The Kaifeng Jews יהודי קאיפנג
A community in the capital of Song China: a synagogue from 1163, four stone stelae with a chronicle of its own—and complete dissolution by the nineteenth century.
They came, it appears, before 1127, from India or from Persia; they spoke New Persian. Their trade was cotton: weaving, dyeing, printing patterns—China then lacked silk, and the work was needed. They numbered about a thousand people.
The synagogue was raised in 1163, repaired in 1279, and after a flood rebuilt in 1653; the rebuilding was led by a mandarin of Jewish descent, and the scrolls were restored at the same time.
Their chronicle they cut in stone: four stelae, of 1489, 1512, 1663 and 1679. It is a rare case of a community telling its own story, and telling it to last.
Europe learned of them by chance. In 1605 a Kaifeng Jew, Ai Tian, came to the Jesuit Matteo Ricci at Peking; from the conversation Ricci understood who stood before him, and wrote of it.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the community was ruined and cut off from everyone: neither a rabbi nor anyone who knew Hebrew remained. By the end of the Second World War the descendants were counted at a little over two hundred, and almost all were kin to their Chinese neighbours. Their prayer books were collected by missionaries in 1850–51; a genealogical register of the 1660s and part of the books are now at Cincinnati.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Kaifeng stelae — the community's own chronicle, cut in stone in 1489, 1512, 1663 and 1679
Scholarship
- Jewish Virtual Library, "Kaifeng" — the arrival before 1127, the synagogue of 1163, Matteo Ricci and Ai Tian, the decline
Basis: documents and evidence.