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Jewish Assimilation: The Case of Chinese Jews

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Song Nai Rhee
Song Nai Rhee
Affiliation:
Northwest Christian College
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Extract

Throughout the past two millennia or more the Jews of Diaspora have persistently maintained their religious and cultural identity in spite of many vicissitudes. Also, as manifested in Jewish history, where favorable conditions exist, politically and economically, Jewish communities have rarely experienced what may be described as a complete assimilation into their surrounding sociocultural milieu. An exceptional case, however, has been noted in China, where a once prosperous and burgeoning community of Jews did indeed experience that fate.

Type
Assimilation
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 1973 , pp. 115 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1973

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References

1 Several Jewish communities are known to have existed in premodern China (in K'ai-feng, Ning-po, Yang-chou and Ning-hsia), but that of K'ai-feng, the capital of Honan Province, is the only one of which anything is known. Consequently, this paper is concerned only with the fate of the Jewish community of K'ai-feng. Since its first ‘discovery’ in 1605 by the Jesuit missionaries, much study has been done with respect to the history of the community. So far, the most comprehensive work on the subject is Jews, William C. White's Chinese, in three parts, first published in 1942Google Scholar by the University of Toronto Press and reprinted in one volume by Paragon Book Reprint Corporation in 1966. Part I contains letters, reports, and articles on the history and the sociocultural conditions of the K'ai-feng Jews, collected from diverse sources; Part II contains Chinese and Hebrew documents and the four stone inscriptions (dated 1489, 1512, 1663, and 1679 respectively) which once belonged to the synagogue and the community of the K'ai-feng Jews; Part III contains genealogical and biographical information, also collected from diverse sources. This paper is largely based upon information drawn from these three parts of Chinese Jews (hereafter referred to as CJ).

2 Leslie, Donald D., ‘Some Notes on the Jewish Inscriptions of K'ai-feng’ in Journal of American Oriental Society, vol. 82, no. 3 (1962), p. 355;CrossRefGoogle Scholar elsewhere, Leslie grants the possibility of an earlier entry, i.e., during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 221) on ‘Circumstantial evidences’. Leslie, , “The K'ai-feng Jewish Community: A Summary’ in The Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, no. 2 (1969), p. 175;Google Scholar Laufer, Berthold, ‘A Chinese-Hebrew Manuscript—a New Source for the History of the Chinese Jews’, CJ, III, p. 9.Google Scholar

3 Leslie, , ‘Some Notes on the Jewish Inscriptions of K'ai-feng’, op. cit., p. 355;Google Scholar elsewhere, Leslie suggests diverse origins of the Chinese Jews: from or via Yemen and Afghanistan along with the then ubiquitous Arab merchants. Leslie, , ‘The K'ai-feng Jewish Community’, op. cit., p. 178.Google Scholar For the Jewish settlers' connection with the cotton trade, see the 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 37Google Scholar (also p. 20, note 13); Laufer, , loc. cit.Google Scholar; George Smith and W. H. Medhurst, ‘A Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jewish Synagogue of K'aifungfu (sic), on behalf of the London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews’ (Shanghai, 1926), CJ, I, p. 88.Google Scholar

4 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 37Google Scholar (also p. 20, note 13); the 1679 inscription, CJ, II, p. 105.Google Scholar

5 Brotier, Gabriel, ‘Memoire sur les Juifs etablis en Chine’, CJ, I, p. 52;Google Scholar Finn, James, ‘The Orphan Colony of the Jews in China’, (London, 1872),Google Scholar CJ, I, p. 87Google Scholar; cf. 1512 inscription, CJ, II, pp. 44–5, 47.Google Scholar

6 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 11.Google Scholar

7 The 1679 inscription, CJ, II, pp. 104–7;Google Scholar Gozani, Jean Paul, S.J., ‘Lettre du Père Jean-Paul Gozani, Miss de la Cie, de Jesus, au Père Joseph Suarez, de la même Cie. Traduite du Portagais’, in Lettres edifiantes et curieuses (Paris, 1781),Google Scholar CJ, I, pp. 39–42.Google Scholar

8 CJ, I, p. 12.Google Scholar

9 Leslie, , ‘Some Notes on the Jewish Inscriptions of K'ai-feng’, op. cit., pp. 351–4.Google Scholar

10 Gozani, , op. cit., pp. 41–6;Google Scholar Brotier, , op. cit., pp. 48–68.Google Scholar

11 Brotier, , op. cit., p. 54.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 62; Smith, and Medhurst, , op. cit., p. 112.Google Scholar

13 Gozani, , op. cit., p 42;Google Scholar Brotier, , op. cit., p. 63;Google Scholar Tobar, Jerome, S.J., ‘Inscriptions juives de K'aifong-fou (sic)’ (Shanghai, 1900),Google Scholar CJ, I, pp. 198–9;Google Scholar Leslie, , op. cit., pp. 356–9.Google Scholar

14 The 1663 inscription, CJ, II, p. 82.Google Scholar

15 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 36.Google Scholar

16 Brotier, , op. cit., p. 63.Google Scholar

17 CJ, I, p. 12;Google Scholar Smith, and Medhurst, , op. cit., pp. 111–12.Google Scholar

18 Brotier, , op. cit., pp. 51, 54, 63.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., p. 57.

20 Ibid., p. 63.

21 Ibid., pp. 50, 63.

22 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 35.Google Scholar

23 Smith, and Medhurst, , op. cit., p. 109.Google Scholar

24 ‘Codex in Hebrew and Chinese From the K'ai-feng Synagogue’ (translated by William C. White and Ronald J. Williams), CJ, III, pp. 28ff.Google Scholar

25 Muller, James A., ‘A Visit to the K'ai-feng Jews’, CJ, I, p. 189.Google Scholar

26 Martin, W. A. P., ‘The Chinese: Account of a Visit to the Jews in Honan’, CJ, I, pp. 185–7 passim.Google Scholar

27 Brown, David A., ‘Through the Eyes of an American Jew’, CJ, I, pp. 154–7 passim.Google Scholar

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 153.

30 MacGiUivray, Donald, ‘The Jews in Honan’, CJ, I, p. 175.Google Scholar

31 Ibid.

32 Menzel, Johanna M., The Chinese Civil Service (Boston: 1963), p. vii.Google Scholar

33 Reischauer, Edwin O. and Fairbank, John K., East Asia—The Great Tradition (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 304–5;Google Scholar Menzel, , op. cit., p. viiiGoogle Scholar; Weber, Max, The Religion of China (The Free Press, 1951), pp. 107–41 passim.Google Scholar

34 The 1489, 1512, 1663, and 1679 inscriptions and the biographical information provided in CJ, Parts II and III.

35 ‘Biographical Notes on Chinese Jews’, CJ, III, p. 111.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., p. 119.

37 ibid., pp. 121–4.

38 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 14.Google Scholar

39 ‘Biographical Notes on Chinese Jews’, op. cit., pp. 126–7.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., pp. 127–8.

41 Ibid., pp. 132–3.

42 Ibid., p. 135.

43 Ibid., p. 133.

44 For the impact of Chinese civil service examinations upon their graduates' ideological as well as behavioral patterns see Wright, Arthur F., ‘Values, Roles, and Personalities’ in Confucian Personalities (ed. Wright, Arthur F.) (Stanford, 1962), pp. 3–23 passimGoogle Scholar; Wittfogel, Karl, ‘Mobility in an Oriented Despotism’, in Menzel, op. cit., p. 63.Google Scholar

45 Laufer, , op. cit., p. 13.Google Scholar

46 The 1489 inscription, CJ, 11, p. 38Google Scholar (cf. 1663 inscription, CJ, 11, p. 84).Google Scholar

47 The 1512 inscription, CJ, II, p. 52.Google Scholar

48 The 1663 inscription, CJ, 11, p. 82.Google Scholar

49 The 1679 inscription, CJ, II, p. 105.Google Scholar

50 Leslie, , ‘Some Notes on the Jewish Inscriptions of K'ai-feng’, op. cit., p. 355.Google Scholar

51 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 38Google Scholar (also, p. 32, note 42); the 1512 inscription, CJ, II, p. 53Google Scholar (also, p. 49, note 17); inscription 36, CJ, II, p. 147.Google Scholar

52 The 1512 inscription, CJ, II, p. 51Google Scholar (also, p. 47, note 5).

53 The 1512 inscription, CJ, II, p. 51Google Scholar (also, p. 47, note 6), p. 53; inscription 25, CJ, II, p. 136.Google Scholar

54 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 36Google Scholar; cf. Leslie, , op. cit., p. 355.Google Scholar The worship of God, for example, is described in terms of ‘pat Tao’, ‘ching Tao’, and ‘ching T'ien’. See also, Brotier's, account on this subject, CJ, I, p. 57.Google Scholar

55 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 36Google Scholar; Smith, and Medhurst, , op cit., p. 116.Google Scholar

56 CJ, I, pp. 12–13Google Scholar; Gozani, , op. cit., p. 45.Google Scholar Believing that the ancestral cult was essential for consolidating and stablizing the Chinese sociopolitical structure, the Confucianists not only promoted the cult but adopted it as an essential ingredient of Confucian orthodoxy. For further information on this subject, see Yang, C. K., Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 52–3, 285–6.Google Scholar

57 The 1663 inscription, CJ, II, p. 84Google Scholar (also, pp. 72–3, notes 36 and 37).

58 Inscription 38, B, CJ, p. 149.Google Scholar

59 The 1489 inscription, CJ, II, p. 36Google Scholar (also, p. 19, note 7).

60 Gozani, , op. cit., pp. 43, 45.Google Scholar

61 The 1663 inscription, CJ, II, pp. 83–4;Google Scholar Laufer, , op. cit., p. 13.Google Scholar

62 The 1663 inscription, CJ, II, p. 84;Google Scholar cf. Li Chi (The Sacred Books of the East series, ed. Max Müller), Book II, Section I, Parts 1 and 2.

63 The 1663 inscription, CJ, II, p. 82.Google Scholar

64 Gozani, , op. cit., p. 43.Google Scholar

65 For example, for the scriptural basis for the Sabbath observance, the 1663 inscription quotes I Ching, Hexagram 24: Fu; and for the basis of Yom Kippur, the 1489 inscription quotes I Ching, Hexagram 42: Yi. CJ, II, p. 36.Google Scholar

66 Weber, , op. cit., pp. 58–9.Google Scholar

67 Gozani, , op. cit., p. 42Google Scholar; Smith, and Medhurst, , op. cit., pp. 88, 107Google Scholar; The 1663 inscription, CJ, II, p. 83–4;Google Scholar Brown, , op. cit., pp. 163–4.Google Scholar

68 CJ, II, p. 20,Google Scholar note 13; The 1679 inscription, CJ, II, p. 105Google Scholar (also, p. 102, note 4).

69 Finn, , op. cit., p. 75.Google Scholar

70 Gozani, , op. cit., p. 42.Google Scholar Actually, it seems that there were more Jewish clans in K'ai-feng than these, and the last two figures represent only those clans which still maintained their faith and were actively involved in the life of their synagogue. There are evidences which indicate that in the course of time the Jewish Confucians, under the impact of increasing acculturation, gradually disassociated themselves with the believing Jews, and vice versa. And in the end, the ‘faithful remnant’, owing to their economic poverty, were simply unable to restore the ruined temple. Finn, , op. cit., pp. 86–9 passimGoogle Scholar; Brown, , op. cit., pp. 161–4 passimGoogle Scholar; Smith, and Medhurst, , op. cit., p. 113.Google Scholar

71 Muller, , ‘A Visit to the K'ai-feng Jews’, loc. cit.Google Scholar

72 Martin, , op. cit., p. 187.Google Scholar We are uncertain as to the identity of the last rabbi and the exact reason for discontinuance of the rabbinic leadership. We might, however, be able to surmise that the few remnants of the K'ai-feng Jews who still maintained their faith were economically unable to call a new rabbi. It wasn't that the Jewish community at large was in an economically dire condition, for as late as 1850 some of the wealthiest and the most influential citizens of K'ai-feng were Jews. (See T. H. Layton's British Consul at Amoy—letter to J. Finn—British Consul in Jerusalem—dated March 24, 1850. CJ, I, p. 84.Google Scholar) The problem was simply the lack of interest in Judaism on the part of the influential members of the Jewish community, for they were by now thoroughly Confucian in their life-style. For example, in his letter to Mr. Layton, a believing Jew in K'ai-feng, named Chao Nien-tsu, appreciated the fact that he rather than others in the community had received Mr. Layton's letter of inquiry. CJ, I, p. 88.Google Scholar