Jews in other Chinese Cities

 

A mosque in Ningbo

We know that there were other Jewish communities in China, mentioned both from Kaifeng community and other sources.  Let us turn to them and see what information is available, and where. 

All refences to Jews in China before the Tang Dynasty, 618-906 CE, are legendary.  Only in the Tang are their documented cases of Jews in China.  At the British Library, which also has a Kaifeng Torah, is a fragment of a letter in Judeo-Persian from 718 CE.

It was discovered in Danfan Uliq, an Oasis site and Buddhist shrine center in Northwest China in 1901. This area was in the southern branch of the Silk Road.  The letter is 37 lines in length, and written on paper - which at that time was only manufactured in China.  The letter is from a merchant complaining about the purchase of inferior sheep, and asking for help in unloading them.  A translation can be found here

Kaifeng is about 2400 miles from Danfan Uliq:

The next piece of evidence of Jews in China in the Tang is a  a Jewish penitential prayer (selichah) in Hebrew, written in about 800 CE,  and was found in the "Library Cave" of the Mogao Grottoes, also known as the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, near Dunhuang, China:

Dunhuang is 1200 miles from Kaifeng

It is also during the Tang era that sources begin to recognize Jews in China.  Leslie references Jews mentioned in The Statutes of the Yuan and The Official History of the Yuan, Leslie Survival of the Chinese Jews, pages 12-15.  All of the cities in China that had Jewish populations also had Muslims.  Today they all have historical mosques built at or around the Song Dynasty.

Marco Polo writes of Jews in the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in Beijing in 1286.  The Franciscan John of Monte Corvino, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Beijing, noted their presence in 1300.  A Franciscan friar and bishop named Andrew of Perugia, wrote about the Jewish community in Quanzhou (Zaytun) in 1326. In 1342, Jean de Marignolli claimed to have disputed with Jews at the Khanbaliq, the winter capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty in Beijing.

Quanzhou is the city to the west of China.  The general trend here is hard to miss:  Jews were entering China from the west at around 700 CE, and moving steadily east to Kaifeng by at least 1100, and probably earlier, and Beijing and Quanzhou by the 1200s to 1300s. 

the Huaisheng Mosque in  Quanzhou 

In Xin Xu’s the Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, and Religion, he suggested that Jews probably lived in Xian.  It is just 300 miles to the west of Kaifeng:

Many western ethnical and religious communities had settled there, including Nestorian Christians.  Their famous  Xi'an Stele or the Jingjiao Stele, erected in 781, documents 150 years of early Christianity in China.

Christian stele

There were, and continue to be, a Muslim presence in the city dating back to the Tang. 

 

the great mosque in Xian

Xian's famous Muslim Quarter

A Jewish community in this city makes historical sense, but there is no evidence that one existed.

Nanjing.  Toward the end of the Ming Dynasty, Alvare de Semmedo, a Portuguese Jesuit, heard from a Muslim in Nanjing that the city had four families of Jews who had recently converted to Islam.  Where they they last of this community?  Semmedo was in Nanjing in the early 1600s.  This would coincide with Ai Tien's account to Matteo Ricci in 1605, about the Jewish communities in China beside Kaifeng as no longer existent. 

Hangzhou: this city is located in eastern China, and is at the southern terminus of the Grand Canal.  It has always been an important city for trade, having access to both the coast and the interior.  

Hangzhou is some 500 miles south east of Kaifeng.  During Ai Tien's visit to Matteo Ricci in 1605, the Ai Tien told the priest that Hangzhou once had many Jews and a synagogue larger than that of Kaifeng, but the community, by this time, was no more.  We also know from other sources that there was an ancient presence of Jews in the city.  The Arab traveler Ibn Battuta visited Hangzhou in 1364, and he entered through "a gate called the Jews' Gate."  Little is known of this community, or why, despite their size and prosperity, were gone by the early seventeenth century.  

The Phoenix Mosque in Hangzhou

Ningbo: this city is a seaport in eastern China and in premodern times was an important connection between China and trade in South East Asia.  

Ningbo is 600 miles south of Kaifeng, and adjacent to Hangzhou.  The Jewish community Ningbo had ties with the Kaifeng Jews, and are mentioned in the 1489 stele:

"...when the synagogue was rebuilt, Shi Bin, Li Rong, Gao Jian, and Zhang Xuan went to Ningbo and brought back a scroll of the Scriptures.  Zhao Ying of Ningbo brought back another scroll to Kaifeng and respectfully presented it to our temple."  The phrase our temple appears to imply that Zhao Ying of Ningbo was not a member of the Kaifeng Synagogue, but the wording is not certain.

Xu Xin holds that because the Jews of Ningbo had two Torah scrolls to give to the Kaifeng community,  that they "must have had many more Torah scrolls if they could spare two for the Jews of Kaifeng" [page 157].  This is possible, but as most of the Chinese Jewish communities in China disappeared by 1605, they may have had Torah scrolls to spare in the decades before the seventeenth century.  White, is his note on this portion of the 1489 stele states the Ningbo Jewish community must have had a "strong community" to be so generous with their Torah scrolls pg., 27.

A good summary of the Gaos of Kaifeng and Ningbo, including their advanced degrees in the Neo-Confucian bureaucracy, is given in The Jews of Old China:

Was the Ningbo group of Jews only a branch of the Kaifeng community?  With the historical paucity of Chinese surnames, it is impossible to know without more evidence.

the Old Mosque in Ningbo; constructed in 1103 CE 

Yangzhou: this city had important historical connections with Kaifeng.  It was connect by the Grand Canal to Kaifeng.  It is nearly 400 miles south of Kaifeng.  

The 1512 Kaifeng inscription documents the connections between the two Jewish communities: "Chin Pu of Wei-yang (Yangzhou) respectfully placed (in the synagogue) a copy of the Scriptures of the Way and set up the Second Gateway.  Chin Jun of Ning-hsia set up the stone tablets and its pavilion.  Chin Chung revised the composition of the inscriptions of the tablet-pavilion.

Here we have three men with the surname Chin (Jin), one residing in Ning-hsia (Ningxia), see below, one in Yangzhou, and the last one in Kaifeng.  White presumes these three men are part of the Kaifeng Chin (Jin) clan.   There is no sure proof of this, but their joint efforts to refurbish the synagogue at Kaifeng appear to imply a more than casual connection.

interior of the Crane Mosque in Yangzhou

Ningxia: Chin Jun's home town is in Northwest China, some 600 miles northeast of Kaifeng, and 1000 miles from Yangzhou. 

This shows the great distances between various Chinese Jewish communities.  The 1489 inscription explains how one Jin (Chin) Xuan, of Ningxia, contributed an altar, a bronze censer, vases and a candlestick to rebuild the synagogue after a flood.  His brother, Jin Ying, contributed funds to purchase land for the synagogue and pay for erecting the 1489 stele.  Jin Zhong, from Ningxia, composed the 1489 stele.  As we saw above, the 1512 inscription mentions a member of the Jin clan in Ningxia.  Were the Jin's the most important clan in this city?  As much as we would like the relationships between the Jews of Kaifeng and the cities they mentioned to be clarified, we do not have enough information to do so.

the Tongxin Great Mosque, Ningxia, circa 1200

It appears that the seventeenth century, the 1600s, was an important decade for Jews in China outside of Kaifeng.  We have mention of these Jews in the 1512 inscription:

Chin Pu of Wei-yang (Yangzhou) respectfully placed (in the synagogue) a copy of the Scriptures of the Way and set up the Second Gateway.  Chin Jun of Ning-hsia set up the stone tablets and its pavilion. 

By 1605 they are gone.  Why?  We will explore this at a future time.  But one reason may reside in the founding myth of the Kaifeng community.  They came as clans, all at once, with women, children, men and settled in Kaifeng as a full time home.  Is this myth true, or does it even have a kernel of truth?  If it does, the fundamental difference between the Kaifeng Jewish community and that in other cities maybe the foundation layer of the Kaifeng group.  If they came as families, they were more settled.  They relied on Jews arriving from the west up to the 1400s, but when those visitors stopped, they were able to maintain their community.  Other Jewish groups were made of men who came and left China.  Their communities were not as cohesive.  We will examine this theory at another time.