Kaifeng Judaism Today - Revival or Reintroduction?.pdf (original) (raw)
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Though estimates vary, the Jewish-Chinese community in Kaifeng never numbered more than 5000 inhabitants at its peak in the Ming dynasty and today comprises less than half that. Yet, the existence of this small group in the ocean of China’s vast populace, and the negotiation of its idiosyncratic Sino-Judaic identity, has generated extensive political reverberations throughout its 1,000 year history until today. Despite the tolerance experienced by the Jewish contingent in Kaifeng, their identity was nonetheless subject to misrepresentation by the majority Han; the dominant minority Hui; and the Catholic and Protestant missionaries who interacted with the group. The flood of 1849 caused the final destruction of its synagogue and the eventual decline of its culture. Despite several appeals to the Jewish Diaspora for relief, by the beginning of the 20th century any material expression of Kaifeng Jewish culture had been extinguished and many scholars had predicted its demise. Yet, located in the Chinese structure of clan lineage and in the practice of ancestor veneration, the personal notion of a Jewish “identity” persisted. The implementation of China’s policy of “reform and openness” and consequent socio-political processes in Kaifeng have catalysed a renegotiation of Sino-Judaic identity, contradistinctive to both official CCP policy and Israeli law. Along with a historiography and epigraphy of Sino-Judaic identity construction, the results of my fieldwork in Kaifeng offer a series of narratives representing several of the current actors and interest groups, their engagement in the processes of emergent Sino-Judaic self-representation and the challenges confronting continued communal development. This thesis will argue for the authentication of Sino-Judaic identity from its intrinsic symbolic markers and advocate for its autochthonous conservation.
Book review: Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions by Irene Eber
Irene Eber's posthumous essay collection Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions offers a quick access to Jewish-Chinese interactions in history, culture and literature in the last eight centuries. Reviewing three major Jewish historical periods in China, as well as Jewish cultural communications and translations between Jewish languages and Chinese, Eber's insightful descriptions of these Jewish transcultural activities offer her readers an understanding of Jews' experiences in China that is both thorough and panoramic. Editor Kathryn Hellerstein's Introduction enhances the volume with a vivid and comprehensive summary of Eber's own bibliography and academic contributions to the field, as well as setting out the main contents of each section. The essays in Section One, "Overview," offer a general description and review of the Jewish presence in China from the eighth century CE to the end of World War II. Chapter 1, "Overland and by Sea: Eight Centuries of the Jewish Presence in China," responds to two main questions: How did the members of the longstanding Jewish community of Kaifeng retain their Jewish identity throughout centuries of involvement with Chinese society and cultural customs? And, in the late 1930s, how were nearly twenty thousand Jews able to reach China, at a time when most countries had shut their doors to Jewish immigration? Eber presents an overarching picture of these two main groups of Jews in China: the "Chinese Jews" of Kaifeng, and the more recently arrived "Jews in China," centered in Shanghai. In her view, the Kaifeng Jews succeeded in preserving their Jewish identity by virtue of their "Sinification," which, she asserts, "suggests not assimilation, but. .. combining Chinese social and religious characteristics with Jewish ones" (p. 10). Kaifeng Jews acquired Chinese surnames while adopting a lineage-based communal organization.
In 1953 the Central United Front of the CPC issued a policy statement rejecting the bid for ethnic status of Kaifeng’s Jewish descendants. Expressing a cryptic concern that recognition might “…put us [China] in a passive position politically”, the document nonetheless proscribed discrimination against the group and granted them the performance of “various activities”. Following the implementation of the “Reform and Opening” policy, attempts in by local and foreign activists to restore Kaifeng Jewish heritage yielded some adverse repercussions for the community in the mid-1990s: suspension of a municipal project for a Sino-Judaic history museum, the revocation of Jewish status recorded in the local household registry cards, and intensified police surveillance of its activities. Over the past decade, however, several transnational NGOs with diverse aims have engaged with a small but growing number of Jewish descendants in Kaifeng. These engagements have triggered a resurgence of cultural practices that were nearly extinguished when an 1849 deluge destroyed the community’s synagogue of seven centuries. This chapter explores some of the challenges stemming from the recent transmissions of contradictory discourse on the significance of cultural identity for Kaifeng Jews. Based on my fieldwork in 2013, it centres on interactions during the convergent celebrations of the Festival of Tabernacles (Sukkot) and Mid-Autumn Festival (中求节) with the community and its foreign guests as well as interviews with twenty-two Kaifeng Jews. It considers conflicting narratives on the construction of “Jewishness”; the dichotomy of historical heritage as opposed to practical observance; and the fissures between the promotion of Israeli immigration and the preservation of an autochthonous tradition. It argues that the diverse articulations influencing the reconstruction of Sino-Judaic identity have concurrently generated ambiguity, confusion and division. Finally, it explores the effects of the development of Kaifeng Jewish tourism on the fragmented state of the Kaifeng Sino-Judaic community.
The aim of this study is twofold. Firstly, it intends to highlight the value of constructivist insights for religious studies by showing that various forms of approach to issues related to religion are mere constructs. In contrast to this viewpoint, the discipline of religious studies had traditionally sought a higher degree of objectivity in the scientific reflection of religious topics, but that has been a fraught path. Secondly, the example it refers to is worthy in itself. The reception of Judaism in contemporary China is not only an under-investigated topic endowed with a great potential to reveal to what extent the Chinese ordinary man as well as the academic succeed to understand Western thought and to differentiate among the varied cultural traditions generally subsumed by them under the notion Western, but it also shows that the constructivist approaches preserve their validity in non-European contexts as well. Judaism's reception in contemporary China will be pursued on four different levels: popular literature, fake books, articles in the Christian Chinese media and academic productions. The four categories of texts represent four different degrees of comprehension of the object of study, primarily offering information about the worldviews of the authors of the texts. The process of reception of thought is regarded as a form of encounter where the active part is striving to get out of its own mindset and move towards the other.
In 1953 the United Front of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a document denying ethnic status to Kaifeng’s Jewish descendants. Simultaneously, the text recommended that this group be protected from discrimination and their “various activities” be somewhat tolerated. Following “Reform and Opening”, foreign interest in the descendants stimulated a revival of Sino-Judaic identity and local projects designed to attract tourism. In 1993 the municipality launched the Construction Office for the Kaifeng Jewish History Museum; the latter was to be modelled after the synagogue that had endured for seven centuries until its destruction by flooding in 1849. However, after members of the Sino-Judaic community articulated this undertaking in terms of their own cultural revitalization rather than a historical platform for tourism, the Construction Office was summarily suspended in 1996. Several months later, the police issued an order for the mandatory submission of the descendants’ household registry certificates; their status as youtai (Jewish) was compulsorily amended to Han or Hui. This official erasure of communal identity has prompted a cautious but resilient activist movement facilitated with the assistance of foreign organizations, both Jewish and Christian. While initially chartered through traditional elements of clan lineage, ancestor veneration and the preservation of a few Jewish customs, the group has more recently mobilized international resources to actively reinvent a contemporary Sino-Judaic cultural identity. The grassroots activism and global networking of the Kaifeng Jews have engendered new opportunities for cultural expression both in Kaifeng and, for many of the younger descendants, in Israel. Such efforts have provoked periodic responses from China’s authorities. Nonetheless, the Sino-Judaic community has continued to negotiate its invigorated identity, while endeavouring to frame this resurgence within appropriate local and transnational discourse.