Legends of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng

Legends of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng
Author: Xin Xu
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1995
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780881255287

Even today there are people in Kaifeng who remain aware of their ancestry and register as Jews on official census forms.

Jews in China

Jews in China
Author: Irene Eber
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2019-10-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0271085851

Irene Eber was one of the foremost authorities on Jews in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a field that, in contrast to the study of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and the Americas, has been critically neglected. This volume gathers fourteen of Eber’s most salient articles and essays on the exchanges between Jewish and Chinese cultures, making available to students, scholars, and general readers a representative sample of the range and depth of her important work in the field of Jews in China. Jews in China delineates the centuries-long, reciprocal dialogue between Jews, Jewish culture, and China, all under the overarching theme of cultural translation. The first section of the book sets forth a sweeping overview of the history of Jews in China, beginning in the twelfth century and concluding with a detailed assessment of the two crucial years leading up to the Second World War. The second section examines the translation of Chinese classics into Hebrew and the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Chinese. The third and final section turns to modern literature, bringing together eight essays that underscore the cultural reciprocity that takes place through acts of translation. The centuries-long relationship between Judaism and China is often overlooked in the light of the extensive discourse surrounding European and American Judaism. With this volume, Eber reminds us that we have much to learn from the intersections between Jewish identity and Chinese culture.

The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng

The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng
Author: Anson H. Laytner
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498550274

This scholarly collection examines the origins, history, and contemporary nature of Chinese Judaism in the community of Kaifeng. These essays, written by a diverse, international team of contributors, explore the culture and history of this thousand-year-old Jewish community, whose synthesis of Chinese and Jewish cultures helped guarantee its survival. Part I of this study analyzes the origin and historical development of the Kaifeng community, as well as the unique cultural synthesis it engendered. Part II explores the contemporary nature of this Chinese Jewish community, particularly examining the community’s relationship to Jewish organizations outside of China, the impact of Western Jewish contact, and the tenuous nature of Jewish identity in Kaifeng.

Chinese Perceptions of the Jews' and Judaism

Chinese Perceptions of the Jews' and Judaism
Author: Zhou Xun
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136835091

While prejudice against Jews is a real and ongoing category in Western culture, little attention has been paid to the myths of the Jews' and their impact in countries outside the West. This work draws on a wide variety of source materials from the past two centuries to examine the images of the Jews' as constructed in China. However, the interest here does not lie in the determination of the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it lies in the implications associated with the Jew' as an other', which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the self' amongst various social groups in modern China. Although it has been noted by a few scholars that the use of the Jews' as a category was important to many thinkers of modern China in the construction of their nationalistic and socio- political ideologies, this is the first systematic study in the field to be published. This book is also more than a historical book on China in that it opens a new arena for modern Jewish studies from a unique angle.

The Last Kings of Shanghai

The Last Kings of Shanghai
Author: Jonathan Kaufman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0735224439

"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

Chinese and Jews

Chinese and Jews
Author: Irene Eber
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN:

A collection of essays translated from the English, some of them published previously. Pp. 62-91, "Ha-ya'ad Shanghai: Heterei kenissah ve-asherot ma'avar, 1938-1941" ("Destination Shanghai: Entry Permits and Transit Certificates, 1939-1941"), discuss the immigration of European Jews to Shanghai during the Holocaust. After the "Kristallnacht" pogrom thousands of Jews were forced by the Nazis to leave Germany and Austria; since most countries would not accept them, many fled to Shanghai. The port and a part of the city were officially extra-territorial, and there was no passport inspection. In August 1939 both the Japanese authorities and the Shanghai Municipal Council, fearing a huge influx of poverty-stricken refugees, restricted immigration; however, the restrictions varied, and many Jews managed to obtain permits. In July 1940 there were further restrictions, but by then it had become more difficult to leave Europe in any case.

The Jews of China: Historical and comparative perspectives

The Jews of China: Historical and comparative perspectives
Author: Jonathan Goldstein
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780765601032

An impressive interdisciplinary effort by Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Western Sinologists and Judaic Studies specialists, these books scrutinize patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation, and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately A.D.1100 to 1949.

Essential Outsiders

Essential Outsiders
Author: Daniel Chirot
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780295976136

Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential “outsiders.” In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination, even when they are formally integrated into the nation.

The Jewish-Chinese Nexus

The Jewish-Chinese Nexus
Author: M. Avrum Ehrlich
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2008-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134105533

This book is concerned with the areas where Jews and Chinese, Judaism and Chinese religions and ideologies are converging or inter relate to each other. It includes chapters on Confuciansim, the Kaifeng Jewish Descendants, business and Chinese/Israeli relations.