Peony: A Novel of China

by Pearl S. Buck

  Once Jews and others outside of Kaifeng learned of their existence, attempts were made to send letters to the Jewish community, but only one was ever acknowledged—possibly the only one ever received. On August 20, 1850, Zhao Nianzi of Kaifeng wrote to T.H. Layton (in response to an 1847 letter by James Finn, a career diplomat and missionary, who was fluent in Hebrew and knowledgeable about Judaism). He described the dismal state of affairs in Kaifeng at that time, mentioning that since 1800-1810 the religion had been “imperfectly transmitted,” though religious writings were still extant. The synagogue, he mentioned, had long been without “ministers.” The structure of the synagogue itself was in ruins, and he mentioned those who were willing to mortgage or sell the synagogue and materials from the Gao, Shi and Zhao clans.

  Zhao’s letter was a cry for help from the Jews of the West, as their poverty and by now general ignorance of Hebrew and most of Judaism’s religious tenets had turned them into a desperately isolated community on the threshold of total assimilation into their Chinese surroundings.

  In 1860 another catastrophic flood from the Yellow River hit Kaifeng. Perhaps this marks the last time the synagogue was swept away—this time for good. For in 1866 the Reverend W.A.P. Martin visited Kaifeng, at which time he declared that the synagogue itself no longer even stood on the site at which it had been for the past seven centuries, and which, although in a dilapidated state, had been visible to the 1850 delegates.

  The plight of the Jews of Kaifeng by this time is poignantly conveyed by Martin when he related learning that after the last rabbi had died, the Jews still cared enough to leave a copy of their Torah in the marketplace in the hopes that a Jew from afar who might perchance be in Kaifeng would notice it and teach them once again its contents. All he reported standing at the time was a solitary stone.

  Western Jewish Contacts with Kaifeng

  The first Western Jew to visit Kaifeng did so for ten days in July of 1867. Jacob L. Liebermann, an Austrian Jewish merchant, went not on behalf of a religious organization, but of his own accord, and wrote a series of ten letters to his father. He described that while the Jews lamented their degree of assimilation, they also recounted stories of a brighter past.

  It was not until the turn of the century, however, that Jews, then living in Shanghai, made a concerted effort to establish close contact with the Chinese Jews in Kaifeng, attempting to help resuscitate the community. This was in response to their discovery that a year earlier, in 1899, the Jews sold the last remaining Torah scroll to the Apostolic vicar of the Henan Mission, a Monsignor Volonteri.

  Until the turn of the 20th century, relatively few Jews had heard of the Kaifeng community, and even fewer made the journey there, since they had not the financial backing afforded representatives of missionary groups.

  The successful Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews who had taken up residence in Shanghai during the 19th century, represented best by the Sassoons and the Kadoories, however, became alarmed when they learned of the sale of Torah scrolls and the generally decayed state of the Kaifeng Jewish community.

  Banding together, they formed the Shanghai Committee for the Rescue of the Chinese Jews in 1900, hoping to save the Kaifeng Jews from spiritual oblivion. Communication with Kaifeng thus took place, prompting several Kaifeng Jews to travel to Shanghai where they reported that they still observed some of the Jewish dietary laws, and that some were even circumcised, but that the community no longer consisted of practicing Jews. They expressed the fervent hope that their synagogue could be rebuilt with the help of Shanghai’s Jews, which might revive even a semblance of the sense of community that once united them.

  When pogroms and immigration of the Russian Jews began to occur soon after, however, attention and funds were diverted from the original intention of rebuilding a synagogue for the Kaifeng Jews. Almost all those who had come to Shanghai hoping to find some Western Jews who could help rebuild their community, returned to Kaifeng with their hopes dashed and their hearts heavy, realizing that the former grandeur of their synagogue and pride as a Jewish community were never again to be.

  Bishop White

  From 1910-1933 the Chinese Jews had in their midst the Canadian Church of England’s first Anglican Bishop of Henan Province. No other Westerner lived among the Chinese Jews as long as did Bishop William Charles White, whose magnum opus Chinese Jews was published in 1942. White succeeded in getting the heads of the seven clans agree to have his church take over protection of the two extant stone inscriptions in 1912. Two years prior to this, the Jews would not agree to give up legal title to the synagogue site. A year later, however, after a conflict over the possession of the steles with the local authorities, White was able to purchase the stones on the condition that they not leave the province. And in 1914 the site of the synagogue itself was sold by the Jews to the Mission, representing the first time in over seven centuries that someone other than the Chinese Jews owned the site.

  By now no more scrolls of the Law were left, and parts of the synagogue were already being used by others in Kaifeng. A Confucian temple had obtained one of the marble balustrades of the former synagogue for over fifty years; two stone lions were said to be outside one of the Buddhist temples, and even the green roof tiles were now part of the local mosque.

  In May of 1919, Bishop White held a series of meetings with the Chinese Jews to try to educate them and revive some kind of communal ties between them. Heads of all seven clans were present, and forty families out of the estimated 200 participated. They did not know one another, and only the Shi clan was reported to have kept family records.

  The many Chinese-Jewish artifacts which Bishop White purchased while in Kaifeng have since passed into the hands of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where they now remain. Among those bits of Chinese-Judaica in the Museum’s possession are a black marble chime used to call the Jews to prayer, two stone lotus-carved bowls and a large, cylindrical case for the Torah scroll.

  One of White’s main contributions while in Kaifeng was to attempt to revive the community by bringing together the seven major clans, documenting the occasion with photos and articles. However, nothing came of these meetings, as the Jews had by now lost all sense of community and all hopes of rebuilding their synagogue or re-learning Judaism, much less practicing it.

  As a community the Jews had by now come to an end, although a strong individual sense of ethnic identity has remained with them, even through the 20th century.

  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.

  In June of 1985, two months before my own solo journey to Kaifeng, the Sino-Judaic Institute was created in Palo Alto, California to promote scholarly research and exchange of information on the subject of the Chinese Jews around the world. In support of the creation of a Judaica Wing of the Kaifeng Municipal Museum, it publishes a newsletter to disseminate information, old and new, on the Chinese Jews, as well as accounts of recent visits to Kaifeng.

  Reminiscent of the Shanghai Committee for the Rescue of the Chinese Jews established at the turn of the century, it attempts to focus attention on this miniscule remnant of the Jewish diaspora so that their story may be made known, and efforts on behalf of the promotion of friendship and understanding between the Chinese and the Jews may succeed.

  As for Chinese interest in the subject, since 1988 the Shanghai Judaic Studies Association and the China Jewish Studies Association in Nanjing have been established. The latter organization is planning an exhibit of Chinese scholarship on Judaic studies, and the former is amassing a Judaica library to be shared with scholars and others interested throughout China, among other projects.

  Other indications that the Chinese are officially interested in fostering closer ties with Jews around the world is the fact that for the past four years a pilot Hebrew program has been conducted at Peking University for six undergraduate Chinese students. Other older scholars from various Chinese universities have also been to Israel from time to time. A tour of the exhibit on the Chinese Jews is being planned in China for the near future as well.

  Although the Chinese government has long sought to avoid mention of Israel between Jewish visitors and the descendants in Kaifeng, 1990 has seen the establishment of Academic Exchange offices between China and Israel in B
eijing and Tel Aviv. Just how long it will be before formal diplomatic relations are established between the two countries is impossible to predict, but the likelihood appears to be greater each year.

  Pearl S. Buck’s knowledge of the Chinese Jews can only be explained by a possible association with missionaries who were in Kaifeng while she was growing up in Nanjing at the turn of the century, or in her discovery of Bishop White’s Chinese Jews, published just six years before Peony was written. The details of daily life and customs prevalent among the Chinese Jews which were incorporated in the story of the Ezra family can only be described as uncanny. In writing Peony, Pearl S. Buck did much to foster greater cultural understanding between the Chinese and the Jews. And in republishing Peony at this particular point in Chinese-Jewish relations, one cannot help but imagine what the future holds in store for continued contact between the two oldest civilizations on earth.

  WENDY R. ABRAHAM, Ed.D., author of the Afterword for this edition, is a scholar of the history of the Jewish descendants of Kaifeng. Her dissertation at Teachers College, Columbia University was on the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng, 1605-1985.

  A frequent lecturer on the topic, she serves on the Board of the Sino-Judaic Institute, Palo Alto, CA., and is currently teaching Asian studies at NYU and the New School for Social Research in New York City. She has visited China six times since 1981, and in 1985 recorded oral histories of the oldest descendants of Chinese Jews in Kaifeng which she hopes to publish.

  Bibliography

  Abraham, Wendy R. “Kaifeng’s Legacy, Chinese Jewish Identity,” Hadassah Magazine, vol. 69 no. 1, August/September 1987, p.20-25. (Illus. with photos by the author).