The Jews of China
Ginsberg, Stanley M.
JEWS Of CHINA STANLEY GINSBERG The Jewish settlement at K'ai-feng, longest surviving and best-documented of the Chinese Jewish enclaves, was founded during the late Eleventh or early Twelfth...
...It stood on two acres of land at the foot of Earth Market Street in the eastern section of the city—where it would remain for 600 years...
...He was also made assistant commissioner in the Embroidered Uniform Guard, an honor guard consisting mainly of foreigners...
...Smith got in touch with Reverend W. H. Medhurst of Shanghai, who sent two Chinese Christians to K'ai-feng, where they stayed for several weeks...
...This was not the first time that China had been conquered by a foreign power, but it was the first time that the conquerors had no use for the Chinese system of government...
...Knowledge of Hebrew declined, and with it, access to Mosaic Law...
...They discouraged intermarriage...
...The new temple contained the Sanctuary, ritual baths, a slaughtering-ground, classrooms, a kitchen, and several apartments for the community's religious leaders...
...Corrupt officials, spoiled monks, and scheming court eunuchs exploited the factionalism that had risen among the Mongol princes and fought over the spoils...
...Never very numerous in Peking, Canton, and other cities, the Jews did not try to increase their numbers by seeking converts...
...Their aims were expulsion of the foreigners and restoration of Chinese rule...
...Twelve years later, in 1368, Chu's armies routed Toghan Te-mur, the last of the Mongol Khans, and assumed the Peacock Throne...
...In 1421, and again in 1445, the community's rabbis, Li Liang and Li Jung, received state funds for repairs...
...Domenge estimated that there remained at most one hundred Jewish families...
...They realize they are Chinese, completely assimilated, yet there is pride in the knowledge that they spring from an ancient people who are different from the other Chinese in K'ai-feng...
...The expectation of a Messiah seems to have been completely lost...
...The best known is Marco Polo, who came to Peking in 1286 and went on several missions as Ku-bilai's personal emissary...
...In 1421, an event took place that speeded up Jewish assimilation into Chinese society...
...The inscription also reveals the extent to which Chinese Judaism assimilated Chinese values...
...Then, in 1850, Bishop George Smith of Hong Kong was asked by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews to join the effort...
...A few may still survive...
...The only thing left to them was the synagogue itself, and even this was the cause of great discord in the community...
...God would always be honored above the emperor...
...The Mongols, though nominally Buddhist, were tolerant of other religions...
...Control of foreign trade, which for centuries rested in the hands of the Chinese, suddenly shifted to the West, who supported their right to traffic in opium with the most advanced technology in the world...
...A dozen years later, another Jew, Ai Chun, became Household Administrator to Prince Te, an imperial relative...
...From then on, assimilation into Chinese society accelerated...
...Now that they had the opportunity, they made a concerted effort to contact the community...
...Their report describes in grim detail the conditions of the survivors...
...The Mongol conquest of China marked an important stage in the assimilation of foreigners into Chinese society...
...j Over the next half century the community's remaining Torah scrolls and Hebrew manuscripts found their way into Western hands...
...The new Temple of the Pure and True was completed in 1663, commemorated by the erection of a second stone tablet alongside the 1489 inscription...
...A 1360 account noted that the Hangchow Sugar Board consisted of "Wealthy Jewish and Moslem merchants...
...any teaching that advocated allegiance to a sovereign other than the Son of Heaven was proscribed...
...Within a few decades, the Ch'ing court changed from the seat of Chinese political sovereignty to an impotent parody of Oriental pomp...
...The rebel armies withdrew and continued their advance on Peking, while the survivors of the devastated city fled to the river's opposite bank and waited for the dynasty's fate to be decided...
...On the Day of Atonement, "men abstain from all food and drink for a full day, while respectfully addressing Heaven, filled with contrition for their trespasses...
...According to Jean Domenge, a French Jesuit who visited K'ai-feng in 1722, the temple grounds contained five courtyards, around which were arrayed the Sanctuary, the Front Hall, two school buildings, the Ancestral Hall, a kitchen, a slaughtering ground, ritual baths, and living quarters for the Grand Rabbi and man-la...
...Above the doorways and on either side of numerous archways, congratulatory inscriptions were written in golden Chinese characters...
...In 1163, the K'ai-feng Jews celebrated the construction of their first synagogue in China, named "Temple of the Pure and True...
...Between 1854 and 1865, the T'ai P'ing Rebellion effectively closed the Chinese interior to foreigners...
...According to their reports, the community had lost most of its knowledge of Hebrew and knew little more of its customs and history than was recorded on the commemorative inscriptions...
...By 1800, the last man-la with any knowledge of Hebrew had died, and the synagogue stood neglected...
...The British had long known of the Chinese Jews from the writings of Ricci and the other Jesuits...
...Their attempts to buy the Torah scrolls and prayer books were unsuccessful...
...JEWS Of CHINA STANLEY GINSBERG The Jewish settlement at K'ai-feng, longest surviving and best-documented of the Chinese Jewish enclaves, was founded during the late Eleventh or early Twelfth Century by a group of 70 families recently arrived from Persia...
...The K'ai-feng community was the only Jewish enclave in China to have a synagogue, and this fact—more than any other— explains why the K'ai-feng Jews were able to retain their identity more than three centuries after the disappearance of other Jewish enclaves in China...
...They refused office...
...Two members of the Chin clan also obtained official appointments at this time, one as a lieutenant in the Chin-wu Advance Guard, and the second as an administrator in the Bureau of Entertainments...
...In recognition of his service, the throne bestowed on him the Chinese name Chao Ch'eng...
...Confucianism was the exclusive State doctrine...
...intermarriage increased considerably...
...the Ming rulers guaranteed their rights as citizens...
...As in the West, prayers were offered "morning, noon, and night—three times a day...
...the Ch'ing dynasty turned its back on them...
...Between 1460 and 1512 the synagogue obtained a total of six scrolls from the Jews of Ningpo, Yangchow, and possibly Hangchow, Peking and Canton...
...One Franciscan, Jean de Marignolli, writing in 1342, even debated with Jews at the Imperial Court...
...In 1605, a K'ai-feng Jew named Ai T'ien went to Peking and visited the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who questioned him at great length...
...In K'ai-feng, the synagogue, which may have been damaged during the fighting, was rebuilt by imperial order in 1279...
...When, in 1850, the first Protestant missionaries arrived on the scene, they found a handful of tattered survivors...
...In 1280, Genghis Khan's grandson, Kubilai, declared himself Son of Heaven and Illustrious Ancestor of the Yuan dynasty...
...The Chief Rabbi now bore the Chinese title chang-chiao (Custodian of the Teaching...
...The Jews were a curiosity—a "must see" for the Protestant missionaries who had come to convert the heathen Chinese...
...Around 1670, a memorial register maintained for over three centuries was closed out forever...
...Contact was also maintained with Jewish communities in the West: a Seventeenth Century account mentions visitors from Persia as late as 1480...
...Peasant armies sprang up near Canton and along the Yangtze valley, and began to march toward Peking...
...The Confucian Teaching and this Teaching," it reads, "agree on essential points and differ on secondary ones only...
...The first Ministers of Finance under the Mongols, for example, were Sayyed Edjell, a Bokharan, and Ahmed ben Aketi, whose family had come from eastern Persia...
...Later, the Jews came to be known as chu-hu (from the Persian djuhud), yi-tzu-lo-yeh (Israelites), and t'iao-chin-chiao ("Sect that Extracts Sinews") —a reference to Jewish ritual slaughter...
...Following the emperor's death in 1722, there was a brief resurgence of missionary activity while the new emperor went about consolidating his government...
...In 1642, the rebel armies of Li Tzu-Ch'eng left K'ai-feng in ruins after six months' siege...
...For the next century, the Jews barely managed to survive, sustained only by the vain hope that some day the emperor would permit them to restore their community...
...The community leaders, casting about desperately for a solution, offered to make Ricci their Grand Rabbi if he would give up eating pork...
...In 1436 a Jew named Kao Nien passed the State examinations that were required of anyone pursuing an official career...
...they blended into the cosmopolitan life of the cities as merchants, tradesmen, peddlers, operators of restaurants...
...The delegates' journal continues: "Within the precincts of the temple were a number of small apartments, all inhabited by the descendants of the ancient people____They told us also that they had been nearly starved since their temple had been neglected...
...By 1489, the Jews had all adopted Chinese surnames...
...Here, in the midst of the surrounding population, two-thirds of whom were Mohammedans, close to a heathen temple dedicated to the god of fire [were found] a few Jewish families, sunk in the lowest poverty and destitution—their religion scarcely more than a name, and yet sufficient to separate them from the multitude around----Not a single individual could read the Hebrew books...
...In 1957, a Czech Sinologist, Timoteus Pokera, visited K'ai-feng...
...more and more Jews faded into the surrounding Chinese population...
...The battle ended when the waters of the Pien River inundated the city...
...At its site Martin found a barren plot of ground, pock-marked here and there with pools of stagnant water...
...The Jewish community turned inward, in an attempt to save what it could without exposing its members to danger...
...they had been without a Rabbi for 50 years...
...But Judaism could not accept the influence of Chinese belief...
...Ming policy toward foreign minorities was surprisingly lenient, considering their prominence in Mongol political and economic rule...
...Another factor was the absence of synagogues—visible symbols of the Jewish identity—outside K'ai-feng...
...Other traditional observances included New Year, Tabernacles (Suk-kot), Simchat Torah, Chanukah, Passover, 9th of Av, and Advent (Shavuot...
...Community leaders petitioned the throne for funds to rebuild their temple, and received a small amount of money...
...Most of K'ai-feng was destroyed...
...Here and there, throughout the city, a few Chinese knew that they were somehow different...
...Despite the Jewish prohibition against worshiping images, the community was expected to install the Imperial Spirit Tablet directly before the Ark...
...in K'ai-feng, for example, the shaliah (emissary) may have paid periodic visits to other Jewish settlements...
...Inside the Sanctuary, which was surrounded by a white marble balustrade, were housed the Ark, an altar, the Imperial Spirit Tablets, and the Chair of Moses, upon which the Torah was placed for reading...
...When contact with Persia was cut off around the middle of the Fifteenth Century, it was no longer possible to import trained rabbis...
...The community, Ai said, numbered about a thousand persons...
...But here, too, the signs of decay are unmistakable...
...only at prayer did they continue to wear Persian-style turbans, caftans, and slippers...
...The following summer, however, they returned to K'ai-feng and this time were able to obtain six Torah scrolls, 50 or 60 other Hebrew manuscripts, and the Chinese-Hebrew Memorial Register...
...no doubt those who took Chinese spouses came under considerable pressure to leave their communities...
...The Chinese Jews kept the social and economic gains they had made under the Mongols, but came under considerable pressure to assimilate...
...in Chinese literature from the University of Wisconsin...
...The Yuan dynasty fell, and the Ming dynasty now ruled China...
...The majority of the Mongol conquerors were unlettered barbarians, not particularly interested in the problems of government...
...After obtaining the government's permission to take up residence in the capital, the Jews occupied a small street in the eastern section of the city, alongside a larger settlement of Moslems and a few Nestorian Christians...
...We heard that the emperor had refused to rebuild the temple until all was rotten and come to nought, so that the temple must remain in its present state until the emperor issues a command to repair or rebuild it____" The delegates returned to Shanghai with six or seven sections of Torah (parshiot) that had been bound into small books...
...The Jews spoke and dressed like their Chinese neighbors...
...The weak Tartars of the North and the remnants of the Sung dynasty in the South proved no match for the savage, disciplined hordes of Genghis Khan...
...The secret societies openly raised the banner of revolt in the early 1350's...
...The congregation observed the Sabbath every seventh day, and fasted four times a year...
...Some of the materials of the houses round the synagogue, such as bricks, tiles, wood, etc., have been sold by the professors to supply the wants of their families...
...Europeans began to appear in China, and they, too, were pressed into service...
...However, it can be inferred that, like other minorities, Stanley M. Ginsberg holds a Ph.D...
...He reported that about 200 Chinese in the city identified themselves as being of Jewish nationality...
...Chinese suspicion of foreigners and minorities continued to grow, and the Jews fell into deeper and deeper isolation...
...China fell to the barbarians without a struggle...
...The government had recognized the Jews' right to Chinese names, and the community followed suit...
...Rather than engaging in violent reprisals, the Chinese removed the foreigners from office and encouraged them to assimilate into Chinese society...
...The community maintained dietary laws, and circum-sised male children on the eighth day after birth...
...By venerating our ancestors, observing the proprieties between ruler and subject, revering our parents, living harmoniously with our wives and children, preserving the distinction between superior and inferior, and living peacefully with our friends, we accord with the Five Confucian Relationships...
...Most of the Jews had already assimilated into the Chinese population as tradesmen and small merchants, but a few still lived on the synagogue grounds in appalling poverty...
...In the Ark were 13 Torah scrolls—one for each of the twelve tribes and one for Moses...
...Twelve of these had been copied from the single scroll pieced together between 1653-1656...
...The rabbis solved this problem by hanging the Hebrew prayer "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God is One" above the Spirit Tablet...
...They know they are Jews," he wrote, "but know nothing of Judaism...
...The Chinese, who made little distinction between the Jews and their neighbors, referred to them collectively as hui-hui (Moslems...
...At the same time, Kubilai could not very well entrust the reins of government to the very Chinese from whom he had just seized them...
...A Jewish physician named An San (Hassan) exposed local corruption...
...Between 1840 and 1850, British gunboats violently altered the Chinese view of the world, and their relations with it...
...He wrote again in 1849, and this time the survivors sent a reply—which did not reach him until 1870...
...We have little direct information about the Chinese Jews during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries...
...But, as is often the case, there were conditions...
...even the foundations had been sold or carried off during the rebellion...
...In 1461, after a flood destroyed the Temple of the Pure and True, the government provided the money for its restoration...
...In 1845, T. H. Layton, British Consul at Amoy, wrote a letter to the K'ai-feng Jews, but received no answer...
...Thus, their common principles of making the mind resolute and making conduct appropriate are nothing more than acknowledging the Way of Heaven...
...Increased upward mobility and the continued erosion of Jewish communal bonds outside of K'ai-feng resulted in their virtual disappearance by 1550...
...The Jews had no teachers, little understanding of their religion and history, and no knowledge whatever of Hebrew...
...There was probably regular contact among the Jewish communities that dotted China...
...In 1932, David Brown, an American Jew, visited K'ai-feng and met with several of these families...
...Under their rule, Jewish enclaves existed in Khan-baliq (Peking), Hangchow, Yang-chow, Ningpo, Zayton (Ch'iian-chou), Nanking, and Sinkalon (Canton...
...Martin, the first Westerner to visit the Jews since 1724, reported that the synagogue no longer stood...
...A contemporary account of the fighting, Diary of the Defense of Pien, records the heroism of a Jewish company commander named Li Yao, who, with a small detachment of Jewish and Moslem troops, perished while defending the city's walls...
...Kubilai died in 1294, and the Mongol dynasty entered a long period of decline...
...Although there was little outward change in Jewish life from day to day, the community's social and religious bonds deteriorated...
...Foreign communities were granted all the rights of Chinese citizenship, including the right to own property and freedom of religion...
...Misrule and abuses soon spread to the local level...
...This inscription has survived and is an invaluable source of information about Chinese Judaism in the Fifteenth Century...
...The Grand Rabbi had died several years earlier and was succeeded by his son, whose knowledge of the Law was incomplete...
...The Jews lost their homes, businesses, and synagogue...
...Several prominent members of the community began the task of piecing together Torah fragments that had somehow survived, while others went around raising the additional funds needed for completion of the synagogue...
...Kubilai's only alternative was to appoint foreigners to important government posts...
...They remained dispersed for eleven years, while the Chinese throne passed into the hands of the Ch'ing dynasty...
...Thousands died in the first bloody assault...
...In 1489 the completion of the new synagogue was marked by the erection of an inscribed stone tablet in the courtyard...
...The K'ai-feng community prospered under the benevolent eye of the Ming government...
...The K'ai-feng Jews were led by two Us tad (rabbis), named Lieh-wei (Levi) and Yen-tu-la (Abdullah...
...In 1724, the Ch'ing throne again ordered the expulsion of the missionaries except for those whose scientific knowledge was needed at court...
...Roofs were of green tiles, the columns and wooden latticework of red lacquer...
...He received a low-level judicial post...
...The situation in K'ai-feng was somewhat better, primarily because of the synagogue and the large size of the community...
...Chinese nationalists, who were fiercely anti-Mongol, organized themselves into secret societies with names such as White Cloud and White Lotus...
...The only hint that a Jewish community once flourished was the inscribed stone tablet that perched precariously at the edge of a pool...
...In 1653, two members of the Chao clan returned to the city and discovered the foundations of the synagogue...
...The flood destroyed their Torah scrolls, prayer books, and the single copy of a Chinese guide to Hebrew pronunciation, without which prayers could not even be recited...
...In 1356 they came together in Nanking, where a general named Chu Yiianchang established a provisional capital and consolidated his command of the rebellion...
...They observed the Sephardic rite of rabbinic Judaism, and had brought Torah scrolls and prayer books with them from Persia...
...Also, they could not legally assume Chinese surnames, although this latter prohibition rapidly fell into disuse...
...With this beginning, the Jews slowly trickled back to their homes and businesses on Earth Market Street...
...At its conclusion, however, Reverend W. A. P. Martin visited K'ai-feng...
...During that time, K'ai-feng was visited by Domenge and another Jesuit, Antoine Gaubil...
...However, foreign males were required by law to take Chinese wives...
...Many served their own communities as teachers, religious leaders, and physicians...
...his assistants were called man-la (mullah), an Arabic term commonly used among the Chinese Moslems...
...Last, and most important, for some unknown reason the Jews never translated their Torah or Hebrew prayer books into Chinese...
...The synagogue had about 12 man-la, who were responsible for assisting at prayer and community observances, for performing ritual slaughter, and for educating the children...
...There was friction between Jews and Moslems, and the community had begun to ignore traditional dietary restrictions and the practice of circumcision...
...The Torah scrolls became little more than incomprehensible cult-objects, best given over to the K'aifeng synagogue for safekeeping...
...Besides religious leaders and teachers, their population of about 350 persons included merchants, tradesmen, and physicians...
...In 1665, the Ch'ing court reversed its earlier lenient policy on foreigners and declared a ban on all missionary activity: the throne saw in the hundreds of churches that dotted the Chinese landscape a challenge to imperial prerogative...
...Martin located a few of the survivors and bought two more Torah scrolls...
...The community's links with its tradition had finally snapped...
...The Sung and Yuan dynasties had welcomed the foreigners and encouraged their participation in the economic life of the empire...
...Extinction had become a reality...
...Kubilai Khan soon discovered that ruling the vast Chinese empire was considerably more difficult than its conquest had been...
...On the district and local level, Jewish and Moslem merchants held considerable power...
...Many Jews had joined the Moslem community, which had always been far larger than their own, and many more simply disappeared into Chinese society...
Vol. 2 • April 1977 • No. 6
