Kaifeng: seven centuries of a community that told its story in stone
In the capital of Song China a Jewish community lived: a synagogue from 1163, four stone stelae with a chronicle of its own. By the nineteenth century it had dissolved entirely.
This is the farthest edge of the dispersion that was reached, and the purest case of what happens to a community left entirely alone.
They came before 1127, from India or Persia, spoke New Persian, and worked in cotton—weaving, dyeing, printing patterns. There were about a thousand of them. The synagogue was raised in 1163, repaired, and after a flood rebuilt in 1653.
They are remarkable for having written about themselves. Four stone stelae—of 1489, 1512, 1663 and 1679—are their own chronicle: where they came from, what they keep, what they do. Communities that left such a thing can be counted on the fingers.
Europe learned of them by chance and late: in 1605 at Peking a Kaifeng Jew, Ai Tian, came to the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, and from the conversation Ricci understood who stood before him.
It ended in dissolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century neither a rabbi nor anyone who knew Hebrew remained; the synagogue fell down. By the end of the Second World War the descendants numbered a little over two hundred. Their books were collected by missionaries and are now at Cincinnati.
The lesson is simple and not cheerful: a community is held not by antiquity and not by charters but by contact. Cochin had contact—trade, visitors, books—and lived to the aliyah. Kaifeng had none and did not.
How we know
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Kaifeng stelae of 1489, 1512, 1663 and 1679 — the community's chronicle, written by itself
Scholarship
- Jewish Virtual Library, "Kaifeng" — the arrival, the synagogue, Matteo Ricci and Ai Tian, the fading
Basis: documents and evidence.