Customer Reviews

Jews in Old China: Studies by Chinese Scholars

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A broad compilation, easy to read, filled with information the average person (or me, an average Jew) would never have known. Jewish history from the perspective of non-Jewish Chinese scholars is both fascinating and curious

Books on this subject are hard to find. Shapiro is a American Jew who knows more about modern China than almost any Westerners, including armchair sinologists like Jonathan Spence. He writes with wonderful scholarship plus intimate knowledge about the country he loves.

My impression is that Jews were treated better in classical China than almost any foreign land in which they found themselves, with the exception of America. But ironically Jews didn't last in Old China. Rather than being persecuted for their religion or their ways, they were given almost privileged status. Somehow this encouraged their assimilation into Chinese society, and they had a hard time remaining as Jews after many generations.

I need hardly add that many Jews who found their way to China during World War II were a good deal luckier than those who stayed in Europe, although they didn't realize this at first. They eventually managed to find their way out to Israel - alive. So, despite post-war "hiccups" due primarily to Marxist ideology, Jews and Chinese traditionally had a benign if somewhat distant relationship.

With only shards of evidence and confusion and ambiguity on the meaning of ancient Chinese terms, which are most likely mutated transliterations from Persian and Arabic, Chinese ethnographic and historical scholars debate on when Jews first arrived, traded, and dwelled in China. After all, even in the West in fairly recent times, Jews were called, in English, Hebrews and Israelites. The editor and translator of this book is a long-time Chinese citizen, a Jew himself. That Jews had resided for centuries in Kaifeng, which was a capital of China in the Middle Ages, is well known. Although the scholarly repetition of evidence and various interpetations get tiresome quickly, there are still interesting commentary and the reader soon acquires an understanding of the Silk Road and the lure of China. A chapter provides an extensive contemporary description of Kaifeng in 1147, which was aided by a huge scroll painting, and establishes the capital as a cosmopolitan and cultural center; apparenty a few years later, in 1163, the first synagogue was built there. Jews among merchants and traders in the 8th century is well founded with, for instance, documents in Hebrew and Hebrew script from Dunhuang and Kotan. This book is an important contribution to Silk Road studies and Jewish history. It helps fill in some of the blanks between Roman Judea and the Renaissance, when Marco Polo observed Jews in his Chinese travels.

The author is in an almost unique position with respect to translating and reviewing the works of Chinese scholars on this subject. I particularly liked the way he allows the reader to compare each of the featured scholars and avoided, with respect to historical content, throwing in his own two cents...or ren min bao.