The Jews of China. Volume 2, A Sourcebook and Research Guide (review)

This book is the second of two volumes, most of the content of which initially emerged from the conference "Jewish Diasporas in China," held at Harvard University in August 1992. There are important additions, including several essays translated from the Chinese, which make this a fine collection, especially when taken together with volume 1. My only major qualm with the book is its outrageous price.

The interface between the Chinese and the Jews occupies only the tiniest of slivers in history—the small Kaifeng community that peaked in the Northern Song, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bagdadi and later Ashkenazi communities of Shanghai, Harbin, Tianjin, and elsewhere. Yet, there has been a great deal of writing on these Jewish immigrants over the past few centuries, most of it eminently forgettable, and major questions (as Irene Eber points out in her contribution) remain to be investigated.

Although billed as "a sourcebook and research guide," much of this volume is decidedly much more—and thankfully so. In his introduction, editor Jonathan Goldstein claims that the work that follows aims primarily at updating previous bibliographies of Sino-Judaica, especially that of Donald Leslie, Jews and Judaism in Traditional China: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1998). In fact, there is only one bibliography in this volume, by the indefatigable Frank Joseph Shulman. The rest is an extremely za mixture of personal memoirs, research project reports, survey essays, and bibliographic essays.

The first section, "Traditional Chinese Awareness of Jews," is comprised of four essays by leading Chinese scholars of the subject at hand—"traditional" here means "premodern." Xu Xin, the peripatetic and industrious researcher and makher of Jewish studies from Nanjing University, offers a general but extremely useful introduction to the state of the field of Jewish studies in China from 1897 to the present. This includes a review of the major Chinese writings over the past century on the Jews of China, in both the Kaifeng and more recent communities, as well as current topics being researched and debated in Chinese scholarly circles. It is fascinating to see how almost completely unconnected the themes being researched in China are with those being researched elsewhere in the world. Xu's bibliography alone provides a marvelous starting point for some enterprising young scholar wishing to research this subject.

I have only one major problem with Professor Xu's analysis and that of several others in the volume. They frequently refer to the Kaifeng community of the Northern Song dynasty as the Jews of "ancient" China. There are, of course, differences of opinion on periodizing the Song dynasty, but few serious scholars anywhere in the world, except maybe China, would place the Song in antiquity. Many of us see it as the commencement of modern China; if we accept this hypothesis provisionally, might it not be interesting, then, to examine how the different Jewish communities faced modernity? Might the issue of acculturation to China, so important especially in the case of the Kaifeng Jews, take on a new light altogether? Unceremoniously lumping the Kaifeng era of Jewry in China with antiquity successfully banishes the topic from our immediate concerns and makes it a fascinating but exotic era in the distant past—like the era of King David or, better yet, that of the contemporaneous Maimonides.

Wei Qianzhi, a historian from Henan University, examines the various theories of when Jews first moved East and settled in Kaifeng. In this essay, translated by Roger Des Forges, he goes through all the positions heretofore taken for the Zhou, Han, Tang, Northern Song, and Jin eras and, unsurprisingly, agrees with the Northern Song thesis for many reasons. The dating and evidence for all of these theories are extremely vague, and Wei seems simply to prefer his vague material over others'; indeed, he dates the Jewish arrival in Kaifeng precisely to the year 998. If I had not read Donald Leslie...