The Kaifeng Symbol for the Tetragrammaton

 

HUC 925 - Rosh Hashanah prayers

There are many conventions for writing the four-letter name of God in Jewish texts. The Jews of Kaifeng used an unusual symbol that I have not encountered in other manuscripts. Even searches using AI tools have failed to reveal its origins or identify anything exactly resembling it elsewhere. The symbol looks like this:

In his HUC rabbinical ordination paper, Typology and Kavanah: The Prayerbook Page Layout, Rabbi Bruce Jonathan Pfeffer discusses this symbol, explaining that Kaifeng manuscripts use it alongside more familiar abbreviations for the Tetragrammaton.

He provides several examples:

The final example is much more common in modern texts. Pfeffer also offers an example from the Rome Machzor of 1486, which contains similar symbols for the divine name.

Both the Rome and Kaifeng examples incorporate two or three yod-like letters. However, they are not identical: the horizontal line that appears in the Kaifeng symbol is entirely absent from the Rome examples.

Where did the Kaifeng symbol originate? Is it unique to the Kaifeng community, or can it be found elsewhere? Did the Kaifeng Jews develop it themselves? They did not, however, invent the practice of abbreviating the Tetragrammaton from whole cloth. There are numerous examples of abbreviated forms of the divine name in Jewish prayerbooks.

The practice dates back to the medieval period, and examples abound in the Cairo Genizah. One relevant study is Tova Sacher and Moshe Lavee’s “Graphic Symbols for God's Name in an Unknown Recension of the Tanhuma from the Cairo Genizah" where the authors discuss scribal freedom in creating these symbols.

Therefore the Kaifeng symbol may well have been an innovation of the community—a distinctive variation on a much older and widespread scribal practice.