The Jews of Kaifeng

by Michael Pollack

The Discovery of the Community

Even though the city of Kaifeng could boast a population of a million during the years in which it served as the capital of the Song emperors-making it one of the two or three largest cities in the medieval world-it was only during the early decades of the seventeenth century that its name attained any noteworthy recognition in European intellectual circles. By then, the city had been reduced to the status of provincial capital, and its population had dwindled considerably. However, the interest demonstrated by well-informed Europeans regarding Kaifeng lay not in the city itself, but rather in the startling revelation that it contained an enclave of Jews who had lived there, as the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci put it, "from time immemorial."

The discovery of the existence of a Jewish community in Kaifeng emerged as the consequence of a seriocomic meeting in Beijing during the last week of June 1605 between Ricci and a Kaifeng mandarin named Ai Tian who had come to Beijing from Kaifeng in the hope of acquiring a more desirable civil service assignment than the district magistracy he already held.

Before leaving home, Ai had read in a book called Things I have Heard Tell about a small contingent of Europeans, headed by Ricci, whose evangelical zeal had brought them to China where, after many years, the emperor had finally approved their several petitions to be allowed to open a house of worship in Beijing. These foreigners, the author of the book explained, spoke of themselves as adherents of a faith based solidly and unalterably upon the doctrine of monotheism, a theological tenet which, as his educated readers would have known, ran parallel to the monotheistic teachings that the followers of the prophet Muhammad had brought to China many centuries earlier. What startled the author and, one would suppose, substantially all his readers, was that these Europeans persistently and indignantly denied that they were Muslims. What, then, the question therefore arose, was this strange faith to which these newcomers to China subscribed?

To Ai Tian, however, the matter was quite simple: if Matteo Ricci's people were truly convinced that there was only one God in the universe and if, as they maintained, they were not Muslims, what else could they be, he reasoned, but Jews?-Jews, that is, just like himself and like the rest of the kehillah to which he belonged. And this was an exhilarating thought, the more so because its consequences could well open a new chapter in the history ofthe isolated Jews of Kaifeng, whose contacts with non-Chinese Jews had now been totally cut off for several generations. In short, Ai's projected journey to Beijing would afford him an opportunity to seek out the European Jews who had settled there, tell them about his own community, find out what was happening to the Jews in the rest of the world, and perhaps reforge the links that had long ago tied the Jews of Kaifeng to their coreligionists in Europe and the non-Chinese world.

So it was that Ai Tian, having arrived in Beijing and made his way to what he thought was a synagogue, but was actually the church that the Jesuits had recently established in the city. Clad in his imposing mandarin robes and looking as Chinese as all the members of his community must by then have looked, he introduced himself to Matteo Ricci, whom he took to be a rabbi, as a coreligionist from distant Kaifeng.

This was, as can be readily understood, an introduction that left Ricci astounded. For the past two decades he had been searching vainly for descendants of the several Christian communities that were known to have existed in China a thousand years earlier, and now-at last-here he was, face to face with one of them. He was exhilarated.

After a few minutes of excited, exploratory talk, the priest ushered his guest into the chapel where, in celebration of the festival of St. John the Baptist, a painting of Mary and the infant Jesus had been placed near the altar, together with another of a youthful St. John. Ricci knelt reverently before the two representations. Ai, curiously inspecting the paintings, promptly misidentified the figures as those of Rebecca, Jacob and Esau. Courteously following the example set by his host, he also sank to his knees, remarking at the same time that although it was not the custom of his people to genuflect before images, he personally saw no objection to paying homage to one's ancestors. Then, observing a mural depicting the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, he wondered aloud whether these might not be the four eldest sons of Jacob, and asked the now-bewildered Ricci why the artist had failed to include Jacob's other eight sons in the work.

In the end, of course, the matter was sorted out, leaving Ricci with the disappointing but still exhilarating realization that his visitor was not the Chinese Christian he had taken him to be, but rather-and even more astonishingly-a Chinese Jew. Ai, as might be expected, was equally astonished to learn that his host belonged to a faith called Christianity, but seems to have concluded that although this Christianity had taken on a veneer of customs and teachings that were strange to him, it was no less Jewish than the faith in which he had been reared back in Kaifeng.

We must assume that on his return to Kaifeng Ai transmitted this conclusion to the rabbi of the city's synagogue, for on the receipt of a letter from Ricci early in 1608, the rabbi (Abishai-?) sent back a reply that, while protesting Ricci's contention that the Messiah had already arrived, apparently perceived so few differences in their respective theological positions that, after explaining that he was elderly and infirm, he offered to appoint the priest as his successor in the office of chief rabbi of Kaifeng. But, he added firmly, there was one formidable failing of Ricci's that had been communicated to him by Ai and would have to be corrected before such an appointment could be confirmed. Put plainly, he declared, Ricci would have to promise to give up, once and for all, his deplorable and scandalously unrabbinic addiction to eating pork.

The stories of Ricci's meeting with Ai and of his correspondence with the rabbi of Kaifeng are told in Ricci's letters and in the journal in which he kept track of his activities in China. Regrettably, he gives us no indication of his reaction to Rabbi Abishai's offer to appoint him to the senior rabbinical post in all of China.