Lessons of the Kaifeng Jews

        I had heard about the Kaifeng Jews before ever thinking to learn Chinese thirty years ago, and because I am Jewish, I have been asked by friends, family, and acquaintances about the Jews of Kaifeng ever since. The need to have ready answers quickly drove me to learn something about them. Sitting down to study them firsthand taught me that much of what I had been told (and that remains conventional wisdom) had been wrong.

            The standard line on the Kaifeng Jews goes like this:

            A group of Jews emigrated to imperial China during the Northern Song dynasty (960 C.E.-1127 C.E.), where they settled in the city of Kaifeng, which was then the capital. They built a synagogue and thrived for a time, but because they were not persecuted in China as they had been elsewhere, they quickly adopted Chinese culture. Eventually they lost their Jewish identity through assimilation and passed into history.

            It is true that a group of Jews (probably merchants from Persia) settled in Kaifeng some time before 1127 C.E. It is also true that their descendants thoroughly embraced Chinese culture, and eventually gave up Jewish traditions. It is not true, however, that they lost their Jewish identity to assimilation.

            If we look at the written records the Kaifeng Jews left behind, we can see that they saw no contradiction between being good Jews and loyal subjects of the empire. Many of the leaders of the Kaifeng community sat for and passed the Confucian examinations to become high officials of the Ming dynasty (1368 C.E.-1644 C.E.). Stone inscriptions that they erected outside of the synagogue in Kaifeng alternately quote the Hebrew Bible and Confucian classics as equivalent sources of sacred wisdom. The leaders of the Kaifeng community deliberately practiced a form of Judaism that could thrive in a religiously plural and vibrantly multiethnic empire.

            This cosmopolitan Judaism proved very durable. The Kaifeng community was small, never numbering more than two-thousand people. Yet they continued to maintain Jewish traditions for more than six hundred years. In the end, it was not assimilation, but the crisis of the imperial state and society with which they had become thoroughly integrated, that caused the Jewish community of Kaifeng to disintegrate. Wars and natural disasters eroded the coherence of both the imperial state and the Kaifeng congregation. The cataclysmic Taiping Rebellion (1850 C.E.-1864 C.E.) dealt the final blow to the religious institutions of the Kaifeng Jews.

What can we Jews here in the U.S. learn from the experience of the Kaifeng Jews? The recent surge of antisemitism has challenged American Jews to decide which threat is more dangerous, that from the “left” or the “right.” From the left, critics invoke old antisemitic stereotypes in attacking the Jewish community’s support of Israel. On the right, racist groups, encouraged by rhetoric coming from the Oval Office, demonize Jews as the architects and beneficiaries of a pluralism white nationalists despise.

If the historical experience of the Kaifeng Jews is any guide, the security of the Jewish community here in the U.S. is best safeguarded by the continued coherence and dynamism of the democracy in which we live. The Kaifeng Jews did not persist by being aggressively exclusionary or parochial, but by integrating their Jewish communal life into that of the larger Chinese empire. In the same way, Jews here in the U.S. have thrived because we have been full participants in a political system that not only guarantees our rights, but those of all our neighbors and compatriots regardless of race, creed, or ethnicity.  If we want to know which form of antisemitism poses the greatest danger, we need only ask: “which is the greater threat to democracy?”