From the first notice of Chinese Jews, the Kaifeng community has aroused intrigue as well as myth and legend in its history. Every few years, a new book about China's Jews, if not those of Kaifeng, appears. Still, even including the nineteenth-and-twentieth-century Jewish communities in Harbin, Shanghai, and other cities, the serious literature about Chinese Jews is limited. The most important studies of China's Jews are listed in the bilbiography of this very significant work of twelve essays edited by Anson Laytner and Jordan Paper.
Beginning with the introductory essay and through the conclusion, both authored by the editors, it is clear that the book has three purposes: to present the entirety of problems surrounding the elusive Kaifeng community, for the book to be accurate, and for it to be as definitive as possible. The book is successful in all three. Indeed, if one reads a single book on the Kaifeng Jews, this one is recommended.
One who knows nothing about China's or Kaifeng's Jews finds key facts in the Introduction. For example: there were at least seven communities with synagogues in port cities of China by the eleventh century; Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song (960–1127) dynasty had a synagogue, farther inland; many Kaifeng Jews passed the civil service exam in Song times; like Islam, Judaism was viewed by non-Jews as a Chinese religion with special rituals such as not eating pork; only at Kaifeng did a Jewish community sustain a history of many centuries. The introduction also raises perhaps the greatest dilemma of the Kaifeng Jewish community: how long did it persist and do any descendants of the Song community survive.
The first seven essays comprise Part 1, the Past. Chapter 1, by Nigel Thomas, deals with China's Jews before the Kaifeng community. Thomas focuses on the Radhanites, a group of Jewish merchants reported in the mid-ninth-century by Arab geographer Ibn-Khurdadhbih. They came to China by land and sea. A text of about a century later places the Radhanites in Rayy. The next part of Thomas's article considers the Radhanites’ points of origin and how they crossed Asia when travelling by land to China. One possible route was through the steppes controlled by the Türks. This possibility leads to consideration of claims that tha Khazars converted to Judaism. Thomas does not confirm this idea, but he emphasizes that Jewish merchants were trading in Khazaria and other parts of Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and West Asia where Muslim merchants were not welcome. Thomas concludes that the Radhanites were the first Jews to travel from Europe to Asia, making a mark on Eurasian roads.
The second essay is by an eminent sinologist, the late Erik Zürcher, who presented the essay as a lecture in 1995 and published it five years later. The essay is written as a scholar writes, based on primary sources including the famous stele inscription of 1489, asking and then answering the questions a scholar would ask. One learns that by 1995 he had identified more than 450 publications relevant to Chinese Jews, and that European interest in the community began with a publication in 1605 by Jesuit Matteo Ricci that was followed three years later with an offer to help them understand the New Testament. Zürcher addresses head-on the theory of Rabbinical forgeries, that passages about Jesus in the Old Testmament had been deleted, and the Rites Controversy whereby in the seventeenth century Jesuits recognised Confucian practices in order to make inroads into China. He writes of Giampolo Gozani and then Father Jean Domenge who were at the Kaifeng synagogue, who copied inscriptions, and on whose drawings of the synagogue much more recent ones have been made. He tells us there were thirteen Torah scrolls and numerous other texts, probably transported from Central Asia and Iran, at the synagogue, that three services were held daily in addition to on major holidays, and he ends with nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of Jews and Christians. Zürcher last questions whether the Kaifeng community will be revived, a subject addressed in later essays.
Irene Eber, who writes often about China's Jews, subtitles her essay “Sinification as Affirmation of Identity”. She argues that taking on practices from China strengthened self-identify among the Kaifeng community. Her evidence comes from many of the sources Zürcher used, the stele, Jesuit and Protestant writings, and a memorial book from the seven Jewish clans in Kaifeng, emphasizing that these families were the basis for Kaifeng's Judaism. Eber's essay is the first in the book that mentions the Dunhuang document of a penitential prayer. Eber also explores the principle of sectarianism, one central to Chinese social history, as it applies to the Kaifeng Jews. Like other authors, she writes that it was sometimes perceived that Jews were Muslims and vice versa. She also explores the Kaifeng Jewish understanding of Adam, Abraham, and Moses based on stele inscription and other sources.
Andrew Plaks's essay on Confucianisation of the Chinese Jews based on the stelae inscriptions follows. Using those of 1512, 1663, and 1679, as well as the 1489 inscription, he provides stronger evidence than Zürcher or Eber of the convergence of Confucian texts such as the Six Classics and Jewish theology. Like Eber, Plaks writes of beliefs that that Adam might be the Chinese mythological Pan Gu, and that Noah might be written with the characters for Nu Wa, the primogenitress of the Chinese people. Emphasizing that the merging of religious texts and philosophies are creative cultural convergence, and that understanding this should not be simplified, Plaks explores subtle attempts to conflate Confucian and Jewish language in the stelae and ideology.
Donald Leslie, another scholar with a long bibliography on Chinese Jews who, like Plaks and Eber, reads Chinese as well as Hebrew documents, focuses on Chinese sources through the Ming dynasty. Leslie begins with two fundamental texts dated to ca. 1225, Zhao Rugua's Zhufanzhi (Record of Foreigners) and Chen Yuanjing's Shilin guangji (Compendium of a Forest of Affairs) that include a version of the story of Abraham, also found in the encyclopedia Sancai tuhui of 1609. He briefly mentions Ming sources and concludes with an appendix in which he explores whether there are Chinese equivalents of Holy Land, Holy Language, Holy Book, or Holy Name.
Jordan Paper's essay examines whether a Jew could also be a magistrate in China, specifically whether the conflict between Judaism and requirements of a civil official were too great. He confirms that an official in Confucian society had no requirements that impeded the practice of Judiasm, and thus it was possible. Moshe Bernstein's essay on an official, Zhao Yingcheng, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century, follows. Zhao is mentioned in the stele of 1663 that records the destruction of the Kaifeng synagogue in a flood and in local records. Zhao was appointed to a position in the Ministry of Justice in 1646, just two years into the establishment of the Qing dynasty. Shortly thereafter he was sent to Fujian, returning to Kaifeng in 1653 to mourn one of his parents. Records confirm both that Zhao could read Hebrew and that he fully functioned as an official, further evidence that Judaism did not prevent the rise in officialdom in Chinese society.
The five essays that comprise the second half of the book deal with Kaifeng's Jews in the last century. Alex Bender seeks to understand how Jews outside China have perceived Kaifeng's Jews, and more specifically if they were considered part of the international Jewish community, or more of a curiosity. He surveys major writings about the Chinese Jews by both Jews and Christians, many of the latter by missionaries. One of the most interesting is an editorial by the Jew Isaac Leeser (1806–1868), a prolific writer and publicist who founded the Jewish Publication Society and published a monthly periodical called The Occident and American Jewish Advocate. Written in response to books by James Finn in 1843 and George Smith in 1851, Leeser's challenges to the negative intentions of publications rallied support for the Kaifeng Jewish community in the United States. Leeser died before he realised his dream of a mission to Kaifeng. By the 1870s, British Jews and Jews living in Shanghai picked up his fervour, giving way to the formation of the Society for the Rescue of the Chinese Jews. In 1900, the Shanghai group sent a letter to Kaifeng, referring to the recipients as brethern. By this point, Jews of the United States, England, and cities in Asia such as Harbin and Nagasaki joined in international efforts to find out about and support the Kaifeng Jews. According to Bender, Leeser's vision had finally been realised.
The shorter essay that follows is a translation by Albert Dien of an article by Xianyi Kong that introduces Kaifeng resident Shi Jingxun and his early-twentieth-century research on Chinese Jews. Shi wrote articles in Kaifeng newspapers and magazines exposing the sale of the synagogue site, its stele, and artifacts, many of them to Bishop Charles White. (Many of those artifacts are now in the Royal Ontario Museum.) Aware that he probably did not have access to everything Shi Jingxun wrote, Xianyi Kong emphasizes in his article his strong opinion that China's cultural relics should remain in China. The last part of this essay is a study of the stele and who might have composed the inscriptions, the extent to which the Kaifeng Jewish community accepted the teachings of Confucius, and that Shi found material that Chen Yuan, a recognised, later scholar of foreigners in China, missed.
The next essay, by Max Eckstein, is a personal account of his experiences doing research in Kaifeng from 1994–1995 following graduation from college. Many of the issues on which he focuses, such as whether the community has assimilated into Chinese life and what role Israel should play in relations with this community, have changed in the twenty-three years since his fieldwork was done. Similarly, al-Sudairi's contribution is the essay of a graduate student on the pros and cons of the immigration of of Kaifeng's Jews to Israel. The two politically-motivated essays suggest a very different agenda from that of the rest of the book, which offers a historical, even-handed study of Kaifeng's Jews.
The final essay returns to an apolitial approach. Editor Anson Laytner offers a historical survey of the “impact of Western Jewish interaction on Kaifeng-Jewish identify”. Laytner takes head-on topics that lend themselves to politcal, even inflammatory politics. Rather than glossing over sensitive issues, he tackles each one systematically: assimilation as citizens of the People's Republic, desire of American Jews to visit Kaifeng and engage with its Jewish population, economic factors, and whether the Jews in Kaifeng today are in fact the descendants of a community that lived in that city in the Song or Ming or Qing dynasties. In contrast to the two previous essays, Laytner's is not personal. He documents with several footnotes for every pages.
A strength of the book is its ambition to present the facts of Kaifeng's Jewish community, a subject that is by nature, controversial, sometimes sensational, and politically controversial. A book like this goes a long way in accomplishing this with as little agenda as possible. It also emphasizes that there is a scholarly aspect to the problem of the Kaifeng Jews.
