Unfortunately, there are few Kaifeng Jews who have an identity outside a mention in a single source. There are many such cases. We have names of men and women in the Memorial Book, names of men in the stone inscriptions, and a few names in colophons at the end of the Square Sections booklets used to check the pronunciation of those chanting the weekly Torah portion. Certainly, there are individual Kaifeng Jews who we can cross reference across sources, but not many. We will examine these men, and they are all men as far as I can tell, when we can, to give the study of this community of Jews an individual grounding.
In 1704/05, Father Jean-Paul Gozani, at the request of his Jesuit superiors, sat down with the Kaifeng Jewish leadership, to examine the community's scriptures. His visit was very productive, and we know a great deal about the Kaifeng Jews from his detailed report. Although he did not know Hebrew, he sat down with a rabbi in a guest room, most likely one of the side lecture halls of the synagogue, to discuss, in Pollak's words, "comparative theology." Gozani brought along a bible with a list of the individual books printed in Hebrew. He and the rabbi compared notes, and we have this priceless document of their interaction:
The Hebrew is in the hand of the Chief Rabbi, and the Portuguese, Gozani. Pollak in his Mandarins, Jews and Missionaries, details this encounter:
"The rabbi who, in Gozani's words 'is deaf and speaks through his teeth,' scanned the titles and admitted that although he did have most of them [the books of the Tanakh] in the synagogue, and had heard of others, there were several that were unknown to him."
Pollak continues: "The priest and he rabbi - whom Gozani did not identity by name in his 1704 letter, but who was a member of the Kao clan, and bore then Hebrew name Phineas, now sat down to their task of comparing and analyzing a series of parallel passages in their respective bibles."
How did Pollak know that the man with Gozani is Rabbi Pinchas? In his letter, Gozani does not name he rabbi, but calls him the "Chang Chiao" the Ruler to the Synagogue, i.e. the Chief Rabbi. How then does Pollak know the name of this rabbi? He references this Rabbi Pinchas a few times in Mandarians
page 193: supposedly Lieberman in 1867 saw a Hebrew section book in the Great Eastern Mosque for parshat Ve-ear, Exodus 6:3 - 9:35. At the end of this book was a colophon that read "Done according to the vow of Rabbi Pinchas, the teacher, the son of Israel, son of Benjamin. For Thy Salvation, O Lord." Pollak explains: "This Pinchas, although Liberman would probably not have known it, was the hard-of-hearing and teeth-clenching rabbi with whom Gozani had sat down in the synagogue in 1704 to compare biblical texts." Is this story true? Did the mosque have a Square Scripture manuscript in 1867?
page 287: in a discussion of the great effort at copying Torah scrolls and synagogue books after the 1642 flood, Pollak says this: "Nor did the congregation's scribal endeavors come to a complete halt once the more urgent textual replacement needs were met, for a half-century later additional copying projects, albeit on a comparatively modest scale, were being attempted, notably by Rabbi Pinchas."
page 298: when discussing the hereditary nature of the chief rabbi position at Kaifeng, with most coming from the Li clan, which was probably once called Levi, Pollack mentions a heredity exception in "Rabbi Pinchas, probably a member of the Kao, the hard-of-hearing chief rabbi with whom Father Gozani will compare biblical texts in 1704."
Those are the reference for Rabbi Pinchas in Mandarins. In The Torah Scrolls of the Chinese Jews, he reproduces this image on page 67:
Here is is referencing a Square Section manuscript, HUC 962, Parashah Book (Exodus 38:21-40:38), which contains a Judeo-Persian colophon:
Which Leslie, in his article "The Judeo-Persian Colophons," page 16, translates as:
a. Dedicated to the Lord
b. Rabbi Pinchas, the Teacher, son of Israel, son of Joshua, son of Benjamin, wrote it and made a pledge.
c. I have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord. Amen.
In a wide sense, Leslie tries to make connections between the men in the colophons and the Memorial Book. He has this to say of Rabbi Pinchas:
"We cannot trace a Rabbi Pinchas. The phrase "son of Israel" is in any case peculiar here. No man named Israel is found in the Register. A Joshua, son of Benjamin, figure in the Kao clan, our tree no. 10, 8th (or 9th) generation. If connected, Rabbi Pinchas might have been on the 9th, 10th or even 11th generation. He was perhaps alive at the time of the closure of the Register."
This are the lines in the Kao registry in the Memorial Book of the Dead that may relate to Rabbi Pinchas' family.
Here is the family according to Leslie's factoring. So, Rabbi Pinchas is the son of Israel, son of Joshua, the son of Benjamin. On this graph, Benjamin had three sons, one is Joshua. Joshua had three sons, two have Chinese names, and one is Judah. It would make sense the Lun-kuei or T'an-kuei would be named Israel in Hebrew - but we don't know. One of them would then be the father of Rabbi Pinchas. If Rabbi Pinchas is the rabbi who sat down with Gozani, he would not be in the Memorial Book, which was more or less closed in 1670.
This is were Pollak got his information regarding Rabbi Pinchas and the Kao Clan. If Rabbi Pinchas was the man sitting with Gozani comparing bibles, then he was very much alive when the Register was closed in 1670, and he was alive to sit down with Gozani. I suggest that Pollak compared the handwriting of the Gozani list and the Exodus square manuscript to reach his conclusion. Let us look at both closely.
The Gozani list is informal, and the hand is too small to make comparisons with the exception of the larger lettering at the top right side of the page:
We will use some of the lines in on the last page of the Exodus text:
Unfortunately, the quality of the scan of Gozani's list is not high. Therefore, I have to keep the page of the list near full size so we can see the letters clearly.
The three tavs are nearly identical, especially the direction of the loop of the lower left leg
The resh in both examples is robustly written, with nearly equal thickness through the arch of the letter in both texts
The alefs are similar, especially in the slant to the left of the lower leg. The alef is less convincing that the examples before.
The shin written in the list is blurry and roughly written, but both share the slant to the right of the upward arms of the letter, and the nearly circular bottom.
Is the same hand attested in both samples? If Rabbi Pinchas wrote the Gozani list, he did so under different circumstances than the Rabbi Pinchas who wrote out the parshah. The list is very informal - even rushed. We see points of similarity on letters that are written the same whether rushed or careful - as in the resh. There is a high likelihood that Rabbi Pinchas of the Square Section colophon is the man who sat down with Gozani in 1704, just as Pollak speculated. This tells us some interesting things.
The dated colophons all run from 1620-1626, written before the flood of 1642. We often read in sources, that most Kaifeng manuscripts date after the flood, the three certain dates of texts we have come after the flood. If the Exodus parshah is indeed from Rabbi Pinchas, than it was written well after the flood. In fact, probably very near the end of the 1600s. Pollak believes it was written anywhere from 1700-1720, which is a good a guess as any. If Lieberman did indeed see another Exodus parshah written by Rabbi Pinchas in the Great Eastern Mosque in 1867, then it seems Rabbi Pinchas was busy replacing old manuscripts with fresh efforts during his tenure as Chief Rabbi.
The Jesuits were expelled from Kaifeng in 1723, and when westerners, or their agents, would have contact with the Kaifeng Jews again in 1850, the community had no rabbi and had lost its proficiency in Hebrew. We know from a single source that the last rabbi died in or around 1810 without a replacement. So if Rabbi Pinchas was writing a Torah parashot in 1720, there was a steady deterioration of the Hebrew abilities of the community in ninety years. After 1720, were any new manuscripts produced by the Kaifeng community, or was the decline already apparent? The 1700s are largely considered a lost century in Kaifeng Jewish studies. After the rebuilding of the synagogue in 1663, and the feverish activity of copying lost Hebrew books, we have little evidence of any activity in the community related to Judaism with one exception:
Chao Tso-Mei, a member of the Chao (Zhao) clan is mentioned in the gazetteers as graduating in 1729 - and therefore dating this inscription.
We can say with some certainly that Rabbi Pinchas, his family, and Gozani list are the same person. And at least on Square Section was complete in the 1700s. This conclusion is not absolutely certain, however. If this is the case, then the 1700s is not nearly the beginning of the end of Judaism in Kaifeng. The production and copying of books was key to their survival, and they were doing so at a time when evidence of great deterioration should have been noticeable.
NOTE: It appears there is a later inscription at the Kaifeng Synagogue, from 1797 - very close to the death of the last rabbi in 1810. Here is the relevant passage from White, who is presenting condensed version of the Chinese delegate travel diaries:
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