Kaifeng Jews are a small community of descendants of Chinese Jews in Kaifeng, Henan province, China. In the early centuries of their settlement, they may have numbered around 2,500 people. Despite their isolation from the rest of the Jewish diaspora, their ancestors managed to practice Jewish traditions and customs for several centuries.
The distinctive customary life of the Kaifeng community slowly eroded, as assimilation and intermarriage with non-Jewish (Han Chinese and Hui) neighbors advanced, until, by the 19th century, its Jewishness largely became extinct, apart from its retention of memories of its clan's Jewish past as the Jews became Chinese.
The place of origin of these Jews and the date when they established their settlement in Kaifeng are sources of intense debate among experts. While the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews are assimilated into mainstream Kaifeng Han culture, some of them are trying to revive the beliefs and customs of their ancestors. In the 21st century, efforts have been made to revive Kaifeng's Jewish heritage and encourage the descendants of its original population to convert back to Judaism. Via the offices of the Shavei Israel organization, 19 young Chinese descendants of Kaifeng Jews have made aliyah, and in the process have had to do a formal conversion. Since 2015, descendants of the Kaifeng Jews have come under government pressure and suspicion.
History
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".