Degree Holders Among the Kaifeng Jews in the 18th Century

 

From the 1400s to the late 1600s, the Kaifeng Jews produced numerous Confucian Scholar/Officials far in excess of what one would expect for such a small community.  The 1663b stone alone lists 20 degree holders, 14 army officers, and four official physicians.  These are all position that would have required taking Civil Service Exams.  Yet there is only one record of degree holders in the Kaifeng community in the 1700s.

Leslie has repeatedly pointed out that White is wrong about attributing Jewish status to people in the Gazettes.  Here he attributed Chao Tso-mei from this possible 18th century synagogue inscription as an official.  But was White correct here?  Leslie does not reference a Chao Tso-mei anywhere that I can find.  The 1700s were also a quiet time for synagogue inscriptions.  White only lists one that was part of the Ai family arch:

This has often been attributed to the Kaifeng Jews entering into into the final stretch before their complete assimilation to their Chinese environment.  This theory is strangely paradoxical as the civil service exams inculcated a great deal of "Chinese" identity into its elite members.  There has also been the sense, never exactly stated, that Kaifeng Jews became more Chinese, and less intellectually accomplished, in the 1700s, because they became more Chinese in a rank and file sense.

A more historically robust theory is the deterioration of the Chinese tax base after 1712.  The Kangxi emperor promised not to rise in taxes that year, and his successors continued this promise.  However, China's population doubled from 1740 to 1790, with some 400 million people - nearly a third of all people on the earth.  

China had an expanded population but did not have the funds to hire more Confucian scholars to govern them.  The position that were open had a great deal of pressure applied to them - and corruption and graft became common.  The Civil Service System had worked for hundreds of years in China, but by "the late eighteenth century, the system was beginning to fail."  

The effect on the Kaifeng Community was profound.  The Scholar/Officials often used their influence and funds to rally the community during difficult times.  Without them, the community was at a special risk.  Kaifeng Judaism had to be "restarted" at several times, but without the leaders and their resources, that would prove impossible.

When the last Jesuits left Kaifeng in 1723, the community appeared to be functioning at a high level.  Children were being taught Hebrew, and services were offered in the synagogue.  But the 1700s is a largely silent time for the Jews of Kaifeng: no new or renovated buildings, synagogue inscriptions, or the larger scale copying of books.  At least, we have no records of these being done.  It is possible the books and the synagogue did not need care in the 1700s.  Perhaps the building and copying boom of the mid-1600s had given the community a vital cushion.

We do know that the last rabbi, and with him knowledge of Hebrew, died in 1810 in a province far from Kaifeng.  It was 87 years since Domenge saw Jewish children learning Hebrew.  In 1810 only on Kaifeng Jews could Hebrew script.  Without the support of the officials, and the general impoverishment of this area, and all of China, during the 1700s, the Kaifeng community had to invest more time and effort in simply surviving at the expense of learning Hebrew or caring on Jewish rites and ceremonies.  The rabbinical families that had always provided sons had to work outside the community to survive.

Post Script

There is also some kind of technical reason why it is difficult to find the names of degree holders in the 1700s.  There are a lack of synagogue inscriptions to draw from.  As Leslie says in his article on Chao family degree holders: