The Kaifeng Jews are members of a small Jewish community that has existed in Kaifeng in the Henan province of China for hundreds of years. The community was known by their Han Chinese neighbors as adherents of tiao jin jiao (挑筋教), meaning, loosely, the religion which removes the sinew (a reference to kashrut).
According to historical records, a Jewish community with a
synagogue built in 1163 lived in
Kaifeng from at least the
Southern Song Dynasty until the late nineteenth century. It is surmised that the ancestors of the Kaifeng Jews came from
Central Asia. The uninterrupted existence of this religious and ethnic group, living for over 700 years in socio-cultural surroundings strongly dominated by
Confucian moral and ethical principles, is a unique phenomenon in Chinese and Jewish history.
The existence of Jews in China was largely unknown until Matteo Ricci met a Jew from the Kaifeng community in the early 17th century. Ricci met a young Chinese Jew named Ai Tian (艾田) in 1605, who explained that he worshipped one God. It is recorded that when he saw a Christian image of Mary with the child Jesus, he believed it to be a picture of Rebecca with Esau or Jacob, figures from Scripture. Ai declared that he had come from Kaifeng, where many other Jews resided. Ricci sent a Chinese Jesuit to visit Kaifeng; later, further Jesuits also visited the city. It was later discovered that the Jewish community had a synagogue (禮拜寺 libai si) and possessed a great number of written materials and books.
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 (bearing the name 清真寺, Qīngzhēn Sì, a term often used for mosques in Chinese). The inscription states that the Jews came to China from India during the Han Dynasty period (2nd century BCE-2nd century CE). 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 the prophet Ezra. The second tablet, dating from 1512 (found in the synagogue Xuanzhang Daojing Si) 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 steles.[1]
Ink rubbings of the 1489 stele (left) and 1512 stele (right)
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" (simplified Chinese: 尽忠报国; traditional Chinese: 盡忠報國; pinyin: jìn zhōng bào guó), 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.” The same source even claims that Israelites served as soldiers in the armies of Yue Fei.[1]
Father Joseph Brucker, a Roman Catholic researcher of the early twentieth century, showed that Ricci's manuscripts indicate that there were only in the range of ten or twelve Jewish families in Kaifeng in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth 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" (Kaifeng) after the Jingkang Incident.
Earth Market Street, Kaifeng, 1910. The synagogue lay beyond the row of stores on the right
Despite their isolation from the rest of the Jewish diaspora, the Jews of Kaifeng preserved Jewish traditions and customs for many centuries. In the seventeenth 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. [2]
Today, 600-1,000 residents of Kaifeng trace their lineage back to this community. [2] After contact with Jewish tourists, the Jews of Kaifeng have reconnected to mainstream Jewry. With the help of Jewish organizations, some members of the community have immigrated to Israel. [2]
[edit] Skepticism
One scholar, Dr Xun Zhou, doubts the authenticity of the Kaifeng community, believing it to have been largely a Western cultural construct. Xun Zhou, a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has written an article putting the status of the Kaifeng Jews into question. He maintains that the community had no Torah scrolls until 1851, when they suddenly appeared to be sold to eager Western collectors. He also states that, for example, 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.[3]
[edit] Kaifeng Jews today
Bird's eye view of the exterior of the Kaifeng
synagogue.
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. 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.[4]
The Kaifeng Jews intermarried with local Chinese, and are thus indistinguishable in appearance from their non-Jewish neighbors.[5] Within the framework of contemporary rabbinical Judaism, only matrilineal transmission of Jewishness is recognized, while Chinese Jews based their Jewishness on patrilineal descent. As a result, they are required to undergo conversion in order to receive Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Most descendants of Kaifeng's Jewish community are only vaguely aware of their ancestry[6]. Some, however, say their parents and grandparents told them that they were Jewish and would one day "return to their land." [2] The one trait that differentiated them from their neighbors was not eating pork.[2]
While the official attitude toward the descendants of Kaifeng's Jewish community is comfortable, their treatment by their fellow-citizens is not always so. Kaifeng is home to a dynamic Muslim community, which is very cohesive, having survived 50 years of isolation and officially sanctioned hostility (largely, presumably, because of the relationship between the Hui, Uyghur, and Kazakh ethnicities and the Chinese government). In that period, the descendants of Kaifeng's Jewish community were protected and helped by Muslims, to the point that they became largely indistinguishable from the Muslim community. That changed with the opening up of China, when Kaifeng's Muslims reestablished links with Muslims elsewhere. The community received assistance from Muslim nations, and adopted much of the prevailing anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish attitude. The Kaifeng mosque propagates "Conquered Jerusalem" anti-Israeli propaganda, and the local Muslim population has developed an increasingly hostile attitude toward Jews. Since few outside Jews ever visit Kaifeng, this hostility is channeled toward the descendants of the Kaifeng Jewish community. There are rumors of pogroms, information about which is reportedly censored by the Chinese government. Because of this situation, many descendants of the Kaifeng Jewish community prefer to pass as ethnic Han.[citation needed]
Interior of the Kaifeng synagogue.
The last census revealed about 400 official Jews in Kaifeng, but that number may be suspect.[citation needed] It is difficult to estimate the number of Jews in any country, but in China it is nearly impossible. Numbers may change simply because of a change in official attitudes. For example, the number of ethnic Manchus during the reign of the last Manchu emperor was estimated at 2 million; after the fall of the Manchu Empire, Manchus, fearing persecution, virtually disappeared and only 500,000 were counted in the succeeding census. When official policies regarding minorities were changed, affording them protective rights, the number of ethnic Manchus jumped to 5 million. There are potentially hundreds of thousands in Kaifeng and its environs that may claim Jewish ethnicity. Thus far, most overseas Jewish communities have been indifferent toward the putative descendants of the Kaifeng Jews. Recently, however, a family of Kaifeng Jewish descendants have formally converted to Judaism and have become Israeli citizens. Whether or not more Kaifeng Jewish descendants will follow in this family's path remains a matter of speculation.
In his 1992 documentary series Legacy, historian Michael Wood walked down a small lane in Kaifeng that he said is known as the "alley of the sect who teach the Scriptures", that is, of the Jews. He mentioned that there are still Jews in Kaifeng today, but that they are reluctant to reveal themselves "in the current political climate." The documentary's companion book further states that one can still see a "mezuzah on the door frame, and the candelabrum in the living room." Similarly, in the documentary Quest for the Lost Tribes, by Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, the film crew visits the home of an elderly Kaifeng Jew who explains the recent history of the Kaifeng Jews, shows some old photographs, and his identity papers that identify him as a member of the Jewish ethnic group.
Literature
Kaifeng city map, 1910. It shows the exact placement of the Kaifeng synagogue.
In the book, 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 descendants of the Kaifeng Jews. These stelae were left to preserve their religion and to briefly touch on their origins, since the Jewish community was slowly dying out from Chinese assimilation. His translation reveals one of many proposed origins of the Kaifeng Jews.
According to Weisz, after the Babylonian exile and Diaspora of the sixth century BCE, disenchanted Levites and Kohanim parted with the Prophet Ezra because of a prohibition against taking foreign wives and the decree encouraging “intermarriage” within the Jewish tribes and disappeared never to be heard from again. Weisz believes these Jews settled in Northwestern India or 天竺 Tiānzhú (“Heaven India,” as it is called in one of the Kaifeng steles), where they lived for centuries.
Prior to 108 BCE, these Jews had migrated from northwestern India to the Ningxia region of modern day Gansu province, China and were spotted by a Chinese general, Li Guang, who was sent to invade the “western region” (西域 Xīyù in Chinese) to expand the borders of Han Dynasty China. From this time until the latter part of the Tang Dynasty, the Jews slowly dispersed throughout China, taking Chinese wives, and siring “half-Chinese, half-barbarian” children. In the "Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution" (845-46), Buddhism and other foreign religions—Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism, Nestorian Christianity, Islam and Judaism—were forced from China proper back to its outlying territories under the supervision of the Khitan tribes (including the Ningixa region) and all foreign temples were burnt to make way for their Confucian and Taoist counterparts, the native religions of China.
Chinese Jews reading the
Torah from a "chair of moses."
It was not until the early Northern Song Dynasty, when Emperor Taizong, a man with a great thirst for knowledge, sent out envoys to every corner of Asia to learn from and recruit foreign scholars, did the Jews return to China. According to former translations of the stelae, the Chinese word Guī 歸 (in the Emperor’s speech to the Jews) was wrongly translated as “come,” leading most western and Chinese historians to believe the Jews first came to China during the Song dynasty. However, Weisz translates Guī 歸 as the proper “return,”[2] meaning the Emperor was aware of the Jews’ former Chinese citizenship and was welcoming them back to China. He then allowed them to stay under the protection of the Song Empire and to continue to practice the religion of the fore-fathers.[1]
Little of the written works of the Kaifeng have survived. A significant portion, however, are kept in the library of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. Among the works in that collection are a siddur (a Jewish prayer book) in Chinese characters and a Hebrew codex of the bible. The codex is fascinating 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 Hebrew is generally written without vowels, a literate Hebrew speaker can disregard these markings, as the consonants are written correctly, with few scribal errors.
- from Wikipedia
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