The Jews of Kaifeng

by Michael Pollack

The Community

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish enclaves of varying size were established in a number of Chinese cities, first by entrepreneurs from western Asia and Europe, then by refugees from Russia, and later by refugees from the Nazi terror. The histories of most of these communities, or at least those large enough to have attained organizationally structured status, have been fairly well documented. However, of the several much earlier Sino-Judaic settlements, some of which were apparently quite substantial, we know almost nothing, not even where all of them were located. The one exception to this is the kehillah of Kaifeng, though even here the available material is sparse and at times unreliable, especially insofar as the first six or seven centuries of that community's existence are concerned. It must be understood that for this period nearly all our knowledge concerning the Kaifeng Jews is derived from three sources: their surviving historical, scriptural and liturgical texts, the ever-waning folk recollections of succeeding generations, and the testimony provided by the Jesuit missionaries who had sporadic dealings with them between the years 1605 and 1723. As a consequence, the number of Jews who settled in Kaifeng during the Song era and the identity of the land from which they came have yet to be determined to everyone's satisfaction. The traditions of the city's Jews, often vague and inconsistent, suggest that their community was originally composed of immigrants from "Xiyu," a geographic term thought to refer to Persia, though to a far greater portion of Asia than is contained in the Iran of our times. Most specialists who have studied the matter agree that the roots of the Jewish community of Kaifeng are to be sought for in the general area of present-day Persia, and that its founders traveled to China over a land route. However, certain etymological, ritualistic and kindred considerations have given rise to theories that offer India, Yemen, Bukhara, and other regions as alternative places of origin. The proven existence of pre-Kaifeng Jewish enclaves in several of the port cities of China has been used, moreover, to support the proposition that the Jews who settled in Kaifeng (or their forebears) traveled to China by sea, and then proceeded overland to Kaifeng. Whatever the case, the most probable rationale for the selection of the old Song capital as their final destination would appear to have been based upon the economic opportunities or the safety from oppression they hoped to find there.

Of the seventeen clans whose names are listed on the stone monument of 1489, subsequent allusions to only eight have been retrieved from the existing records: Shi, Ai, Gao, Jin, Zhang, Zhao, and Li (with two distinct clans using the name Li). This led, incidentally, to the common practice of referring to the Jews of Kaifeng as "The Eight Clans with the Seven Surnames."

Although the use of Chinese patronymics by people of recognizable foreign descent was not ordinarily sanctioned, the Kaifeng Jews were authorized to adopt such names in appreciation of the role played by a Jewish soldier (or perhaps a physician) who in 1420 helped expose the treasonable designs of a member of the royal family. The clan names chiseled onto the 1489 monument are Chinese, but we may assume that the names borne by the original Jewish settlers in Kaifeng would have been predominantly Hebraic. It is worth noting, however, that the seven Chinese patronymics mentioned above are still used by those several hundred individuals of Kaifeng extraction who even now call themselves Jews.

The inscription of 1489 tells us that Kaifeng's first synagogue was built in 1163, the rabbi at the time was Lie-wei (Levi-?), and the construction was directed by someone bearing the name Antula (Abdullah-?; Hamdullah-?). In time, the synagogue was surrounded by other structures, among them a ritual bath, a communal kitchen, a study hall, a kosher butchering facility, a sukkah for use at the appropriate season of the year, commemorative arches and gateways, stelae (that of 1489, another dated 1512, and the two-sided stele dated 1663), and the like. The first synagogue, enlarged and refurbished as the need arose, was destroyed by flood in 1461. A replacement synagogue appears to have been consumed by fire around 1600. The third synagogue was swept away in 1642 by a fiood caused by the deliberate rupturing of the dikes of the nearby Yellow River as part of a plan for ending a lengthy siege of the city by rebel forces. At least 100,000 people lost their lives in this inundation, including an undetermined number of Jews. Kaifeng's last synagogue, which was dedicated in 1663, served the community until the 1860s, when it was demolished, the congregation having by then become divided, impoverished, and weakened by a general ignorance of its heritage. A substantial portion of the tiles from this structure were acquired by the city's Great East (Dong Da) Mosque, which, it would appear, also managed to procure an assortment of artifacts and manuscripts that had formerly been used in the synagogue. A balustrade, which was part of the synagogal building, was incorporated in a local Confucian temple. Other synagogal appurtenances have survived, as well as seven of its Torah scrolls, a fragment consisting of the first twelve skins of an eighth Torah, and sixty-one booklets-mainly prayer texts and portions of the weekly Torah readings, but also two Haggadahs for Passover and the community's historically invaluable Memorial book, which lists the names of more than a thousand Kaifeng Jews who died between the early years of the sixteenth century and cat 1670. With the exception of the Torah fragment, which is owned by an anonymous private collector, all are preserved in libraries and museums in England, Austria, Canada, and the United States.

What was life like for the Jews of Kaifeng from the time they became firmly established in the city until their community fell apart? The answer is that in its everyday non-religious aspects the life of the Kaifeng Jews was not very different from that of their neighbors. They dressed like their countrymen, wore pigtails (a custom decreed by the Qing conquerors of China to symbolize the submission of the Chinese to their new rulers), bound their daughters' feet, spoke the local dialect, and engaged in the same occupations as the people among whom they lived. They were thus farmers, merchants, artisans, scholars, officials, soldiers, doctors, and the like. In proportion to their numbers, however, they seem to have been quite successful . Many attained mandarin rank, the most noteworthy of these being the brothers Zhao Yingcheng (Moshe ben Abram) and Zhao Yingdou (Hebrew name unknown), who in the 1660s held prestigious governmental posts and were instrumental in rebuilding the synagogue that was destroyed in the flood of 1642. Each of the two brothers also wrote a book, in Chinese, about Judaism. To our regret, however, only the titles of these works are known. Yingcheng's Record of the Vicissitudes of the Holy Scriptures, it is believed, dealt with the history and scriptures of Kaifeng Jewry, while Yingdou's Preface to the Illustrious Way offered an exposition of the tenets of Judaism. In recent years, interested Chinese scholars have instituted searches, so far altogether unsuccessful, in the libraries of Kaifeng, Beijing and elsewhere for these texts. In the event that a copy of either or both of these works is discovered, we may expect to fill in many of the gaps that now exist in our understanding of the Jewish experience in old China.

The religious outlooks and practices of the Kaifeng Jews were for centuries very much like those of their fellow Jews outside China. They observed the Sabbath and the other holy days, circumcised their male offspring, maintained schools which taught the language and scriptural texts of their ancestors, and ordered their lives within the moral and doctrinal parameters set forth in the traditional rabbinic literature. They recognized the One God as eternal and without physical form, and believed that the individual is judged in the hereafter, as well as in the resurrection of the dead and the existence of angels. Idolatry was anathema to them. They accepted full responsibility for helping the poor and those incapable of taking care of themselves. They prayed facing westward, in the direction of Jerusalem. The headgear they wore at worship was colored blue, a practice which led some of their neighbors, who mistook them for adherents of a subsect of Islam, to call them "The Muslims with the Blue Caps," this to differentiate them from mainstream Muslims, who, because they wore white headgear at prayer, were known as "The Muslims with the White Caps." Their children were given Hebrew names in addition to the conventional names of the country. No converts were sought, but Chinese women underwent the rite of conversion before marrying Jewish men. Polygamy was permitted, and the levirate laws were observed. In the Persian style, they divided their pentateuchal readings into fifty-three portions rather than into the Ashkenazic division of fifty-four.

The Kaifeng Jews ate only meat that had been prepared in accordance with the precepts so common elsewhere in the Jewish world. Their kashrut practices appeared so utterly strange to the Chinese that one of the several names by which they identified the Jews was "The Sect that Plucks Out the Sinews." The term was inspired by the Kaifeng Jews' practice of removing the thigh muscles from the hip sockets of the animals they slaughtered, this in adherence to the kashrut rule derived from the story told in Genesis 32 of Jacob's struggle with the angel at Peniel, in the course of which this part of his body was injured.

The prospects for the long-term survival of Kaifeng Jewry were from the very outset endangered by its small numbers and later compounded by its total isolation from the rest of the Jewish world. For several hundred years, the bilateral international trade that flowed along the Silk Road and the sea lanes between East and West provided the Kaifeng Jews with infusions of theological and educational content that reinforced their resolve and capacity to maintain their Jewish orientation intact. Their relations with the several Jewish communities then flourishing within China itself no doubt did much the same. Around the year 1500, however, the Ming rulers issued a series of decrees prohibiting travel between their domains and foreign lands. As an immediate consequence, the Jews of Kaifeng found themselves hermetically sealed off from all contact with coreligionists abroad. Meanwhile, the various Jewish settlements in other Chinese centers died out, leaving the Kaifeng Jews utterly stranded and surrounded by millions upon millions of inhabitants who looked to spiritual heritages profoundly different from their own.

There were, to be sure, other significant erosive factors. The Chinese Jews, unlike most of their non-Chinese coreligionists, lived in a relatively open and tolerant society, and not once in their long history did any Chinese monarch see fit to single them out for the torments and ghettoization to which Jews were so tragically subjected in western lands, or to deny them free access to all forms of employment. Their good fortune was not, however, without its difficulties, for it split their ranks disastrously as they dealt with the thorny problem of drawing the line between their desire to preserve their own traditions and the constant temptation to replace them with those of their neighbors. Moreover, the absence of political and economic restrictions cost Kaifeng Jewry a high percentage of its brightest young men. To make matters worse, appointments to the country's most prestigious and remunerative postsãposts, that is, in the civil service, the educational establishment, and even in the armed forces -required that candidates pass a series of specialized examinations designed to evaluate the extent of their mastery of the classic texts of Confucianism. The preparation for these examinations entailed long years of intensive study; and in the case of Jewish candidates the effort was all too often undertaken at the expense of their Judaic studies. As a rule, moreover, success in the examinations quite often resulted in appointments to posts far from home. There the Jewish official and his family would be unlikely to meet other Jews, and could well be lost to the people from whom they had sprung. Still, this was not always the case the Zhao brothers, for example, came home to participate fully in Jewish life but there is every reason to suspect that such losses occurred frequently enough to cause appreciable damage to the integrity of the community that had been left behind.

The community was further weakened by the repeated natural, military and economic crises that Kaifeng experienced over the centuries. Fire and flood took their toll, revolutionary and foreign armies swept across the city, and the closing of the Silk Road drained it of much of its prosperity. Though now no longer the imperial capital, Kaifeng retained its status as capital of Henan Province until modern times, and as such continued to be a place of importance. But it was nevertheless a city in decline, a city which lured fewer and fewer newcomers, while losing more and more of its own people. Understandably, those Jews who left the city-and there were many who did could scarcely have been expected to find their new surroundings conducive to the successful transmission of their Judaic heritage to succeeding generations.

The gradual dilution of that heritage in Kaifeng itself is readily discerned from even cursory readings of both the community's surviving records and the reports published by foreign visitors.

The first evidence of the community's habituation to its all-encompassing Chinese environment may be gleaned from the text inscribed on the synagogal monument of 1489, where an attempt is made to demonstrate that the ethical principles upon which both Judaism and Confucianism are based are very much the same. Incense is bumed in the synagogue to honor the memory of dozens of outstanding biblical personages, but also to honor Confucius (who, however, is revered as a great moral teacher rather than as a religious figure). As time goes by, even more evidence of sinicization becomes evident. Sacrifices, in the Chinese style, are offered on several Jewish holidays, though only of kosher foods. The communal schools teach less and less, and the number of students decreases.

Slowly but inexorably, the knowledge of Hebrew diminishes, so that when twelve new Torah scrolls are written in the middle of the seventeenth century, the scribal misspellings in each of them run into the hundreds. Even the rabbis remember distressingly little of the ancestral language and faith, and after the death of the last of Kaifeng's rabbis in the first decade of the nineteenth century, there is nobody to take his place. Still, the Torah scrolls are preserved in the decaying synagogal building, where they are treasured as objects of veneration, but nobody in the congregation is now able to read them. In fact, the lews display one Torah scroll in the marketplace, together with a placard offering a reward to any bypasser who could translate it for them. This turns out to be a futile gesture.

Worship services are discontinued, destitute Jewish families set up ramshackle shelters on the synagogal grounds, and even grow cabbages in their little plots. By 1850-51 poverty and ignorance are so widespread that the surviving Jews sell six of their Torah scrolls and sixty-three smaller synagogal books to emissaries of the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews (now the Church's Mission to the Jews). In ensuing years, three more Torahs and at least two smaller synagogal manuscripts are sold. Around 1860, the synagogue is torn down, and a half-century later the land itself is deeded to Canadian missionaries.

Still, throughout all this time there persists a tenacious sense of loyalty (well-mixed, presumably, with nostalgia) on the part of some of the descendants of the ancient Jewish community to the idea of being Jewish and to their forgotten traditions. One finds occasional expressions of that attachment even now, so that it is not surprising that in two censuses made of Chinese minority peoples in recent decades, two or three hundred individuals saw fit to register themselves as Jews.

Given Kaifeng Jewry's grindingly long isolation from the wellsprings of Judaism in other lands and its paucity of numbers, it is not difficult to understand why most of its members were ultimately assimilated into the faiths of their countrymen. But what is really amazing is that this beleaguered outpost of Israel was able to find the inner strength and determination to carry on in face of these overpowering obstacles for as many centuries as it did.