In June 1605 Matteo Ricci received a visitor at his home in Beijing. Ricci, who was a Jesuit missionary sent to convert the Chinese, had been looking forward to this visit. He had heard that although the visitor was Chinese, they worshipped the same God.
When the visitor arrived, Ricci took him into his chapel and kneeled down before a painting of the Madonna with Child and John the Baptist. The visitor, puzzled, did the same. “In our religion we do not kneel before pictures of Rebecca, Jacob and Esau” he said. Now it was Ricci’s turn to be puzzled. When the visitor saw a picture of the four Evangelists, he asked why Jacob’s other eight sons had not been included. It wasn’t until the visitor contradicted Ricci, telling him that the Messiah had not yet come, that the missionary realised that he was talking, not to a fellow Christian, but to a Jew. Even so, the visitor, a 60 year old man named Ngai (or, according to some, Ai Tian) did not recognise the word Jew. He called himself an Israelite.
When Ricci showed him a Hebrew Bible, Ngai said that he recognised the characters but he could not read the words. He told Ricci that he had seen similar letters on a 400 year old Torah scroll in the synagogue of his home town of Kaifeng, but that while his brothers had chosen to study Hebrew he had opted for Chinese literature.
Ricci’s encounter with Ngai is the earliest recorded contact between a Westerner and a Chinese Jew.
It is thought that Jews first settled in Kaifeng in the 11th or 12th centuries. According to Chinese records and Jewish legends, seventy families of Indian Jews had brought gifts of cotton and seeds to the emperor of the Song dynasty. Having donated their presents, they settled in Kaifeng. The Chinese thought that they were Muslims because they did not eat pork. They called them ‘Muslims who wear the blue cap’. The Jews referred to themselves as ‘the people who do not eat the sinew’, referring to the biblical prohibition against eating an animal’s sciatic nerve (Genesis 32, 33).
There are still a few Jews left in Kaifeng but they life under severe repression, a state of affairs that has reportedly become worse since Xi Jinping took over as China’s head of state.
In 1642, the city of Kaifeng was besieged by a rebel army. After six futile months beleaguering the city the rebel leader took decisive action. He diverted the waters of the nearby Yellow River, causing a flood which inundated the city and killed hundreds. The Jewish quarter, which was only 500 meters from the river, was deluged; the synagogue was destroyed, its books and its 12 Torah scrolls were all washed away. The scraps of parchment they managed to save were just enough to make one complete Torah scroll from the 12 that had been ruined.
One of the Jewish residents of Kaifeng was a man named Zhao Ying-Cheng. He was a judge, a philosopher and a military leader whose exploits led the Emperor of China to bestow the highest of all honours, not upon him but upon his father as the head of the clan.
Zhao Ying-Cheng was known to Kaifeng’s Jews as Moshe ben Avram. He was born in 1619 and was studying for the Imperial Examinations in Kaifeng when the rebels flooded the city. He obtained a Master’s Degree in 1642 and a Doctorate the following year. Zhao Ying-Cheng was the only Kaifeng Jew to achieve this level of academic distinction.
After passing his exams Zhao Ying-Cheng was appointed as a judge. He was made a Department Director at the Ministry of Justice and after three years was sent to govern the province of Fujian. He only lasted four months in the job before he was promoted again, this time to a military role, as a regimental Assistant Commander. He was sent to a region that was plagued by a violent gang that the Chinese records describe as bandits, though they were more likely to have been rebels. Whatever they were, they terrorised the local population; running riot, attacking villages, burning property, and creating tremendous misery. In his new military role, Zhao Ying-Cheng was ordered to put an end to their activities.
Among his many talents Zhao seems to have been something of an artist; he enlisted the help of the local peasants by drawing and displaying 30 charts depicting their suffering. He fired up the peasants’ passions, encouraging them to fight back against the bandits. He formed a peasant militia, integrated it into the troops he commanded and launched a series of successful attacks on the bandit stronghold, restoring peace to the region.
Alongside his legal, military and artistic skills, Zhao was an acknowledged Confucian scholar and an advocate of education for the masses. Once he had disposed of the bandits he began work on a book of philosophy. He called it the Record of Oddities of the Four Bamboos’ Hall. Then he turned his hand to education, building schools, erecting a lecture hall and hiring the best teachers he could to improve the lot of the local population.
When Zhao’s mother died he returned to Kaifeng for the mandatory three year(!) Confucian mourning period. The city was still a wreck after the flood and his cousin, Major Zhao Ying-Shi, who had unsuccessfully tried to defend the city from the rebel siege, was one of those working on its reconstruction. Zhao Ying-Cheng, teamed up with his brother Zhao Ying-Du and Zhao Ying-Shi to rebuild the synagogue, of which no sign now remained; even its foundations were not recognisable. They sent in troops to guard the site, dug down to uncover the foundations and commenced work on rebuilding the prayer hall.
When the synagogue was complete the Emperor donated a large plaque in honour of Zhao’s father, Zhao Guang-yu. It was placed on top of the synagogue gate. Ordering that the story of Kaifeng’s Jews be in engraved in stone as a permanent record, Zhao's cousin erected a stone tablet detailing the history of the synagogue’s destruction in the flood and its rebuilding. It described the community’s efforts to rescue the sodden parchments of the Torah scrolls that had been washed away, listed the names of all the people who had scooped the remnants up from the water and mentioned everyone who had been involved in the building’s reconstruction.
In 1656, after his three years of mourning for his mother, Zhao returned to government service. He was appointed to Huguang District as Assistant Surveillance Commissioner and wrote another book. Entitled Record of The Vicissitudes of the Holy Scriptures it was an expanded account of the narrative on the stone tablet, telling the story of the destruction of the synagogue, the rescue of its scrolls and their restoration. He died a year later. He was 38.
Zhao’s brother Zhao Ying-du also wrote a book, an introduction to Judaism called Preface to the Illustrious Way. None of these books or Zhao’s drawings have survived; they have been lost like so much else. The only reason that some of the details of Zhao’s life are still known is because he had a successful career in national life. However, there is considerable interest in the history of China’s Jews these days. Scholars are scouring libraries for books that were presumed to be lost, researchers are looking for clues in the most obscure of places. It is just possible that some of Zhao’s writings or charts may one day come to light.
There are still a few Jews left in Kaifeng but they live under severe repression, a state of affairs that has reportedly become worse since Xi Jinping took over as China’s head of state. Yet, as we have seen with other countries, notably Soviet Russia, raising awareness in other countries is an essential first step in the liberation of an oppressed people. The same, one hopes, is happening with the Uyghurs. It is so easy for those of us in America and Europe not to have any idea of what it is like to live under a regime where we are not free.