Juifs de Kaïfeng

At the heart of the Yellow River plain, in Henan province, the city of Kaifeng — once known as Bianliang — was the setting of an unparalleled human adventure: the rooting, over nearly eight centuries, of the only indigenous Jewish community China has ever known. For one hundred and sixty-six years, beginning in 960 CE, China was governed by the emperors of the Song dynasty from their capital of Kaifeng, then a teeming metropolis on the banks of the Yellow River, connected by the Grand Canal to the ports of the Chinese coast [Sino-Judaic Institute]. It was within this commercial and cosmopolitan setting that Jewish merchants, coming from the west, set down their bolts of cloth and their scrolls of the Law.

The History of the Jews of Kaifeng resists easy grasp, for it belongs at once to lapidary archives — a handful of engraved steles — and to transmitted Memory, often reconstructed after the fact. The origins of the community remain shrouded in mystery, and the sources it produced itself contradict one another on the date of its arrival. This Great Book endeavors to untangle, insofar as it is possible, what may be considered established from what belongs to pious tradition, never arbitrarily settling matters where uncertainty remains sovereign. For the fate of Kaifeng is that of a diaspora which, isolated from the rest of the Jewish world, was able to preserve its identity before merging, slowly, into the vast ocean of Chinese civilization.

The question of the origins of the Jews of Kaifeng is the most disputed in their entire history, precisely because the testimonies they left behind do not agree. The origins of the Jewish community of Kaifeng are a mystery: three stone tablets, dated 1489, 1663, and 1679, from the ancient synagogue, record different dates of arrival [Frommer's]. More striking still, the more recent the stele, the further back in time it places the arrival of the Jews in China: the oldest, from 1489, claims that the Jews entered during the Song dynasty (960–1279), while the one from 1663 indicates the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 BCE) [Chinese Jewish Institute].

Contemporary research rejects these legendary datings. Historians generally date the formation of the Kaifeng community to the early Song dynasty (960–1127), when the city's status as a flourishing commercial center, enjoying imperial favor, would have attracted foreign merchants, among them Jews from Persia or Central Asia along the Silk Road [Grokipedia, based on scholarship]. A debate persists, however, regarding the route taken. Contrary to widespread belief, Kaifeng was not located on the legendary Silk Road: it lies some 550 kilometers from Xi'an, the actual terminus of that route [Sino-Judaic Institute]. This is why several scholars favor an arrival by sea: according to the 1489 stele, a group of Jews, probably maritime merchants speaking Judeo-Persian and originating from the ports of Ningbo or Yangzhou, was received in audience at the imperial palace, and the emperor graciously accepted the tribute of cotton cloth they had brought [Sino-Judaic Institute].

This mention of cotton is not incidental. According to the inscription, these Jews, as merchants, presented their host emperor with five-colored cotton; the fact that they possessed a large quantity suggests that they had come to China from India, since at that time China did not yet cultivate it and high-quality cotton fabric was often imported from South Asia [Chinese Jewish Institute]. The presence of Jewish merchants in China under the Tang is moreover independently attested: a Judeo-Persian commercial letter from 718, discovered at Dunhuang, bears witness to Jewish mercantile activity in the region [Grokipedia]. A distinction must therefore be made between the diffuse presence of Jewish merchants in China — ancient and plausible — and the formation of an organized and settled community in Kaifeng, which the evidence places at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The founding act of the community, as preserved in stone, is twofold: an imperial audience conferring a status, and the erection of a place of worship. According to the stele of 1489, the first arrivals were merchants invited to settle in Kaïfeng by the Song emperor, who granted them his own surname and those of his six ministers; it is said that they had arrived with 73 patronyms and subsequently adopted the Chinese names Zhao, Li, Ai, Zhang, Gao, Jin, and Shi [Frommer's]. This onomastic assimilation was decisive: by exchanging their original names for Chinese surnames, the Jews of Kaïfeng inscribed themselves from the outset into the social fabric of the empire.

The most precious monument of this History is undoubtedly the first stele. This same stele, which also detailed their rites and fundamental beliefs, was placed in a position of honor in the courtyard of the synagogue built in the year 1163 at the intersection of the Earth Market and Fire God streets of Kaïfeng; this monument is today part of the collections of the Kaïfeng Municipal Museum [Sino-Judaic Institute]. The very structure of the engraved text reveals the community's concerns: its content is divided into three sections — one explaining the origin and History of Judaism, another describing the rites and worship of the Chinese Jews at the time of the stele's erection, and the last recounting a past imperial audience [University of Washington Libraries].

The synagogue itself bore a name revealing of the Chinese perception of this foreign religion. The oldest stele, from 1489, commemorates the construction of a synagogue in 1163, bearing the name Qingzhen Si — a term often used to designate mosques in Chinese [KehilaLinks]. This vocabulary shared with Islam, which designated monotheistic religions as "pure and true," testifies to the manner in which the host society placed Judaism among the respectable foreign cults. The stone thus fixed, for generations to come, both the doctrine and the civic legitimacy of the community.

If the community was born under the Song, it was under the Ming dynasty that it reached its apogee. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) marked the height of the prosperity of the Jewish community of Kaifeng, which extended to approximately 500 households distributed across several clans and integrated deeply into Chinese society through Confucian education and participation in public service [Grokipedia]. This integration was not merely tolerated assimilation, but active promotion: the Great Ming dynasty saw a disproportionately high number of Jews appointed to high positions in public service owing to their excellent results in the imperial examinations, which led Professor Xu Xin of Nanjing University to describe the Ming era as a golden age for the Jews of Kaifeng [Chinese Jewish Institute, citing Xu Xin].

Imperial favor expressed itself in striking fashion. In 1421, the Emperor Yongle decreed that a prominent Jewish clan adopt the name Zhao — evoking an ancient tribal lineage — and authorized the renovation of the synagogue, signaling official tolerance and recognition [Grokipedia]. The lapidary sources detail the circumstances of this elevation: in 1423, the emperor heard of An Cheng's contribution and, by imperial decree, conferred upon him the name Zhao; Zhao Cheng was subsequently promoted to commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard and colonel in the army of Zhejiang province [Chinese Jewish Institute]. A member of the "eight great clans" of the city, the Jewish family thus gained access to the highest echelons of imperial service.

This social ascent had an inevitable cultural counterpart: sinicization. Over time, the Jews of Kaifeng adopted local customs, their religious texts being increasingly written in Chinese and their traditions influenced by Confucianism and Chinese culture; despite the adoption of Chinese names, clothing, and language, they preserved their Jewish identity for centuries [Substack, Cycleback]. The prominence of references to Confucius in the inscriptions reflects, according to scholarly analysis, this flourishing relationship between the Jews of Kaifeng and Chinese high society. The golden age was thus one of a subtle — and fragile — balance between Mosaic fidelity and imperial belonging.

For centuries, the Jews of Kaifeng lived in mutual ignorance with the rest of the diaspora. According to most accounts, the Jews of Kaifeng maintained no contact with other Jews outside of China [Frommer's]. This isolation explains the magnitude of the event that, at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, would reveal their existence to Europe. The first Western report of their existence came from the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci in 1605, when he encountered Ai Tian, a Jew from Kaifeng who had come to Peking seeking an official position [Frommer's].

This chance encounter — a Chinese Jew believing he had found coreligionists among the Jesuits, and a missionary discovering followers of the Old Testament in the heart of China — opened the way to a methodical inquiry. In 1608, Father Matteo Ricci sent two representatives to Kaifeng to copy the Torah; the Jews of Kaifeng told the visitors that this ancient scroll had been in Kaifeng for 600 years, which would date the presence of Scripture in China to 1008, during the reign of Emperor Zhenzong (997–1022) of the Northern Song [Chinese Jewish Institute]. This indirect testimony, corroborating the lapidary inscriptions, remains one of the strongest arguments in favor of a settlement under the Song.

The Jesuit visits did not stop there, and their documentary value has proven invaluable. Jesuit missionaries visited Kaifeng in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they drew precise depictions of the interior and exterior of the synagogue and its grounds, detailed its sacred books, and described the manner in which the faithful prayed [The Interfaith Observer]. Thanks to them, we possess an almost complete image of the community at its zenith. The synagogue complex, reflecting the architecture of Chinese temples, extended over the equivalent of several football fields and comprised a synagogue, classrooms, a ritual bath, and a kosher slaughterhouse; it was perhaps the largest synagogue complex ever built in the world [The Interfaith Observer]. The encounter with the West saved from total oblivion a community that was already entering its decline.

The fate of Kaïfeng was intimately linked to the Yellow River, a source of commercial prosperity but also of repeated disasters. The synagogue had to be rebuilt several times in the wake of catastrophes. The first synagogue of Kaïfeng was built in 1163 and destroyed by a flood in 1461; in 1600, a fire consumed the synagogue that had replaced the original building, and a second flood destroyed the third version in 1642 [My Jewish Learning]. This last catastrophe was not natural but military: the third synagogue was swept away in 1642 by a flood caused by the deliberate breaching of the Yellow River's dikes [The Interfaith Observer].

The fatal blow came from a conjunction of factors — isolation, impoverishment, loss of religious knowledge, and new floods. A further flood annihilated the last synagogue of Kaïfeng in the 1860s, and the community's last religious leader died at around the same time [My Jewish Learning]. The loss of mastery of Hebrew was a major aggravating factor: without a rabbi since the early 1800s and deprived of a synagogue since the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews of Kaïfeng nonetheless managed to survive floods, wars, changes of dynasty, rebellions, and revolutions [The Interfaith Observer].

The political upheavals of the nineteenth century accelerated the dispersal. The Taiping Rebellion, in the 1850s, led to the scattering of the community, which subsequently returned to Kaïfeng [Jewish Wikipedia]. Assimilation, already long underway, became irreversible. In the seventeenth century, assimilation began to erode these traditions, and the rate of intermarriage between Jews and other ethnic groups — Han, Hui, and Manchu — increased [Jewish Wikipedia]. Yet attachment to the Memory of the ancestors did not entirely fade: the destruction of the synagogue in the 1860s brought about the decline of the community, but J. L. Liebermann, the first Western Jew to visit Kaïfeng in 1867, noted that they still possessed a cemetery of their own [Jewish Wikipedia].

The institutional disappearance of Judaism in Kaifeng did not signify the extinction of memory. At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a movement of identity revival emerged. Since the opening of the twenty-first century, the community has resumed Jewish festive celebrations and prayer services after decades of obscurity, as numerous scholars and observers have recorded [Tudor Parfitt and Netanel Fisher, Becoming Jewish]. This renewal has drawn on a network of external support: the article highlights the religious and cultural revitalization of today's Kaifeng Jews as an effort led by Shavei Israel, an Israel-based organization that reaches out to the Lost Tribes and to "hidden Jews" seeking to return to the Jewish people [Academia.edu].

The demographic scale of this residual community remains modest but real. Although estimates vary, the Sino-Jewish community of Kaifeng never exceeded 5,000 inhabitants at its height under the Ming, and today numbers less than half that [Academia.edu]. Support organizations cite comparable figures: the last rabbi of Kaifeng died two centuries ago, and in the mid-nineteenth century the community was compelled to sell the synagogue, the Torah scrolls, and its other possessions; yet between 500 and 1,000 identifiable descendants of the Jewish community remain today [Shavei Israel].

Returning to normative Judaism nonetheless requires a formal process, since Chinese patrilineal transmission does not correspond to rabbinic matrilineal law. Before becoming Israeli Jews, descendants were required to undergo a formal traditional conversion process; by 2016, 19 Kaifeng Jews had done so voluntarily with the assistance of Shavei Israel, some even joining the Israeli defense forces [Made in China Journal]. Yet this revival confronts contemporary political realities. An initial municipal proposal to restore the Kaifeng synagogue was raised and then swiftly abandoned when Jewish descendants visited the Israeli consulate to claim the right to citizenship, brandishing the Youtai designation on their hukou as proof [Made in China Journal]. Thus, in Kaifeng, the lapidary archive and transmitted Memory continue to speak to one another, now under the watchful eye of the State.

The history of the Jews of Kaifeng traces a singular trajectory within the vast landscape of Jewish diasporas: that of a community which, in the absence of persecution, was absorbed by the very hospitality of its host. Established under the Song through the pathways of commerce, elevated to honors under the Ming, revealed to the West by the Jesuits, then dissolved by the floods of the Yellow River and the slow erosion of sinization, the Jews of Kaifeng illustrate a fundamental paradox: successful integration can, in the long run, prove more fatal to a minority than hostility.

The steles of 1489, 1512, and 1679, now preserved in the Kaifeng museum, remain stone witnesses to a faith that was able to express itself in the language of Confucius without renouncing Moses. Though the community has had neither synagogue nor rabbi since the nineteenth century, the persistence, among some hundreds of descendants, of an identity consciousness — and the contemporary awakening it has inspired — proves that Memory, where the institution has perished, can still serve as a tenuous thread between a millennial past and an uncertain future. Kaifeng remains, in this regard, the moving laboratory of a universal question: what does it take for a people, dispersed and assimilated, to nonetheless remain itself?