Between the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Kaifeng saw an array of visitors during the turbulent first years of the Republic of China. Some claimed to still notice physical characteristics among the Chinese Jews which stemmed from their Semitic origin, but all noted the tremendous amount of assimilation into their Chinese environment which had by then taken place. Nevertheless, it can be seen from conversations with the Chinese Jews that they still longed for some contact with Jews from the West which would enable them to revive at least their knowledge of Judaism. In particular they asked for schools for the young. Their numbers fairly decimated, the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng proved nevertheless to be resilient and driven to retaining whatever sense of ethnic identity they still possessed.
Chinese Jewish Descendants into the 20th Century
After the creation of the People’s Republic of China, little contact was had with the Jewish descendants in Kaifeng. In 1952, a census of all minority peoples in China was carried out, “minority” being defined as a group whose members spoke a common language of their own, and retained common traditions and cultural traits different from the Han ethnic majority. As Michael Pollak explained in his Mandarins, Jews and Missionaries, “several hundred inhabitants of Kaifeng, apparently unaware that Jews did not fit into any of the minority classifications set up by Peking, trooped to the various census centers, where, to the utter bewilderment of the clerical staffs, they attempted to register as members of a minority that, officially at least, did not even exist. Their efforts were of course to no avail.”
The decade of turbulence and violence which began with the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 prevented most Westerners from making their way to Kaifeng until the late 1970s. A UPI journalist in 1980 was the first Westerner to visit the Jews of Kaifeng since the 1960s, meeting several members of the Ai and Shi clans who told of the existence of dozens of other Jewish descendants in the city. Although claiming to be Jews on the basis of their ancestry alone, none were said to observe any of the Jewish customs or rituals. The existence of the steles in a safe place in the warehouse of the Kaifeng Municipal Museum was confirmed.
A flurry of activities ensued in 1981 in attempts to contact or research the subject of the Chinese Jews. A survey was conducted by the former curator of the Kaifeng Municipal Museum, Wang Yisha (who is arguably the one person in Kaifeng today who personally knows more Chinese Jews than anyone else), which concluded that there were still 140 families of Jewish descent with six surnames. Of these, 79 families live in Kaifeng and 6l have moved to other parts of China. The 79 families in Kaifeng numbered altogether 166 persons.
The year 1981 saw the publication of an article by Jin Xiaojing, entitled “I am a Chinese Jew.” Jin, a sociologist at the National Minorities Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, only discovered her Jewish roots in 1980 while attending a professional conference. At that time she learned that two of the men whose names were mentioned by others as being Jews, were actually paternal uncles of hers. Although her ancestral home was Kaifeng, it never dawned on her that she might be of Jewish descent, since she was raised as a Moslem!
My own visits to Kaifeng began in 1983 with special interest tours I led for the American Jewish Congress. Each of my groups was allowed to meet with three particular individuals, representing the Zhao and Shi clans. We went to South Teaching Scripture Lane, where the synagogue once stood but where now only a hospital exists to mark the spot. We also saw the 1489/1512 and 1679 steles, stored in a warehouse of the Kaifeng Municipal Museum.
Although discussions with the Jewish descendants were fairly formal, and no mention of Israel was allowed, we were able to glimpse for the first time those people whose ancestors and ours once spoke the same language in prayer, and equally longed for a return to their ancestral homeland.
In 1985 I returned to Kaifeng alone, and managed to speak with six heads of Jewish-descended families and some of their family members, representing the Ai, Li, Shi and Zhao clans. Each day in Kaifeng was an adventure in discovery of this remnant community. I gathered informal oral histories, testaments to how much has lingered on for some, and how much has been forgotten by others.
One member of the Ai clan could not recognize a Star of David as relating to Judaism, and knew nothing of the religion or history of the Jews in Kaifeng. He knew only that he was of Jewish descent because his father had told him so, and for some reason he, too, believed it important to pass down this knowledge to his sons. This, I surmised, was more representative of the Chinese Jewish descendants in Kaifeng, than those few brought before groups of tourists to recount their family’s and people’s history in China and religious customs.
Another member of a different Ai family, the oldest, being in his late seventies, had one of the most interesting stories of all. He was chosen in 1952 by his neighborhood committee to go to Beijing to represent the Chinese Jews as one of the national minorities, for a ceremony held by the three-year-old government of the newly created People’s Republic. Ai met and shook hands with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. This leads one to believe that the Jews were at one point, soon after the establishment of the PRC, close to being declared a national minority.
An elder statesman for the Zhao clan — the clan which figured so prominently throughout Chinese Jewish history and in Pearl S. Buck’s novel — has begun to build his own mini-museum to commemorate the many contributions of his family’s ancestors to the Kaifeng Jewish community. To this end, he has built a model of the old synagogue as his father and grandfather told him it looked, including the two stone lions which are missing on the model of the synagogue found in Israel’s Museum of the Diaspora.
One of the most enterprising of the Chinese Jews, he and one of this daughters had begun to make Chinese-style yarmulkas which they hoped to be able to sell to visiting tourists within the next few years. Zhao, in fact, found himself in a peculiar position with five daughters, since Judaism had been passed down patrilineally in Kaifeng for centuries. As one of the few Chinese Jewish descendants with an extensive knowledge of his people’s history, he has decreed that any children which his daughters have should be registered as “Youtai,” (meaning Jewish, rather than “Han,” for ethnic Chinese) even if their fathers are not of Jewish descent, on all Certificates of Registry next to the space allotted for nationality. The Zhaos still live on South Teaching Scripture Lane, near the hospital where the synagogue once stood.
A senior member of the Shi clan I met exhibited a deep desire to recover his heritage. His childhood memories were still vivid, recalling yarmulkas made in six sections (in honor of the six days it took G-d to create the universe, so his mother had told him), brass Stars of David kept locked in a medicine chest but lost over the years, and Passover rituals … red paint mixed with water, a substitution for the traditional chicken’s blood, was spread over the doorpost of his home with a Chinese writing brush. This festival was combined with the Chinese New Year, while a second, separate custom taking place a month later called for the baking of cakes without yeast.
Shi has been working closely with Wang Yisha to reconstruct the genealogies of the Kaifeng Jews, in particular those of the Shi clan. To this end, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati agreed to donate two microfiches of the Chinese-Hebrew Memorial Book of the Dead to Kaifeng — one to the Kaifeng Municipal Museum and another directly to Wang Yisha.
I returned to Kaifeng for the last time in 1988, and came away feeling that a renewed sense of purpose had taken root, both in those Chinese Jewish descendants actively pursuing knowledge of their past, and in the Westerners who have been lucky enough to reestablish contact at this crucial time, when the last generation who can even purport to have such memories, still lives.