The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng: A Millennium of Adaptation and Endurance eds. by Anson H. Laytner and Jordan Paper (review)

The volume reviewed here is the latest English language compilation of studies on the subject of the Chinese Jews to have been published over a period of three quarters of a century. The monumental three-volume compilation Chinese Jews: A Compilation of Matters Relating to the Jews of K'aifeng by the Canadian Anglican bishop of Kaifeng William C. White, published in Toronto in 1942, stands out as the first of its kind. A subsequent anthology that stands out is Jonathan Goldstein's two-volume The Jews of China. In addition to these collections of scholarly articles produced were comprehensive, multilingual bibliographies, authored by Rudolf Loewenthal, Michael Pollack, and the most complete of all: Donald D. Leslie's Jews and Judaism in Traditional China: A Comprehensive Bibliography.

Any study of the Jewish presence in China would need to take into consideration the historical existence of the two kinds of Jewish presence in China: (1) That of Chinese Jews properly speaking, of whom a uniquely ancient community survives in the city of Kaifeng in Henan province. These bear Chinese surnames, are fully Chinese in culture, yet retain a Jewish identity in the sense that some of them call themselves Chinese Jews, while others regard themselves as Chinese with Jewish ancestry. (2) Jews in China. This category includes descendants of Mizrahi Jews from Iraq and India, who settled in Shanghai in mid-nineteenth century in the wake of British colonial expansion; Ashkenazi Jews, a major part of whom fled the pogroms of Russia, and who settled in Harbin, Shanghai, and Tianjin; and Jewish refugees mainly from Germany and Austria fleeing from the Holocaust.

The first two chapters delve into the origins of the Jewish presence in China: Nigel Thomas investigates the early commercial activities of Jewish merchants traveling the Silk Road of the Steppes, while Erik Zürcher traces a historical overview of eight centuries of the Chinese diaspora. In the Tang and Northern Sung periods there existed Jewish communities in six or seven Southern port cities, of which scarcely a trace remains other than mentions of contacts between them and their Kaifeng brethren.

A fortuitous encounter between Matteo Ricci, founder of the Jesuit mission in Beijing in 1605, and Ai Tian, a Chinese-Jewish candidate to the examinations for the mandarinate arriving from Kaifeng, revealed to Europe the existence of this remote, isolated community. In the following century this community received visits from several Jesuits. It had by then briefly recovered from the devastation inflicted in the 1640s by the rebel Li Zicheng, a flood of the Yellow River, and then the Manchu invasion and founding of the Qing dynasty. Among the leading figures of the community at that time were two outstanding brothers, both mandarins and recipients of the jinshi or highest degree, both learned in Hebrew and in Chinese: Zhao Yingdou, who authored a guide to the moral precepts of Judaism entitled "Preface to the Illustrious Way," and Zhao Yingcheng, whose book "Vicissitudes of the Holy Scriptures" gave an account of the destruction of the city and the synagogue, and of their reconstruction and the repairing of the Torah scrolls saved from the flood, under his guidance. Alas, neither book survived the disintegration of the community and of its religious life in the nineteenth century. The Kaifeng Jews left no written documents other than four historical inscriptions engraved on stone stelae, a memorial book, and a few inscriptions from the synagogue.

Moshe Bernstein devotes an admirable chapter to Zhao Yingcheng and proposes that his Hebrew name Moshe was richly deserved, for like the Biblical Moses who led his people to the Promised Land, Moshe Zhao repatriated the Jewish survivors of the calamities that befell Kaifeng to their home town. Unlike Moses who died a venerated elder on Mount Nebo, Moshe Zhao led in reconstruction but resigned from his...