The Hidden Legacy: Jews in China After 700 Years

About seven hundred years ago, a Muslim traveler arrived in the bustling Chinese city of Canton with an unusual request. He stopped passersby and asked where he could find “Jews.”

To understand how odd this was, picture China in the 13th century, a vast empire almost entirely cut off from Europe and other lands where Jewish communities lived. Canton, now China’s fourth-largest city with over 18 million residents, was already large and lively in those days. Yet most of its people had never even heard the word “Jew.”

Surprisingly, the traveler did find one. There was an old, little-known synagogue in the city, though it stood abandoned. Nearby lived an elderly and sick Jewish man. When the Muslim asked if he could buy a Torah scroll, the man agreed to sell the neglected scroll from the synagogue.

Why would a Muslim want a Torah scroll?
That question leads to the fascinating story of Kaifeng’s Jewish community in medieval China.

No one knows exactly how or when Jews reached Kaifeng, but a stone inscription in the city records that their synagogue was built in 1163, about nine centuries ago. Many believe they arrived with Persian Jewish merchants who traveled the famous Silk Road. This network of trade routes carried silk from China to the West, and Jewish traders, known for their commercial skill, sometimes settled in the cities along the way.

The emperor of the Ming dynasty welcomed the Jews of Kaifeng, granting them permission to live in the city and even assigning them six official family names: Ai, She, Gao, Jin, Li, Gan, and Shi. The Jews thrived in trade and integrated into Chinese life, but they faced a recurring challenge, flooding.

Their synagogue stood near the Yangtze River, part of the silk trade route. When heavy rains came, they usually had time to move their sacred items to safety. But one year, an unexpected flood struck, damaging all their Torah scrolls. With no scribes to repair them and no printed Chumashim (Pentateuchs) to copy from, the community faced a crisis.

Determined to restore their Torah, they sent emissaries to search for other Jewish communities in China. Information was scarce, but they heard old rumors about Jewish life in Canton. They chose a Muslim emissary, someone who, though not Jewish, respected the holiness of the Torah. That emissary found the abandoned synagogue in Canton, purchased the scroll, and brought it back to Kaifeng. It may have been the source from which they copied new Torahs, allowing their Jewish life to continue.

One synagogue inscription from Kaifeng lists seventy families and traces their lineage from Avraham Avinu to their own time. Another inscription praises their loyalty to the emperor and records that they fought in his wars.

The wider world first learned of them in 1605, when a Christian missionary in Beijing met a Jew from Kaifeng. Curious, the missionary tried to discuss Christianity, only to discover that the Kaifeng Jews knew nothing about it. He wrote to their synagogue leader, insisting that the Jewish messiah had already come. The leader politely replied that, according to their faith, the messiah had not yet arrived, and they awaited his coming to redeem Israel at the end of days.

Their final great trial came in the mid-1800s during the Taiping Rebellion, a devastating civil war led by a Christian-inspired rebel leader named Hong Xiuquan. It lasted 14 years and is considered by some historians the deadliest war in human history, claiming the lives of millions, about 7% of the world’s population at the time.

During this chaos, Kaifeng’s synagogue was destroyed. The Jewish community scattered, and as the generations passed, much of their Jewish learning was lost.

Today, about five hundred people in Kaifeng trace their ancestry to those Jews. Only a few dozen actively gather for Jewish prayer and tradition. They keep a few simple markers of identity, such as refraining from eating pork and avoiding seafood, practices that set them apart in Chinese society and connect them to their heritage.

Though their numbers are small, the spirit of Kaifeng’s Jews remains a remarkable reminder of how far Jewish history reaches even to the heart of medieval China.