Chinese and Jews

Since the demise of Harvard University professor Benjamin I. Schwartz over a decade ago, Irene Eber, the Louis Friebery Professor Emerita of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University, has emerged as the preeminent Sino-Judaic scholar educating us about both ancient and modern Chinese Jewish communities. Eber is of Galician Jewish stock, was educated in Sinology at the Claremont Graduate School, and has both the linguistic and analytical tools to describe this complex interaction. She is fluent in Yiddish (her mother tongue), as well as biblical and modern Hebrew, classical and modern Chinese, English, German, and other languages. She delivered papers about Harbin, Kaifeng, Shanghai, and Tianjin Jewry at Harvard University's 1992 "Jewish Diasporas in China" conference. She contributed to both published volumes of essays which emerged from that symposium. She also wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog of rare Sino-Judaica which Harvard showcased at that conference.¹ A major commemorative volume of the works of other Sinologists was published in Eber's honor on her eightieth birthday, December 29, 2009.²

Eber remains vigorously productive. One expression of that vitality is this retrospective anthology of some of her work which was published in 2008 under the overarching title Chinese and Jews: Encounters between Cultures. A scholar of lesser ability might have shied away from as daunting a task as defining the contacts between two cultures on opposite sides of Eurasia over a period of more than a thousand years. The essence of seven of the eight articles in this anthology—all but her chapter on the translation of the Psalms into Chinese—was previously published in Hebrew.³ Seven of the articles in this collection deal with the arrival and influence of Jews in China, as migrants, immigrants, and conveyors of ideas. Her final chapter discusses a reverse osmosis, namely, the Chinese influence on a major Western Jewish philosopher.

Her first article, "Jewish Communities in China: A Brief Overview," originally appeared as the introduction to the aforementioned Harvard library catalog.⁴ Eber contextualized some of Harvard's rarest Sino-Judaic publications and photographs. She begins with Jewish merchant/adventurers in Tang dynasty China (608–906 c.e.), continues with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century arrival of Baghdadi and Russian Jews, and concludes with the arrival in China in the 1930s of Central European Jews fleeing Hitler.

Eber's second article, "Kaifeng Jews: Sinification and the Persistence of Identity," was presented as a paper at the Harvard conference.⁵ She sees Kaifeng Judaism as an integration of Jewish and Confucian belief. According to Eber, the Judaism of Kaifeng was a form of Chinese sectarian religion similar to that of the "White Lotus" movement which persisted over centuries in Chinese history and which the historian Susan Naquin has analyzed.⁶ The persistence of memory and lineage, rather than ritual practice or even a widespread knowledge of Hebrew, defined the distinctly Chinese Judaism of Kaifeng.

"Translating the Ancestors: S. I. J. Schereschewsky's 1875 Chinese Version of Genesis" is the essence of Eber's full-length biography of the Lithuanian/Jewish convert to Christianity who rose to become Episcopal Bishop of Shanghai. Unlike earlier missionaries Robert Morrison (1782–1834) and Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801–61), Schereschewsky translated Genesis into readable colloquial guanhua (later guoyu), the northern Chinese dialect which was becoming increasingly popular in the late 1800s. Moreover, Schereschewsky worked directly from the Hebrew (p. 110). In this article as well as in "Several Psalms in Chinese Translation," Eber marshals her knowledge of biblical Hebrew and classical and modern Chinese to define Shereschewsky as a sophisticated and culturally sensitive translator who did not attempt literalness.⁷ She argues that because "omissions, changes, and vocabulary choices were made, the transposed text was not merely a translation into another language. More than any other early scripture translator, Schereschewsky recognized and tackled the problem of Chinese cultural and linguistic factors in expressing foreign ideas" (p. 85).

Eber continues her analysis of biblical translation in "Notes on the Early Reception of the Old...