Background The origin of the Kaifeng Jews and the date of their arrival is one of the most intensely debated topics in the field of Chinese-Jewish relations. Though some scholars date their arrival to the
Tang dynasty (618–907), or even earlier, Steven Sharot, reflecting the majority view, considers that the most probable date for the formation of a
Jewish community in Kaifeng was sometime during the
Song dynasty (960–1279). That Jewish merchants were active before Song China appears probable from the fact that the Muslim Persian geographer
ibn Khordadbeh in his
Book of Roads and Kingdoms ca. 870 describes
the Jewish Radhanite merchants as operating over a wide arc from Western Europe to China. It has been conjectured that this group constituted the first of two waves of Jewish settlement in China, the second being associated with the
Mongol conquest of China and the establishment of the
Yuan dynasty. According to a scholarly consensus, the Jewish community of Kaifeng primarily consisted of people of
Persian Jewish origin. Uncertainty persists as to whether they came overland through
Chang'an, via either of the two
Silk Roads, or whether they travelled inland after they reached coastal cities like
Guangzhou or
Quanzhou by sea. Ibn Khordadbeh's Rhadanites used both routes. Some evidence has been interpreted to suggest that their ancestors may have mostly hailed from the
Bukharan Jewish branch of Persian Jews who had settled in
Central Asia. In all likelihood, all of the founders of the community were male Jewish merchants: the arduous, dangerous nature of the route, and the length of time which they needed to spend in order to travel on it, would have probably forced them to rule out bringing their wives, and after they settled in Kaifeng, they married Chinese women. Among the vast trove of documents which
Aurel Stein discovered in
Dunhuang in
Gansu in northwestern China was a bill of sale for sheep which dated back to 718 written in new
New Persian using the
Hebrew alphabet. They wrote their documents on paper, something which was unavailable in the West, together with a fragment of a
Seliḥoth that was probably composed in the eighth or ninth century. A century later, the Arab geographer Abū Zayd Ḥasan al-Sīrāfī mentioned in 910 the
Guangzhou massacre of 878/9, in which Muslims,
Oriental Christians, and Jews were killed, attesting to the latter group's presence in China. Trade with China was predominantly maritime and dominated by
Arabs, with many Jews also engaged in this network. By the 11th century, more than a million Arabs lived in
port enclaves, where they were allowed self-administration. At least seven synagogue communities are attested for this period in all major Chinese port cities, such as
Ningbo City,
Guangzhou and
Hangzhou. Goods from these coastal centres were transported inland via the
Grand Canal to the
Yellow River and then by barge to Kaifeng. The Jewish community that was eventually established in Kaifeng survived the collapse of these sister communities on the eastern seaboard, all of which disappeared in the 15–16th centuries when the
Ming dynasty's ability to protect its coast was crippled by raids by
Wokou.
The Song/Yuan period hypotheses The point of departure for determining precisely when a
community (kehillah) was established relies on two forms of evidence: the information surviving in inscriptions from four
stelae recovered from Kaifeng, and references in Chinese dynastic sources. The dates on the stelae range from 1489 through 1512 and 1663 to 1679. Chinese documents on Jews are rare compared to the voluminous records of other peoples. The first official documents referring to the Jews as a distinct group date to the 12th century. Two Chinese scholars have argued that the Jews went to China in 998, because the
Song History records that in the year 998, a monk (僧) named Ni-wei-ni () and others had spent seven years traveling from India to China in order to pay homage to the Song
Emperor Zhenzong. They identified this Ni-wei-ni as a Jewish
rabbi. Others followed this up with a claim that the
Song History provides a precise date for a large population of Jewish expatriates accompanying Ni-wei-ni from India who putatively arrived in Kaifeng on 20 February 998. These inferences contradict Buddhist records for Ni-wei-ni's visit. Both the
sēng () used to describe Ni-wei-ni in the Song dynastic history and the
shāmén () in the Buddha Almanac of Zhi-pan mean "Buddhist monk", not rabbi. Furthermore, Ni-wei-ni did not bring Western cloth with him, but banyan seeds. The earliest
stele erected by the Kaifeng community bears the date 1489. This, it is affirmed, commemorates the construction in 1163 of a synagogue called Qingzhensi (), the customary term for
mosques in China. The inscription states that the Jews came to China from Tiānzhú (天竺), a Han-Song term for India. It adds that they brought Western cloth as tribute for an emperor, unnamed, who welcomed them with the words: "You have come to Our China; reverence and preserve the customs of your ancestors, and hand them down at Bianliang ()," i.e., Kaifeng. The same stone inscription also associates the building's establishment with two names: An-du-la ( perhaps
Abdullah) and a certain Lieh-wei (), probably transcribing
Levi, who is described as the
Wu-ssu-ta () of the community. This last term probably is a phonetic rendering of the
Persian word
ustad, ("master", religious leader), and "rabbi" in a Jewish context in that language. According to
Irene Eber, among others, believe that the Jews must have settled in this Song dynasty capital city of Kaifeng, then also known as Bianjing, no later than 1120, some years before the
Song-Jin alliance broke down. In 1163, the synagogue of Kaifeng city was established. The 1489 stele speaks of its establishment coinciding with the
first year of the Longxing () era of the Song emperor
Xiaozong (), namely 1161, which sets the synagogue's establishment in the first year of the reign of the Jurchen Emperor
Jin Shizong (), within whose territory Kaifeng lay. If the city was Jurchen, it is asked, why does the stele associate its foundation with the Song? Recently, Peng Yu has challenged the Song-entry consensus, favouring instead a variant of the "second wave" theory of Kaifeng Jewish origins, one version of which holds that Jews probably figured among the large number of peoples collectively known as the
Semu () who were captured during Mongol campaigns in the West and conveyed east to serve in the bureaucracy and assist the Mongols in administering China after its conquest. The two names associated in 1489 with the establishment of the synagogue in 1163, An-du-la and Lieh-wei (namely Abdullah and Levi), are in Yu's interpretation retrodated from later times. An-du-la, on the basis of the 1679 stele, he reads as the
religious name of the An Cheng (), said to be a Kaifeng Jewish physician, who "restored" the synagogue in 1421 (not 1163). According to the
Diary of the Defence of Pien, the Kaifeng Jewish Li/Levi clan, from whose ranks some 14
manla or synagogue leaders were drawn, only arrived in Kaifeng after relocating from
Beijing during the
Hung Wu period (1368–1398) of the
Ming dynasty. Yu's Yuan-entry theory claims that the Kaifeng Jews entered China together with the Muslim
Hui-hui people during the Mongol
Yuan dynasty. The Jews themselves were defined as a Hui people, due to similarities between Jewish and Islamic traditions. They were called blue hat Hui () as opposed to the "white cap Hui" (), who were Muslims. Chinese sources do not mention the existence of Chinese Jews until the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The explanation for these contradictions within the various stelae must lie, Yu thinks, in the impact of Ming imperial policies aiming to constrain peoples such as the Semu, who came
en masse with the Mongols peoples, to assimilate to the culture of the revived Han hegemony. The dynasty was marked by a distinct
anti-foreign sentiment expressed in coercive decrees that enforced assimilation, and therefore, Yu infers, the Kaifeng Jews, under the Ming, claimed in their monumental stone inscriptions that their roots in China were ancient, going back at least to the nativist Song if not indeed to the Han period. The stele sought to assert proof of a long accommodation by Jews to Chinese civilization in order to avoid discriminatory measures.
The early Kaifeng community Kaifeng was a cosmopolitan industrial metropolis with 600,000 to a million inhabitants in Northern Song times, which formed an intense hub for overland trade via the Silk Road and the commercial riverine networks connecting it to the eastern seaboard. Through it vast amounts of grain tribute also passed. Its strategic importance and wealth were recognized by successive dynastic powers over the period 905–959, such as the
Liang (who gave it its present name),
Jin,
Later Han and
Later Zhou who all made it their capital, as did the
Northern Song when they unified the empire, until the city was conquered by the Jurchen in 1127. Under siege, it
surrendered to the Mongols in 1233. It would have been attractive to Persian Jewish merchants. The founding colony's members may have specialized in the manufacturing, dyeing, or pattern printing of cotton fabrics. By the early 16th century, an inscription mentions not only craftsmen, farmers and traders among them, but also scholars, physicians and officials, political and administrative, as well as military men in important posts. A Ming emperor conferred eight
surnames upon the Jews. Other evidence points to 70–73 surnames. The late 1672 inscription states that at the synagogue's inception (1163) there were 73 clans () and 500 families () in the Kaifeng Jewish community. The Hongzhi stele (1489) () registers the names of 14
clans. •
Ài (艾) (
Heb.עי) •
Shí (石) (Heb.שי) •
Gāo (高) •
Mù (穆) •
Bái (白) •
Huáng (黄) •
Zhào (赵/趙) (Heb.שה) •
Zhōu (周) •
Zuǒ (左) •
Niè (聂/聶) •
Jin (金) (Heb.גין) •
Lǐ (李) (Heb.לי) •
Ǎn (俺) •
Zhāng (張) (Heb.גן) Leaders among this community were called
manla (), a term usually explained as a loanword from Arabic
mullah. It has been suggested however that it may well have been a phonetic transcription of the Hebrew ''ma'lā'' (מעלה) "the honourable". The Persian rubrics of the Kaifeng Jewish liturgy are written in the Bukharan dialect and the Bukharan Jews believe that in the past, some of their kin migrated to China and ceased to have contact with their country of origin. Many of the known Hebrew names of the Kaifeng Jews were only found among Persian and
Babylonian Jews. Jewish written sources do not mention how the Jews arrived in Kaifeng, though a legend says that they arrived by land on the
Silk Road. Some Jesuit reports inaccurately stated the Kaifeng Jews did not intermarry. The
Ming dynasty (1368–1644), in reaction to the foreign dynasty it replaced, laid down a policy of discrimination against foreigners, such as the resident Mongols and Semu. Laws regarding ethnic
endogamy were issued that forbade members of such communities from marrying within their own groups. They were at liberty to marry only Han Chinese. Failure to do so would lead to enslavement. To what degree these measures were applied is unknown, but is evident from their Memorial Book that intermarriage took place on a large scale among the Kaifeng Jews certainly from Ming and it may be assumed, in Qing times. From the 19th century onwards it became the norm. They followed the Chinese custom of
foot binding. The custom of the
levirate marriage was retained, and
polygamy was practiced: one Kaifeng Jew, the Zhang (張) clan's Zhang Mei, is recorded in the Memorial Book as having six wives, while Jin Rong-Zhang from the Jin clan (金) had five. Towards the end of the Ming period, calculations based on the community's memorial book suggest that the Kaifeng Jewish community amounted to some 4,000 people. The
catastrophic flood of 1642 brought about a precipitous drop in their population as the Flood killed 3000 Jews. The flood also destroyed the synagogue. Considerable efforts were made to save the scriptures. One man of the Gao clan, Gao Xuan, dove repeatedly into the flooded synagogue to rescue what he could and afterward all seven clans helped restore and rewrite the 13 scrolls. They obtained some from Ningxia and Ningbo to replace them, and another Hebrew
Torah scroll was bought from a Muslim in Ningqiangzhou (in
Shaanxi), who acquired it from a dying Jew at Canton.
Religious practices and beliefs When Kaifeng Jews introduced themselves to the Jesuits in 1605, they called themselves members of the house of "Israel" () The Jesuits also noted that a Chinese
exonym labelled them as
Tiao jin jiao, "the sect that plucks the sinews" (). This term arose from observing that, in memory of
Jacob's
wrestling with the angel, their butchers extracted the sciatic nerve (
Gid hanasheh) as required in
Nikkur, marking them as distinct from Muslims who otherwise, like them, also refrained from eating pork. The evidence on the stelae shows that they identified the emergence of Judaism as coinciding with the early
Zhou dynasty ( 1046–256 BCE, in modern reckoning). Abraham () was recorded as wakening as from sleep to the 19th generation from
Pangu-Adam (), and grasping profound mysteries, founded Judaism. This is said to have occurred in the 146th year of the Zhou dynasty (i.e., 977 BCE). The
floruit of Moses () in turn is set in the 613th year of the same dynasty, namely around 510 BCE. In their prayers and liturgy, the traditional community followed
Talmudic usage, celebrating all the Jewish festivals, observing the prayers, rituals and
days of fasting variously associated with the
Jewish Sabbath,
Yom Kippur,
Rosh Hashanah,
Passover,
Shavuot,
Sukkot,
Hanukkah,
Purim and
Tisha B'Av. Within a few centuries, nonetheless, practices regarding
the coming of age ceremony,
wedding and
death and burial were acclimatized to the respective Chinese customs, though the text of the
Kaddish in the Memorial Book suggests the prayer was recited at funerals. By sometime after the mid 19th century all of these practices appear to have been abandoned, including the observance of the Sabbath. Outside the synagogue was a large hall, the Tz'u t'ang () or "Hall of the Ancestors" where, according to the Portuguese Jesuit Jean-Paul Gozani (1647–1732) who lived in Kaifeng from 1698 to 1718,
incense bowls were placed to commemorate the patriarchs and outstanding figures of the Law, as well as various holy men (). This was similar to Chinese rites regarding ancestors, with the difference that
no images were allowed. Their
Pentateuch was divided into 53 sections according to the Persian style.
The Jesuits The existence of Jews in China was unknown to Europeans until 1605, when
Matteo Ricci, then established in Beijing, was visited by a Chinese official from Kaifeng. According to the account in
De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, Ricci's visitor, named
Ai Tian (), was a
chüren () – someone who had passed the provincial level of the
imperial examination decades earlier in 1573. Ai Tian explained that he was a member of a 1,000 strong Israelite congregation that worshipped one God. They were unfamiliar with the word "Jew" () which, according to Zhang Ligang, first appeared in the 1820s when a German missionary used this translated name of "Jews Country" in a journal. When he saw a Christian image of
The Madonna, Mary with
Jesus and
John the Baptist, he took it to be a representation of
Rebecca with her children
Jacob and Esau. Ai said that many other Jews resided in Kaifeng; they had a splendid synagogue (), and possessed a great number of written materials and books. Ricci wrote that "his face was quite different to that of a Chinese in respect to his
nose, his eyes, and all his features". This has been taken to allow an inference that, up to that time, the Kaifeng Jews had still largely shunned intermixing and were thus physically distinguishable from the surrounding population. About three years after Ai's visit, Ricci sent a Chinese
Jesuit lay brother to visit Kaifeng; he copied the beginnings and ends of the holy books kept in the synagogue, which allowed Ricci to verify that they indeed were the same texts as the
Pentateuch known to Europeans, except that they did not use
Hebrew diacritics (which were a comparatively late invention). When Ricci wrote to the "ruler of the synagogue" in Kaifeng, telling him that the
Messiah the Jews were waiting for had come already, the wrote back, saying that the Messiah would not come for another ten thousand years. Nonetheless, apparently concerned with the lack of a trained successor, the old rabbi offered Ricci his position, if the Jesuit would join their faith and abstain from eating pork. Later, another three Jews from Kaifeng, including Ai's nephew, stopped by the Jesuits' house while visiting Beijing on business, and got themselves baptized. They told Ricci that the old rabbi had died, and (since Ricci had not taken him up on his earlier offer), his position was inherited by his son, "quite unlearned in matters pertaining to his faith". Ricci's overall impression of the situation of China's Jewish community was that "they were well on the way to becoming
Saracens [i.e.,
Muslims] or heathens." Father Joseph Brucker stated that Ricci's account of Chinese Jews indicated that there were only in the range of ten or twelve Jewish families in Kaifeng in the late 16th to early 17th centuries) In the Jesuits' manuscripts it was also stated that there was a greater number of Jews in
Hangzhou.
19th to 20th centuries The Kaifeng Jewish community's isolation from other Jewish communities and marriages with Han Chinese and Islamic Chinese resulted in a decreased emphasis on Jewish identity and tradition. With some Kaifeng families, Muslim men did marry their Jewish women, while Muslim women did not marry the Jews. In 1849, an observer who had contact with the Kaifeng Jewish community noted that "the Jews are quite Chinese in appearance." The
Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s led to the dispersal of the community, but it later returned to Kaifeng. To avoid the threat of becoming defunct, the Kaifeng community dispatched members to Shanghai in order to seek help from Sephardic European Jewish merchants active there. The funds that were collected to this end were diverted to assist an influx of Russian Jews fleeing
pogroms. Shanghai's
Baghdadi Jewish community attempted to instruct Kaifeng Jews in the Jewish religious teachings and ritual.
The firm of S. H. Sassoon took two Kaifeng brothers in flight from the Taiping rebels under their wing and had them sent to
Bombay where they underwent circumcision. One died within two years but the other, Feba, was renamed Shalem Sholome David, and was employed by the Sassoons in their Shanghai office (1872–1882). In 1883 he married a Baghdadi Jewish woman, Habiba Reuben Moses, and became a respected member of the Jewish community in Bombay. During the
Boxer rebellion the Bombay community offered to subsidize the relocation of Kaifeng Jews to Shanghai. The dismantlement of the synagogue sometime between 1850 and 1866 led to the community's demise. By the turn of the 19–20th century members of the community had fallen into dire poverty. The Zhang Kaifeng Jewish family had largely converted to Islam by this time. The site of the synagogue had turned into a fetid swamp. Much material belonging to it, even the roof tiles, was purchased by Muslims and others: two young Kaifeng Jews sold three Torahs to two Americans and an Austrian. Some property was also said to have been stolen. The Ark of the
Sefer Torah was reportedly seen in a mosque. The site itself was apparently bought by Bishop White in 1914, and in 1954, the Chinese Communist government confiscated the property and built the Kaifeng Municipal Clinic (today 开封市中医院南院) on it. Some usages remained. Burial coffins maintained a distinctive shape from those customary for Chinese. Kaifeng Jewish ancestry has been found among their descendants living among the Hui Muslims. Scholars have pointed out that Hui Muslims may have absorbed Kaifeng Jews instead of Han Confucians and Buddhists. Kaifeng Chinese had difficulty in distinguishing Jews and Muslims, and spoke of the former as "ancient Islam" (). The blue hat Hui also referred to Jews converting to Islam. Jin clan descendants also came to believe they were Muslims. Instead of being absorbed into Han, a portion of the Jews of China of Kaifeng became Hui Muslims. In 1948, Samuel Stupa Shih (Shi Hong Mo) (施洪模) said he saw a Hebrew language "Religion of Israel" Jewish inscription on a tombstone in a Qing dynasty Muslim cemetery to a place west of Hangzhou. By Ricci's time, it is said that the Nanjing and Beijing Jews had become Muslims, though a Jewish community and synagogue still existed in Hangzhou.
Post World War II The Kaifeng Jews are not recognized as a minority among the
55 ethnic groups which have been granted this official status in China. Their bid to be so listed in 1953 was turned down by the Chinese government. Their registration as "Jewish descendants" () was changed to
Han Chinese () out of official concerns that an ethnic status might lead them to seek privileges. What little remains of their material Jewish heritage has been locked away by Chinese authorities in a special room in the Kaifeng museum, ostensibly for the protection of their heritage or is conserved in the Dongda mosque (), where the relics are inaccessible. Family papers and heirlooms were reportedly discarded or burnt out of fear of the
Red Guards during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution. In 1980 during a
hajj pilgrimage the Hui Muslim woman Jin Xiaojing () realized she had Jewish roots. The
Portland Rabbi Joshua Stampfer (1921–2019), on a visit to Kaifeng in 1983, estimated there were from 100 to 150 descendants of Kaifeng Jews, and provided the means for Jin Xiaojing's daughter, Qu Yinan, then a Beijing journalist, to study Judaism and Hebrew in California where she became the first of the Kaifeng community to be
reconverted back to the religion of her ancestors. Qu Yinan's family abstained from certain foods, such as shellfish and pork, similar to the stipulations of
kosher dietary law, which marked them off from most neighbouring Chinese. She had been under the impression her family was Muslim, who likewise abstain from pork, and her grandfather, like them, had worn a skullcap, only blue as opposed to the white cap worn donned by local Muslims. Writing in 1987
Daniel Elazar suggested it would be difficult to maintain that contemporary Kaifeng Chinese of Jewish descent are Jews. Proposals to establish a Museum commemorating their history despite the city's lack of Jewish artifacts and documents, have received enthusiastic local government backing, which considers that such a centre would have positive effects on the local economy via Jewish tourism. Elazar opines that, over the ensuing decades, Western Jews will manage to encourage the growth of Chinese Jews among the descendant population The establishment of
diplomatic relations between China and Israel in 1992 rekindled interest in Judaism and the Jewish experience. It is difficult to estimate the number of Jews in China, population count often having to fluctuate constantly due to changes in official attitudes. A survey in the 80s suggested 140 families in China bore six of the traditional Jewish surnames, with 79 in Kaifeng amounting to 166 individuals. The last official census revealed about 400 official Jews in Kaifeng, now estimated at some 100 families totalling approximately 500 people. Up to 1,000 residents have ties to Jewish ancestry, though only 40 to 50 individuals partake in Jewish activities. Within the framework of contemporary
rabbinic Judaism, matrilineal transmission of Jewishness is predominant, while Chinese Jews based their Jewishness on patrilineal descent. This has been attributed to the influence of Chinese cultural norms, where lines of descent are typically patrilineal. The Jewish sinologist Jordan Paper notes, however, that all genealogies in the Torah consist exclusively of male descent. The modern assumption that Judaism is matrilineal has been used, he adds, to deny the authenticity of Chinese Jews because their clan lineages were patrilineal. Kaifeng Jews are not recognized as Jews by birth and are required to formally convert to Judaism in order to receive Israeli
citizenship. Some desire to reconnect with Judaism and some say their parents and grandparents told them that they were Jewish and would one day "return to their land". Under Israel's
Law of Return,
aliyah requires proof of Jewish descent through at least one grandparent. Though such evidence is not available for the Kaifeng community, and strict Orthodox Jewish rabbis would question their authenticity as Jews,
Shavei Israel's
Michael Freund has sponsored for over a decade (2006–2016) the emigration of 19 descendants of Kaifeng Jews to Israel, where they have studied variously Hebrew in
ulpanim and a yeshiva in preparation for
conversion to Judaism. In the 21st century, both the Sino-Judaic Institute and Shavei Israel sent teachers to Kaifeng to help interested community members learn about their Jewish heritage, building on the pioneering work of the American Judeo-Christian Timothy Lerner. Advocates for the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews are exploring ways to convince the Chinese authorities to recognize the antiquity of the Kaifeng Jews and allow them to practice their Chinese Jewish way of life. Since 2015, descendants of the Kaifeng Jews have come under increased pressure and suspicion by the
Chinese government. == Kaifeng manuscripts ==