the holy scriptures since 1810.

Around 1845, the British consul and Hebrew scholar James Finn (1806-1872) sent a letter to the Kaifeng Jewish community, written both in Hebrew and English, through the British consul in Xiamen. Although Zhao Nianzu, a Kaifeng Jew, replied to the consul’s letter in 1850 with an urgent request for financial assistance, his letter would not reach Finn until twenty years later. A few of his fellow Jews, wrote Zhao, had dared to mortgage the ruins of the synagogue. Even the Torah scrolls were sold: six of them to representatives of the “Protestant Delegates”, the remainder to furtive European buyers. The American missionary W.A.P. Martin (1827-1916) conjectured that by 1860 there must have been about 300-400 members left in the community.

The loss of Hebrew meant, in turn, the irretrievable loss of liturgy. In the absence of a rabbi to guide the community during religious services, the memory of Jewish customs and festivals inevitably amalgamated with various local beliefs. Such was the degree of cultural integration of Kaifeng Jews by the mid-19th century that their neighbours assumed they belonged to of one of multiple local religious sects that amalgamated a set of peculiar beliefs with elements of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.

Testimony:

“In reply to the inquiries which you therein make, we have to state, that during the past forty or fifty years, our religion has been but imperfectly transmitted, and although its canonical writings are still extant, there are none who understand so much as one word of them. It happens only that there yet survives an aged female of more than seventy years, who retains in her recollection the principal tenets of the faith… Our temple in this place has long been without ministers; the four walls of its principal hall are greatly dilapidated, and the compartments of the hall of the holy men are in ruins. The water-chamber (bath), and the treasury are in ruins likewise. Through the whole day tears have been in our eyes, and grief at our hearts, at the sight of such things”.

The Orphan Colonies of Jews in China, James Finn, pgs. 40-41

Image:

Descendants of Kaifeng Jews, photo by Harrison Foreman (1938)

© University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Epilogue

Sephardim and Ashkenazi Jews in China in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries

While the Jewish community in Kaifeng gradually languished, a small number of Sephardic Jews intent on establishing trade relations set foot for the first time in the ports of Shanghai and Hong Kong, soon after the Treaty of Nanking in 1840 had forced the Qing Empire (1644-1911) to open its borders to foreign trade. Many of them hailed from British colonies, as was the case of the illustrious Sassoon family, whose patriarch originally came from Baghdad, from where he expanded his business ventures first to colonial Mumbai and then to the Chinese market. Small, middle eastern Sephardic communities emerged both in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and each built its own synagogue.

Large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews, mostly of Russian origin, also migrated to China from the 1880s onwards, due to the rising tide of anti-Semitism that threatened Jews both in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe. They travelled across the steppes, so that the first Ashkenazi community, founded in Harbin, in the northeast confines of the Qing Empire, had substantially more members than the two main Sephardic communities. In 1931, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria forced most of the members in the Harbin community to move south to coastal cities such as Shanghai, Tianjin and Qingdao, where many of them remained until the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It is worth remarking that between 1933 and 1941, the city of Shanghai offered asylum to more than 30,000 Jewish refugees fleeing from the atrocities unleashed by the Nazis in Europe.

Images:

Beth Aharon Sephardic Synagogue in Shanghai (1927)

German-Jewish refugee’s Resident Certificate for the Shanghai ghetto, issued by Japanese colonial authorities during WWII

A 21^st-century revival?

Although more than once it seemed to hang by a thread, the Kaifeng community never truly disappeared. Throughout the 20th century, families who identified themselves as Jewish remained in the city, even if they could only evoke a few of their ancestor’s religious customs. In 1932, David Brown, an American Jew visiting Kaifeng, recorded a conversation with the representative of the Ai family, one of the Jewish clans that had founded the community. Mr. Ai claimed that the Jewish families of Kaifeng were aware that their ancestors had been among the Jews who first migrated to China many centuries before. Even during the Maoist period, after Mao Zedong denied the existence of a “Jewish nationality” in the People’s Republic of China, several Kaifeng Jews still remembered that their ancestors never ate pork, that during Passover they used to bake matzah and daub their doorframes with blood.

From the 1990s onwards, contact between scholars, Western organisations, and a few of the Jewish families still at Kaifeng, resumed. At that time, there seemed to be signs of a possible communal revival, to such an extent that, until 2015, the Sino-Judaic Institute and Shavei Israel funded the continuous presence of Jewish teachers who taught Hebrew to the remaining members of the Kaifeng community and also explained Jewish culture to them.

Images:

Kaifeng Jews photographed by Harrison Foreman (1938)

© University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Passover Seder held in Kaifeng in mid-April 2014, organized by Shavei Israel

© Jason Jia Shuo