The Jews of China

Adam L. Silverman, PhD*

In the comments to Mr. Habakkuk's most recent post, commenter Dag asked if there were, indeed, Jews in China.  The answer is yes, but there are very, very few left.  Above you can see drawings of the exterior and interior of the Jewish Temple at Kaifeng, which is where the very small remnant of China's Jewish community survives.  The history of Judaism in China is long, dating at least to the 8th Century BCE, but references to what appear to be China can be found in the book of Isaiah and communities of Jews have been documented in China as far back as the 1st Century BCE, if not earlier.  I even remember once seeing a reference, while studying comparative religion for one of my master's degrees, that one of the oldest extant pieces of writing ever found was an ancient Chinese dialect written in paleo-Hebrew script found in a cave along what came to be called the Silk Road.  While that is most likely an apocryphal and mythological reference, it should provide some indication as to just how far back the group of people that would eventually become known as the Jews have been interacting with the Far East**.  Once the Jews got to China they were very successful.  Unlike most of their interactions when going west into Europe, they were far better able to enter the societies and cultures in Central, Southeast, and East Asia.  For instance, in India Jews found a way to work themselves into the caste system and became very successful members of society in Cochin and the same was ultimately true in China.***  

Jewish succes in China was partially the result of the communities acceptance by the Confucian Emperor under the restored Song Dynasty.  Imperial edict allowed the Chinese Jews to participate in the civil service and there are a number of surviving records of Jewish mandarins.  According to some traditions once the synagogue complex was built at Kaifeng the Emperor is said to have sent the community a gift: Confucian ancestor worship fire pots.  The story goes that the Jewish community, not wishing to offend the Emperor found a way to work the Confucian ritual objects into their worship by simply adapting their use.  When reciting the lines of the Amidah (The Eighteen Benedictions), the synagogue authorities would light the fire pots upon reaching the portions dealing with the Jewish patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (crisis averted...).  

The success of the Jewish community in China, its being welcomed into the community and allowed to fully participate in the life of society and state, ultimately led to its eventual demise (and now resurrection).  The Jews, sometimes called the sinew-pluckers or the Chinese with the Blue Hats****, essentially assimilated themselves.  The population dwindled as assimilation into the larger Sino-Confucian community took place.  There are copies that can be read of desperate letters sent from the community at Kaifeng to their last contacts (often long dead) in parts of Europe begging for a rabbi to be sent.  And while the West rediscovered the Jews of China because of interaction with the Jesuits, the story is that when the first Jesuit arrived in China word reached the community at Kaifeng that a skull capped, bearded religious scholar wearing robes had arrived from the West.  They wrote to him and asked if he would take up the spiritual leadership of the community, but that he would have to give up eating pork, which they had been told he had been seen to consume.

Eventually time and no external threats took their toll on the Jews of China and they, for all intents and purposes, simply became Chinese.  While there were several attempts at revival, it has only been over the past generation that the community has made something of a comeback with descendants of the last Jews of Kaifeng rediscovering their religious traditions and, for all intents and purposes, converting back to their ancestral faith.  There is even a (very basic) blog of one of a member of the community.  The story of the Jews of China, both in Kaifeng and other locations, is one of both success and failure.  It shows the best of humanity - not discriminating on the basis of religious otherness, as well as what happens to a tradition when there is no external pressure to maintain it.

*Adam L. Silverman is the Culture and Foreign Language Advisor at the US Army War College.  The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army War College or the US Army.

** I've also seen these types of references for interaction with the ancient Celtic world.  In that case it was to one of the sons of an Israelite king being married to a Princess of Tara - one of the ancient Celtic kingdoms in Ireland.  Moreover, one of the most interesting attempts to figure out just what the Holy Grail was (is?) and where it went is an argument that it was actually the copy of the Torah (Law) that Jesus prepared for his Jewish followers and that it was transported by one of them (a son of Joseph of Arimethea) in a coast hopping vessel out of the Mediterranean, up the coast of Europe, and to the remnants of this Hebraic/Celtic community of Ancient Britain for safe keeping.

*** Full disclosure: Professor Katz was the major advisor of my MA in Comparative Religion.  He is a specialist in Asian religion, as well as in Judaism in Asia.  I searched youtube for a copy of his lecture on the Jews of China, but it is, unfortunately, not posted.  It is from Professor Katz that I know a pretty fair amount about this topic.

**** Sinew plucker refers to the (for all intents and purposes) now lost butchery practice of removing the tendon from the rear legs of beef cattle so that they could be consumed as Kosher.  Jews are forbidden to eat cuts of meat from the hind quarters of beef cattle in honor and deference to Jacob, who according to tradition was wounded in the sciatic nerve during his wrestling bought with an Angel of the Lord that earned him the name Israel (one who grapples with G-d).  The blue hats refer to the color of the skull caps that the Chinese Jews wore.  In fact once Muslims came to China they were often referred to as the Jews with the White Hats as they practiced a similar, and to Confucian and Taoist eyes, likely variant, religion, but wore white skull caps.  Jews in China are also called Yodai.

Comments

[jmc5588]

Pearl Buck wrote a novel ("Peony") with the decline (or rather, the assimilation) of the Chinese Jewish community as its topic. The basic theme is the one you mention in your fourth paragraph.

[Dag]

Fascinating. Thanks for that. Follow on question is: if there is in fact a ring through America's nose will it be transferable to China? If and when the time comes.

[BillWade]

Maybe I was wrong and Dr Silverman might correct me but I thought I once knew the only Vietnamese Jew in the world. I met him and his wife in Canada in the mid-eighties. He was the lone survivor of a refugee boat headed out of Vietnam, everyone else had died of starvation, exposure, or lack of water. The boat was spotted by an Israeli freighter and they took him onboard, cared for him, and he wound up in Israel, I assume in an orphanage. As he got older he fell in love with an Israeli girl and they eventually married after he had converted to Judaism. They then emigrated to Canada and both were involved in the pastry business. They were two of the most likeable people I've ever met in my life, happiness and love just absolutely radiated from them.

[Fnord]

Very interesting piece. For those reading about Jews in the far East, the Jewish Autonome Oblast may be interesting as well. Stalins very own little jewish homeland on the border to China.

[Adam L. Silverman]

Dag: If by your question you mean will China be heavily influenced by Israel in an attempt to achieve regional policy objectives, then I think the answer is no for several reasons. The first is that while the reemergent, but tiny, Kaifeng community has made some connections with Israel, even if every member tried to lobby the Chinese government, there are so few it wouldn't matter. Moreover, this gets to the heart of the issue: NO ONE really lobbies the Chinese government. China is still a Communist state. Sure, they're embracing and utilizing markets, but its centrally planned and controlled. And while China may eventually give up a lot of its economic authoritarianism, the reason that they are pursuing economic development the way they are is to get ahead of things in a way that the Soviets didn't. It has always seemed that the Chinese leadership saw what happened in Russia under Gorbachev, followed by the imperfect and never completed transition under Yeltsin, and it scared them to death. For all the Maoism, the Chinese are still Confucian/neo-Confucian, and the messiness, the lack of order that marked Russia's imperfect and never completed transition to both political and economic freedom is something that the Chinese leadership won't tolerate. So we have a Communist state engaging in open market behavior in a very controlled manner in an attempt to preserve the control of the Chinese communist leadership. They are playing a very long game in the hopes that slow, sure, and steady ultimately brings them the victory.

[Adam L. Silverman]

BillWade: It wouldn't surprise me. I've heard a lot of interesting stories like these. For instance, when I was a grad student in Scotland doing my master's in international security) and before I was Professor Katz's student he asked me through my Father (at the time they worked at the same university, but were in different disciplines - my Dad was one of the founding members of the criminology department at USF in Tampa) if I could try to look up a British scholar who had, supposedly, while conducting field work in Korea discovered a community of Jews, or Koreans whose religious behavior was Jewish like, and written a little about it. I tracked the scholar down, but unfortunately he'd been quite ill, was unable to take any visitors, and I think died while I was still in the UK. One of my professors at the time in Scotland, a Jewish American from NY married to a Korean American woman told me, when I mentioned Nathan's request, that his father in law told him that there were Koreans who were descended from Jews.

My guess is that there were Jewish communities all throughout Central, South, South East, and East Asia. They were likely, originally, trading communities where the locals slowly married into the local population, but retained their religious identity. After successive defeats these communities likely picked up members as relatives and business relations fled to safety after the Jews were exiled.

[Fnord]

Silverman: The way for lobbying China is to offer technology in exchange for influence. Chinas enviromental problems sees them in a lot of problems with receding groundwater, energy-innefficiency etc.My country, Norway, was fairly succesful with this until we went and gave the Nobel price to a chinese dissenter. Since then, the cold hand.

But I do not think China will succumb to the Lobby, since the clients of China Are in large part on the other side...

[Jimmy]

While attending an American college (1997-2002), I met two sisters (fellow students) who were from the Chinese Jewish community.

[WILL]

No discussion of the history of Jews in China is complete w/o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_Imperial_Japan

At the present history of the world, we are all Jewish, Celtic, German, etc. in part. The Palestinian West Bankers are descendants in part of the New Testament Jews. The Copts may well be too. We must remember who indeed started the Christian religion.

The following quote is instructive how cultural and social assimilation flows back & forth. The Chaldeans (Babylonians/Kasdim) were speaking Aramaic. Within a few generations all of Palestine was speaking it including Jesus Christ.

"‎2 Kings 18:26 Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah, and Shebna and Joah said to the field commander, "Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don't speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall."

[shanks]

Carrying on in the theme of strange Jewish stories(unbelieveable but true)..

In recent years, you'd heard of Zionist-Hindu/Indian conspiracy theories. You know why? I'd trace it to the the the 1971 war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War

Of all the millions of people in India, the one chap who sort of did the war planning and logistics and stood up to Sam Manekshaw(over timing, tactics etc), a Baghdadi Jew from a family settled in Calcutta!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._F._R._Jacob
And finally, here's the pic of the signing with that chap there.
http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/1971/Dec16/index.html

And if you're looking for a stereotype of hard bargaining, look here

http://www.ebangladesh.com/2008/03/30/major-general-jfr-jacob/

scroll down till you come to 'instrument of surrender.'

That was a fantastic sleight of hand, the other team surrenders when everyone else was saying 'ceasefire'. :)

[Ken Hoop]

"The Palestinian West Bankers are descendants in part of the New Testament Jews. "

The well-travelled Ashkenazi non-Sephardic Jews, i.e.the majority, could well have less Semitic blood related to "Ancient Israelites" than the prototype modern Palestinian.

[WILL]

Sephardic technically refers to the Spanish-Portugese Jews & their descendants. After the expulsion from Hispania, they were taken in by the Muslims of North Africa & the Ottoman Empire. The Morosicos were also expelled.

The Eastern Jews are called by a different name-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews

Israel is a much confused name. It was Jacob's other name as well as the name of the extinguished northern kingdom of King Ahab & Queen Jezebel. The word Jew (from Yehudah) is from the southern kingdom of Judah which grew into the vacuum.

[J]

Adam,

Here for our listening enjoyment

Oorah Presents: 8th Day "It's Shabbos Now"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmvEYNAsUxA

[J]

Have a bad day, to perk up one's spirit one needs Ya'alili.

"Ya'alili" by 8th Day: The official music video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fXIMUyrw7s

[mbrenner]

A brief footnote. In the early 1980s, Israel and the PRC entered into an informal agreement to exchange military technology. The Israelis sent a team to the PRC to advise on tank design and engineering. A former Chinese student of mine served as the interpretor.

[Moshe Gorelik]

"ancient Chinese dialect written in paleo-Hebrew script found in a cave"

Probably you speak about Yang Shao culture (excavations in Bonpo). I have analyses written by Dr. David Inbar.
The texts written in language similar to the ancient "ktav daatz" (ancient Hebrew). This belongs to the period of 6000 - 4000 B.C. (Red ceramics period).