The Jews of Kaifeng
Jewish identity can be a complicated subject within our community.
It is much simpler looking from the outside, I've always found it to be the case that most non-Jews are very quick to pass a label on someone's Jewish identity without much of a second thought. Unfortunately that seems to be a consistent truth in recent history, although after all my years traveling I now believe that statement can be equally true for any minority population in nearly any context.
I'd always known that Jewish settlers had made their homes in Asia, many friends and family I grew up around were familiar with Jewish communities in India and some of the more famous middle-eastern Jewish families that controlled large stakes of Shanghai. These famous families including the infamous Kadoories and Sassoons established themselves as titans of the international business community in the foreign concessions of Shanghai, only to flee to Hong Kong after the communist revolution swept over the country following the end of World War II.
Their family businesses still make up a prominent role in Hong Kong’s business community as the families behind globally recognized brands including the China Light and Power Group and the glamorous Peninsula Hotel Chain.
What I hadn't been aware of was the long-standing Jewish communities in places I had never thought to look. I would venture to guess that many fellow Americans, even American Jews, would have no idea that metro Manila has one of the best established communities of Jewish heritage throughout the Pacific. That is why when I first learned of a community of Jews living in central China for more than a thousand years, I knew I had to visit myself.
By now the Jews of Kaifeng have become well known to the world. In the mid-2000's when the State of Israel began fostering closer economic and governmental exchanges with the PRC government there had already been scholarly and religious exchanges researching the descendants of Jewish residents in Kaifeng. To make Aliyah is an important right for all Jews to consider in their lifetime, and it is also a lifeline for many Jewish people who suffer persecution in their native countries of origin. Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, Africans, South Asians; if you are Jewish and from a place where being Jewish can be a high risk proposition, even life threatening, the right to assert your heritage and immigrate to Israel is life changing.
Through these early cultural exchanges, many Chinese Jews were beginning to assert their right of return and pursue immigration to Israel, slowly building a bridge between the two countries. Fast forward 10 years, and these early connections had blossomed into a flourishing source of economic and technological exchange, just in time for the rise of Neo-Confucianism and Xi Jinpin thought. By 2016, coinciding with the terrible crackdown on outwardly religious communities across the country, this reborn Jewish community only beginning to grow was also threatened by these new waves of monitoring and security control.
When I visited the last remnants of the Jews of Kaifeng, however, none of this had yet come to pass. It was still the early 2000's, and the city of Kaifeng itself was something of a historical backwater which frankly had seen better days. My friend and I were well into our months long summer adventure across the country, and by the time we found our way to this ancient city, we were very, very tired, and in need of some rest.
Where exactly is Kaifeng you might be asking yourself by now?
Kaifeng (开封市) is a city located approximately the very center of China. In modern days it is does not have any internationally recognizable tourism points, being located a few hours south-west of Beijing, west of Shanghai, but north-east of Sichuan, Chungking (or Chongqing) and the Three Gorges Dam. The closest landmark most people from outside of China will possibly recognize is the original Shaolin Temple in nearby Luoyang city. Anyone visiting China as an international tourist, especially when we were visiting, would not come to the city without a specific reason.
Despite the cities sleepy existence today, historically it was a very important seat of power. During the Song dynasty (960 -1127 C.E.) Kaifeng was the imperial capital of China until the Jurchen (proto-Mongolian) Jin dynasty sacked the city during the historical Jing Kang Incident. The namesake of the city is for the famous “Lord Bao” lake and pagoda, built in memorial of the mythical protector of Chinese justice Judge Bao Zheng (包拯).
Judge Bao is a heroic figure in Chinese folkloric tradition, representing incorruptible justice and working on behalf of the Emperor and the divine rule of heaven to root out evildoers by acting as a detective, prosecutor and judge all rolled under the power of the imperial seal. Many novels, plays, and even a very entertaining Taiwanese produced television show called ‘The Arbiter’ in English translation recount his noble exploits on behalf of a downtrodden populace.
My friend and I had arrived in town very early in the morning. This was before China's high speed railways had connected the vast distances separating the major population centers of the country, and the only transport connecting many out of the way destinations was overnight sleeper buses. Most people could not afford private cars yet, and highways were not completed in many areas deeper in the countryside. Some rural areas were notorious for bribery and corruption, and many public facilities like hotels and guest houses were still de facto off-limits to non-Chinese, so the bus routes were usually the only feasible option.
That also meant you were dropped off by the bus wherever they could earn the best return but still technically have brought you to your destination. This always meant somewhere they could avoid paying any tolls or fees to formally enter a city or other municipal area. In short, as had happened countless times before, we were dropped off again in the early morning darkness on some unnamed rural road, the faint glow of city lights shining through the fog, miles in the distance.
A group of waiting private taxi cars were there, the drivers standing by their cars waiting for the arrival of the bus and nearly collapsing in laughter as two bleary eyed western people stumbled out of the bus doors right into their waiting pockets. What better luck could they hope for?
At least that is how they thought, two obviously younger foreign people should be able to pay a premium. Unfortunately for them, my friend and I were young and stupid in that invincible way young men perceive the world around them. Nothing could hurt us, and screw those guys if they thought we were trapped in a shitty deal for something as basic as a taxi ride. We grabbed our bags, bantered a bit with one or two of the drivers more out of politeness than anything else.
After all these drivers in particular were to their credit very friendly and genuinely curious what we were doing coming here in the middle of the night. Then, when the discussion naturally drifted towards a price, we knew the score, and started walking in a random direction which we hoped was the right way.
The drivers couldn't believe it, and most of the group decided to ignore us and wait for the next bus to come, whenever that would be the case. One individual was curious, and wanted to see what we would do, so he decided to follow behind us as we walked. Of course, we didn't know his thinking at the time, and the slowly creeping car following behind us as we walked was something more than a little unnerving given our complete inability to tell exactly where we were. What else could we do though? Given where we were, we decided to keep walking, and be ready for anything.
Eventually, I can't remember how much time had passed, the driver yelled from his open window and asked us for a cigarette, and we decided to stop and talk to him. It was a ridiculous scene, us walking along a pitch black road, except for this bubble of headlight created by a slowly following solitary car, whose driver was sticking his head out asking to have a smoke with us. Of course we exchanged cigarettes through the window, no reason to be rude in the circumstances after all, and he asked us where we were from. Within a few minutes he decided to cut us a ‘break’ on the price and offer something that seemed more reasonable. With that, somewhat assured our new friend wouldn’t drive us to a waiting group of gangsters around the next blind corner, we were on our way into the ancient city of Kaifeng to try and find the Jewish community...that is if we could find a place to sleep for a few hours first.
Nowadays in China it can be difficult to find hotels that outright refuse service to foreigners. If you are familiar with the country, especially if you are fluent in mandarin, you will be more familiar with the various categories of inns, motels and guest houses available to PRC citizens which refuse service to foreign guests. This is because in China there is an archaic system of residency registration which if you are a citizen, flows through your ‘work unit’ or ‘dan wei’. The system was intensely controlling during the Mao and immediate post-Mao eras, but as the 1980s and 1990s economic reforms progressed it was usually more relaxed at local levels. In more recent times a stricter enforcement of the system is now seeing a resurgence, but at the time my friend and I were traveling in Kaifeng there were still quite a few ‘grey areas’ when it came to local oversight over the laws.
Technically speaking, in order for any guest house to accept us they would first need to file a registration with the local police to obtain a special permit. All foreigners were and still are required to file a corresponding residency registration within a short time period of arriving in China. As a visitor, your international hotel does this for you referencing their own license number, that’s why the hotel staff always retain a photocopy of your passport when you check in after arrival. In central China in the early 2000’s government records systems were not as sophisticated as they are today, and rather than go through the trouble of actually registering as a venue authorized to host foreigners, the managers of most hotels and guest houses in a city like Kaifeng with only a very rare foreign visitor would outright refuse to service to anyone of non-Chinese descent.
This is where one of these wonderful ‘grey areas’ came into the light however, because not everyone of Chinese descent travelling in China is a citizen of the country. American Chinese, Taiwanese, Singaporeans, Hong Kongers, anyone who was ethnically Chinese were frequently given a pass and allowed to stay in almost any type of lodging, usually for a small extra ‘fee’. These days there is much less room for under the table arrangements like this, after all with the rise of electronic payment and credit cards modern records and accounting make it challenging to hide these under the table transactions if a company seriously wants to prevent them. However, back then cash was king in China, no one would dare pay with a credit card anywhere outside the major city centers even if payment systems were available, and these little local ‘solutions’ to the often vague and unclear enforcement of complicated regulations are what made everyday life functional for most Chinese.
Needless to say, seeing two young foreigners arrive unexpectedly in the middle of the night, bags in tow, was not the kind of attention many smaller businesses in the city were willing to subject themselves to. We brought with us a lot of trouble for little to gain in return, and so hour after hour, vacancy after denied vacancy, our new friend brought us to every place he could think of to ask for a room. Sometime around 6am we were all exhausted, our friend had a breakthrough through some contact in his network of friends, and we found a small room. Luckily we had our exchange student identification with us as we travelled, and by explaining we were in town to learn about the history of Kaifeng city as a part of our university studies, and a little extra ‘tip’ paid for ‘early check-in’, we had our room. Time for a quick nap, some food, and then the next leg of our adventure.
We woke up in the early afternoon, dazed but grateful more than anything for a hot shower. We were ready to go, and not knowing where we were or how to navigate the city, did the next best thing we could think of and simply asked the lobby staff where to find ‘the Jews’. We tried a few names for Jewish people, including ‘You Tai Ren 犹太人’ the modern name for Jewish people, the ‘Tiao Jin Jiao 挑筋教’, a historical name roughly translated to ‘the removing sinew religion.’ Nothing was getting across though, but despite our frustration the local staff was very amused by our antics.
After comparing Kosher and Halal foods as a way of explanation, (清真 Qingzhen food) amazingly, one of the staff remembered something. She quickly called his ‘older brother’ as he described him, who worked in some government department for the city, and was able to get a suggestion from him where could start our search. We hopped in a local private car, licensed taxis being few and far between at this time, and were off.
We eventually were dropped off at a small neighborhood with a stone memorial. On it there was an inscribed story about a ‘temple’ that had stood the test of time on this location, but unfortunately had been destroyed sometime in more recent history. The whole situation was very confusing, the temple itself seemed to be in the Muslim quarter of town, but the ‘temple’ description on the monument wasn’t something we had seen in respect of Muslim religious or historical sites in China before. With no idea what to do next, we simply started walking up to anyone who looked like they might have been from the area. Our friend’s ‘older brother’ had mentioned a new term to us, the ‘Blue Hat Hui’, as a term to use, and with no better ideas we approached a group of elderly people singing in an adjacent park and asked about it.
Hui people in China are Muslim, but not of the same ethnicity of the Uighur minorities you may be more familiar with. The Uighurs are a Turkish ethnic group that lives in the west of China, They speak a Turkic language and have cousins living in many different central Asian countries, with a sizable population resident in Turkey itself. They have mixed Asiatic and European features, and many times could easily be mistaken for persons coming from certain parts of Iran, or any of the ‘stan’ nations like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. On the other hand, the Hui people appear 100% ethnically Chinese, and are the descendants of Islamic traders and merchants coming to China through the Silk Road in the Northwest and maritime trading routes in the Southwest. The Hui have intermarried with the majority ethnic Han Chinese for so many generations that their features blend in with most other people you’ll meet in the country, except that they have maintained their Muslim faith. Men from the Hui ethnicity sometimes wear a white hat reminiscent of head-wear seen in many middle eastern nations, and the Hui keep to Halal customs that differentiate themselves from Han Chinese in the food they eat. In particular they refuse to eat the undisputed staple of Chinese cuisine, pork.
When we used the term ‘Blue Hat Hui’, this octogenarian park-side singing club immediately knew what we were talking about. The Jewish population of Kaifeng had arrived a thousand years before our visit, alongside the ancestors of the modern day Hui Muslims. They followed what seemed to the local Han population as similar customs, keeping Kosher and refusing to accept the hospitality of their Han neighbors and join them for any pork-centric feasts or banquets. This, along with other traditional beliefs, served to ostracize them from the local populations, and for centuries they lived alongside the local Hui community in separate but parallel lives from both their Muslim and Chinese cousins.
A famous incident in the Ming dynasty of the 17th century recorded their existence when the Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci was visited by a Jewish-Chinese individual surnamed ‘Ngai’, or ‘
Ai’ in Mandarin. The legendary Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci was serving the imperial court in his capacity as an adviser and representative Jesuit mission to the Chinese Imperial court. He investigated the story represented by Mr. Ngai about a historical population of worshipers who kept Kosher, prayed at a temple, and followed their elder Abraham. Ricci recorded his experiences investigating the claims personally in his diaries and letters to the Vatican, marking an important historical record of the existence of an independent Jewish community in the city.
Following the direction of these charming elderly singers, a person who seemed to us to be around college age was recommended by the group, saying he would take us to a house still occupied by one family descended from these Blue Hats, for a fee of course. We negotiated skeptically, and paid him something although we were by now used to the daily dose of scams and devious plans intended to separate us from our pocket cash. Then we were off practically at a sprint, rushing through the twists and turns of dilapidated Chinese village homes. After a few minutes, by the time we were completely sure this was some kind of fraud and he would demand more money from us at the next major intersection, we stopped in front of a little old house. We heard the clacking of Mahjong tiles, another small irony given both Jewish and Chinese grandmother’s modern day proclivity towards the game, and our guide called out to them. One little old lady poked her head through the screen at the doorway, and on seeing two foreigners, decided it was a curious enough situation to step outside.
My Chinese name is translated as De Wen (德文). De (德), the character for virtue, and wen (文) for literary culture, combine to approximate the sound of my English name, with a duel meaning as the modern day word for the German language. My last name, Ehrig, was not so easy to approximate in Chinese, but to this day to give credit to my high-school Chinese teacher. She chose the surname Ai (艾) as a Chinese surrogate for my name out of historical context. Ai was one of the seven surnames granted to Jewish families by the imperial court, along with Li, Shi, Zhao, Jin, Zhang and Gao. Throughout the centuries those with the surname Ai in the city were recognized as descended from this original population. Mr. Ngai from Ricci’s records above also was surnamed Ai, when read in modern day Mandarin pronunciation.
My friend and I introduced ourselves, she was delighted to speak with foreigners in her own language, a fairly common reaction. When we had explained to her that we were trying to find descendants of the Jewish community, and that our friendly guide had brought us to the house with that goal in mind, she quickly ushered us inside. She was trying to explain something, but the language she was using was so specific neither of us could understand what she was talking about.
We went into her house and said hello to her three other elderly friends sitting around the table. Sunflower seed shells were piled high, tea was on the table, and they were busily reshuffling the tiles for another round. They went back and forth for a bit in local dialect, we could only understand portions of what they were saying, and then our new elderly friend brought us back to the door. We thought it was time to leave and we were being ushered out, but instead she pointed to the upper left corner of the frame. When I looked around the protruded edge of the frame, and nestled in the very top corner, there was a mezuzah, complete with Hebrew writing engraved on the surface.
I was completely shocked, and I asked her if she knew what that object was. She explained that since she was a little girl her father had said a prayer by it, and told her to always leave it in place, but always to leave it hidden from the outside like it was mounted away from view here. She did not understand the meaning behind the prayer her father said, and she recalled a few lines for us. In the broken Chinese pronounced version of whatever prayer it was, there was no way I could hear exactly what she said. Not knowing what to do at that point, I asked her if I could say a little prayer as well. So I recited what I could remember in the spur of the moment of a Chanukah prayer. She fell very quiet, and thanked us both for coming, inviting us to come back whenever we were in town.
After we said our goodbyes, we paid our guide a great tip, thanked him profusely, and asked where to get some food. He recommended we try out some of the local Hui Muslim street food, which seemed fitting given our experience. So off we went, down to the famous shore of Lord Bao’s Lake, to a street-side barbecue and kebab stand practically in the shadow of the Lord Bao Memorial Temple and Pagoda. We were almost delirious with exhaustion and joy having achieved our goals and living such a deeply intimate and personal experience. We down one of the kebob sellers as they were just starting up the charcoal grills, and ordered a mini-keg of local beer. This mini-keg became our guiding point for the rest of the evening, as we had placed a sizable deposit on it.
No matter how many times later that night we would think of abandoning it and running from town as fast as we could, we were determined to get our keg deposit back. That was the future though, a few of the many surprises fate would have in store for us. But for now, against the pastoral backdrop of the infamous lake where Chinese Justice built its home, we toasted our success.