Kaifeng Jews
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The Kaifeng Jews comprise the best documented Jewish community in China. They resided in the city of Kaifeng in Henan province. Although their profile was relatively low among the surrounding mainstream Chinese populace, they have attracted interest from European visitors, who were curious about this most remote outpost of Jewish culture. Although Jews in modern China have traditionally called themselves Youtai (犹太) in Mandarin Chinese — also the predominant contemporary Chinese language term for Jews in general — the community was long known by their Han Chinese neighbors as adherents of tiao jin jiao (挑筋教), meaning, loosely, the religion which removes the sinew. (See kashrut)
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[edit] History
According to historical records, a Jewish community with a synagogue, built in 1163, existed at Kaifeng from at least the Southern Song Dynasty until the late nineteenth century. Some accounts suggest they in fact had lived there since the mid Han Dynasty.
It is surmised that the ancestors of the Kaifeng Jews came from Central Asia. The uninterrupted existence of this religious and ethnic group, lasting for more than 700 years in totally different socio-cultural surroundings strongly dominated by Confucian moral and ethical principles, is a unique phenomenon, not only in Chinese history, but also in the thousands of years of Jewish civilisation.
13th century Italian traveler Marco Polo may have received accounts of Jewish settlements in China. The existence of the Jews in China was still largely unknown to the rest of the world until Matteo Ricci met a Jew from the Kaifeng community by accident at the beginning of the 16th century. It was then that European research on the Jews in Kaifeng began, mostly carried out by European missionaries.
Ricci received a visit from a young Jewish Chinese 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 ("Libai si, 禮拜寺") and possessed a great number of written materials and books.
The Jews of China apparently "suffered greatly" and were dispersed during the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s. It is recorded that, following this dislocation, they returned to Kaifeng, yet continued to be small in number and to face hardships.
Three steles with inscriptions were found at Kaifeng. The oldest, dating from 1489, commemorates the construction of a synagogue in 1163 (bearing the name Qīngzhēn Sì, a term often used for mosques in Chinese), states the Jews entered China from India in the mid Han Dynasty period (2nd BCE-2nd century CE)), the Jews' 70 chinese surnames, their audience with an "un-named" Song Dynasty Emperor, and finally lists the transmission of their religion from Abraham down to the prophet Ezra. The second table, dated 1512 (found in the synagogue Xuanzhang Daojing Si) details the Jews' religious practices. The third is dated 1663 and commemorates the re-rebuilding of the Qingzhen si synagogue and recaps the information from the other two steles.
Father Joseph Brucker, a Catholic researcher of the early 20th 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 16th–early 17th century, 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.
Besides its long history, the Kaifeng Jewish community had another conspicuous feature: although isolated from the Jewish diaspora outside China, it still managed to keep alive Jewish traditions and customs for centuries. However, although the Kaifeng Jews experienced neither discrimination nor persecution from their Chinese neighbors, a process of gradual assimilation went on. Up to the 17th century, the assimilation of the Kaifeng Jews intensified and escalated. It resulted in changes in Jewish religious and ritual customs, social, and linguistic traditions, as well as increased intermarriage between Jews and other ethnic groups, such as the Han Chinese, and the Hui and Manchu minorities in China. In the 1860s, the Jewish synagogue in Kaifeng collapsed as it had long been in disrepair. As a consequence, Jewish religious life, together with the Jewish identity in the community, effectively came to an end.
[edit] Kaifeng Jews today
The Jews in China remained almost unknown to Chinese society until the beginning of the 20th century, although their presence had been attested in the country for over 700 years.
European Jews residing in Shanghai in the early 20th century are reported to have conducted research in Kaifeng but with little success.
Together with the growing interest in Western cultures among Chinese intellectuals during that time, the presence of the Jews, and Judaism, began to be realized by scholars in China. This subject had gradually developed into an independent field of research by the time the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949.
Due to the poor conditions for research on religions (as a result of the political atmosphere), 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 accelerated the research work in this field on both nations. Research on the Jews in China gained new attention around the world through the reappraisal of the experiences of around 25,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai during the Nazi period.
In recent years, research into the history and culture of the Kaifeng Jews has been conducted not only in China, but in other countries as well. Increasing academic interest in related subjects will continue in the foreseeable future.
It has been stated that, in appearance, the Kaifeng Jews were indistinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors. [1]
The current situation of Kaifeng Jewish descendants is complex. Within the framework of contemporary rabbinical Judaism, only matrilineal transmission of Jewishness is recognized (a Jew is a convert or someone whose mother is a Jew), while Chinese Jews recognized only patrilineal descent. They are not, therefore, recognized as Jews by other Jewish communities and are also ineligible for automatic Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Most descendants of Kaifeng's Jewish community are vaguely aware of their ancestry, but few have direct sources indicating their descent; the vast majority are unfamiliar with a Jewish identity in common with Jews elsewhere. This situation may be changing as Jewish groups from outside China continue their efforts to educate the descendants of the Kaifeng community about their religious and ethnic heritage. [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 reëstablished 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]
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. [3]
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.
[edit] Literature
In the book, THE KAIFENG STONE INSCRIPTIONS: The Legacy of the Jewish Community in Ancient China, Mr. Tiberiu Weiz, a teacher of Hebrew History and Chinese Religion, presents his own translations of the 1489, 1512, and 1663 stone steles left by the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews. These steles 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 Mr. Weiz, after the Babylonian exile and Diaspora of the 6th 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. Mr. Weiz 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 Guangli, 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.
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 steles, 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, Mr. Weisz translates Guī 歸 as the proper “return,”[4] 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.
[edit] Source
- Tiberiu Weisz, The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions: The Legacy of the Jewish Community in Ancient China New York: iUniverse, 2006. ISBN 0-595-37340-2
