How did Kaifeng become the Center of Chinese Jewry?

How did Kaifeng become the Center of Chinese Jewry?

Many people don't know it, but the city of Kaifeng is home to one of the biggest and most historically important Jewish communities on the territory of China.

But, how did the Jews get to China and when?

Here we will answer these exact questions.

When did Jews establish themselves in China?

No one knows for sure at what point did the first Jews reached China. Yet, it is known that the migration of Jews to China took place in the Middle Ages when Jewish traders regularly travelled throughout the Silk road, establishing themselves all across it, from Europe, through Persia, Central Asia, and at its end - China.

Siddur from the Kaifeng region.

Jewish people have already been living in what is now Central and Northwestern China during the Mongols conquest. This is known for sure, as Jews are mentioned in Mongol sources from the period. In the sources in question the Mongols describe the Jews within their domain as Hui, confusing them with the Muslim community of the same name. The Mongols who took care of the Mongol Empire's East Asian provinces also described local Christians as Hui and rarely distinguished Muslims, Christians, and Jews. However, the presence of three religious communities is evident from the descriptions given by the Mongols and from the rare and unsystematic distinctions between different groups, such as Blue Hui, White Hui, etc.

The other peoples in the regions, namely the Persian and Turkic speaking Muslims, are known to have used different dialectal variations of the words yehud and yehudlar to describe Jews.

In the period of the Qing Dynasty two brothers from the Kaifeng Jewish community climbed up to high administrative positions after succeeding in the imperial examinations, which are notorious to this day for their immense difficulty. The native Jewish names of those two brothers never became known, as they adopted the Chinese names Zhao Yin-cheng and Zhao Yin-dou. Zhao Yin-cheng even reached the position of minister and served as an advisor to the Emperor himself.

Portraits of Zhao Yin-cheng and Zhao Yin-dou.

In the period of the Ming and Qing Dynasties the first encounters between local Chinese Jews and Western European Jesuit missionaries took place. And, the later documented the situation of the Jewish community as they found it, ancluding the fact that at the time the Jews did not intermarry with the Han and the other Chinese.

In the last years of the Ming reign and after the rise of the Manchu Qing Dynasty to the Chinese throne a process of gradual assimilation of the Kaifeng Jews into the surrounding Han Chinese enviroment began.

Photo of two Jews from Kaifeng.

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