Kaifeng Inscriptions Revisited

The Kaifeng Stones Revisited

Tiberiu Weisz

[Originally published in : The Covenant, Global Jewish Magazine 

Volume 1, Issue 3 (October 2007 / Cheshvan 5768)]

Abstract: Our knowledge of the Chinese Jews derives from two primary sources: one is the stone inscriptions, carved in grey limestone by the Jews and the other the eyewitness reports of missionaries, travelers and adventures who encountered Jews in Kaifeng in the 18th century and later. Scholars scrutinized both sources and reported many inconsistencies in the eyewitness reports. The inscriptions, however, were a source of puzzlement. The Chinese text posed particular challenges, and scholars had to rely on the translation of Bishop Charles White, a missionary who resided in China for forty years and had a good command of the Chinese language but little knowledge of Judaism. Weisz’s new annotated translation of the Chinese text identifies many biblical sources veiled in the intricacies of the Chinese language. This article is a summary of his findings.-ed.

What are the Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions and why are they important? Why the need for a new translation? And most important of all, is there anything that the inscriptions tell us about ancient Judaism that can serve as a lesson for today?  These are just some of the questions that any sophisticated reader today has on his mind when thinking of the ancient stone carvings that the Jews in China engraved over five hundred years ago. For one thing, after living in China for over fifteen hundred years devoid of any contact with other Jewish communities, the Chinese Jews felt that the community was on the verge of extinction. They were determined to record their existence in China and remind future generations that at one time some Jews played an important role in the Chinese society; some acquired an education and competed in the examination system to become scholars; others earned the highest academic degrees to become officials and gained respect in the society. There were also prominent shopkeepers, artisans, traders and military officers.

But acceptance in the Chinese society came at the expense of Judaism. Though the Chinese had never exerted any pressure on the Jews, or on any other minorities to convert, the social structure of the Chinese society put enormous demands on the Jews and required them to accept and act according to local customs. Jews had to adapt to the Confucian lifestyle that often seemed to overlap the Jewish customs. In addition, the rigid administrative system caused further erosion of Jewish lifestyle. To climb the administrative and social ladder, Jews needed to devote considerable time and effort to the study of the Chinese Classics. All this came at the expense of the study of the Torah. When the Jews felt that the end was near, they pooled their resources and inscribed their religious beliefs on a stele that was dated 1489. This was perhaps the most comprehensive and informative of the inscriptions, but to our disappointment it was long on rituals and short on historical details. This stele can be seen today encased in glass in the Kaifeng Museum of Jewish History. It is five feet tall, about thirty inches wide and about five inches thick and sits on a base that is about twenty inches high. Some of the characters are still decipherable; others are so faded that it is hard to read them. This inscription contains about 1800 characters. Its content is divided into three sections, the first tell us about the Chinese version of the biblical story of Abraham and how the religion was born. The second section tells us about the rituals and worship of the Chinese Jews at that time. The third segment recaps the imperial audience that was handed down in oral tradition. Each segment seems to be composed by someone knowledgeable in his field. On the back of this stele is another inscription dated 1512 comprising of over 1000 characters. This inscription was composed by a Jew or someone who knew about Judaism. He stated that Judaism would not exist without the Torah.  This inscription was perhaps the most puzzling to scholars as it appeared to contain no historical indicators and therefore was considered of very limited historical value. But from a Jewish perspective, it provided a wealth of information about the life of the Jews at the time and it constantly compared Judaism with Confucianism, perhaps the first ever attempt to compare the two cultures. 

The other stele dated 1663 on one side and has not been seen since its disappearance from the gate of the Anglican Church where it had been placed by Bishop White in 1912.  On the obverse side is engraved an incomplete text that appears to be the middle section of a text that largely pays tribute to the Jews who contributed to the restoration of the temple. This stele, according to White, is about two feet taller than the earlier stele. Fortunately, Bishop White made an ink rubbing that had been preserved and was reproduced in his book The Chinese Jews. Side one contains about 2200 characters written by a non- Jew who had Jewish friends or neighbors and made some very interesting observations about Jewish customs and rituals. It provided more historical details regarding the temple and the community in action. The composer also pointed out many similarities between Judaism and Confucianism.  The back side of this stele is an acknowledgment of those Jews who had contributed to the restoration of the synagogue and the community. Since the introduction and the ending are missing, we have no way of dating it so by default it was dated 1663b, though it is more likely that it was composed at a later period.

The Chinese Repository (July 1851) published a translation of the 1489 and 1512 inscriptions and Bishop Charles White improved it with his own translation in the 1940’s. In addition, he also annotated the text, identified some of the Chinese sources and expressed his surprise that the inscriptions contained no biblical references. That was, as far as I know, the last English translation of the stele and it became the accepted, if not the “official” guide to the inscriptions. Many scholars and researchers intrigued by the topic of the orphaned colony of the Chinese Jews published articles and books on the subject and they based their research on White’s translation. Then in 1972 Donald Leslie, an Australian scholar published a monograph The Survival of the Chinese Jews that was intended to be the ultimate resource book about the Jews in China. It dealt with the many facets of the Jewish presence in China, and it incorporated many new details derived from local gazetteers but as far as the inscriptions were concerned, the White’s translation was the standard. Leslie also agreed with White’s conclusion that “we hardly find passages from the Jewish Law translated into Chinese” (pg.102), and expressed his frustrations that the inscriptions lacked any solid historical landmarks. He attached little importance to 1663a inscription as most of the material seemed to be addressed in the 1489 stele. He also wondered why the 1512 inscription was written. I addressed these issues and reported my preliminary findings in two articles published in Points East (July 2003 and November 2003) a newsletter of the Sino-Judaic Institute. 

So why was there a need for a new translation? Differences of opinions would not justify such an endeavor, but when inaccuracies and mistranslation of characters went undetected for almost a century, that prompted me to take a closer look at the Chinese text. I came upon those errors while researching my book on a comparative study of Jewish and Chinese cultures. Detailed analysis of Chinese and Hebrew sources pointed to an indirect but unmistakable link between the land of Israel and China as early as the seventh century BCE. The Wisdom of Solomon (965- 926 BCE) had reached the ears of Laozi (604- 531 BCE) and the latter had incorporated several of Solomon’s sayings in his writings. (This material will be published in my forthcoming book The Covenant and the Mandate of Heaven). This prompted me to re-examine the stone inscriptions with a Jewish and Chinese historical context in mind. To my disappointment, neither Western nor Chinese literature published on the Chinese Jews correlated the inscriptions to any historical context, let alone in a Jewish context. I asked myself, why not?  The obvious reason could be that the original text did not contain history, and the uninterrupted and unpunctuated text left us a story that we did not understand. Some of the style was standard Chinese but some extended segments contained irregular grammatical structures that appeared completely meaningless and incomprehensible. Could it be that those segments held the key to the inscriptions? They puzzled researchers and they went unexplained until now.

To start with, I broke the Chinese text into individual phrases and sentences and set each phrase on a new line. The key was in the details and I kept an open mind to every possibility. The text contained many parallel structures and incomplete quotes that I found to be traceable. As I traced those quotes to their source, I started to get a picture that was very different from any previously translated texts. The 1489 inscriptions, for instance, revealed three different styles that I attributed to three different composers. I made a note of this in the introductory chapter on the “Testimony of the Inscriptions” (pg. xix) in my book The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions. Then the style of 1512 inscription reminded me of the writing of some Chinese neo-Confucians that depicted a tapestry of daily life in China.  But the real revelation came when I realized that the last segment of this inscription resembled a Hebrew prayer. This particular segment puzzled many scholars because it contained a peculiar structure that hardly related to anything. It portrayed a vision and by invoking the name of Heaven, I realized that it was a prayer. And indeed when I juxtaposed it with the Hebrew prayer book, I realized that it was the Chinese version of the Amida, a prayer that the Chinese Jews had memorized, and as time passed, they composed their own version. Nevertheless it was the Eighteen Benedictions. This information also shed some light on the antiquity of the Jews in China: the text emulated a pre-Jabneh version that was composed in exile by members of the Great Assembly (Knesseth Hagadol c.a. 500-300 BCE). It did not include the birkat haminim (benediction against the heretics) or the nineteenth benedictions which was added later in the first century CE. I also realized that the English language compounded the problem. The Chinese Jews did not know English or any other Western languages, and they handed down the prayer through oral tradition in the original Hebrew. As time passed they remembered less of the Hebrew but still remembered the spirit of the Amida and composed a Chinese version. The Chinese Jews added the text of the prayers to remind future generation of their tradition.

The 1663a inscription confirmed my findings. It was composed by a non-Jew who described either what he had seen or what he had been told by his Jewish neighbors. Like the previous inscriptions, the 1663a stele described the rituals but unlike the other stele, it did not repeat the actual words of the prayers. The reason: the composer was a bystander who neither knew the prayers nor understood them. He jotted down his observation and noted that the Jews prayed three times a day and that was “when man was to see Heaven”. What he added after this observation was interesting. He recapped what he had heard the Jews say or chant at the conclusion of the ceremonies and when I juxtaposed this with the Hebrew text, I realized that it was the pronouncement of the birkat hacohanim (Lord’s Blessing). That custom was prevalent during the Temple periods when the cohen hagadol (high priest) performed the sacrificial rites and then he came down from the altar and raising his hands over the whole assembly of Israel, he pronounced the Lord’s blessing or the birkat hacohanim (Numbers 6:24-26). Though the words in the inscriptions were Confucian in nature, the structure and the intent coincided with the biblical Hebrew version. Another interesting aspect of this inscription was the composer’s descriptions of some of the practices of the Jews that corresponded to similar practices in China. He often quoted from Chinese literature to show that the Jews practiced something that was not too different from the Chinese. Inadvertently, he created the first comparative study of Judaism and China. 

Long on rites and prayers and short on history, the inscriptions seemed to be of little historical significance. None of them elaborated on the past or on how and when the Jews settled in China. The little they did say about their past was hard to corroborate and their origin was shrouded in mystery. Even more puzzling was the fact that they mentioned an audience with a Song emperor (960- 1279) without further explanation. This sentence became critical in recreating the history of the community, and unfortunately, a mistranslation diverted the attention of scholars who then built on the incorrect translation. Once I corrected the translation, the text displayed evidence of the roots of the community that could be traced to antiquity and their history could be corroborated by both biblical and Chinese sources. After captivity and exile, a group of Levites and Cohanim (priests) left Babylon and wandered east, first headed towards India where they stayed for several generations. Several generation later, the descendants continued their journey northwards where they came across a place that answered a biblical description. (Psalms 104:8-10). Being devout believers, they saw a biblical prophecy come true. They settled there and lived in isolation for several more generations until they were accidentally discovered by a Chinese military expedition in 108 BCE. They would have stayed anonymous had not the Chinese general left us a sentence describing their appearance as strange. That description was deemed insignificant in the massive amount of Chinese annals and very few scholars paid any attention to it. But from a biblical point of view that description depicted the features of observant Jews who lived by the precepts of the Torah. When the Chinese army withdrew from the Western Regions, they encouraged the more domesticated tribes to come and live under the protection of the Chinese administration. For the Chinese this was a policy of pacification, the tribes would serve as a buffer zone between them and the Huns, and at the same time they would be exposed to the Chinese culture. This was the first step of sinicization.  Many, if not most of the domesticated tribes preferred the protection of the Chinese to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the Tatars. They migrated and settled in the area of Gansu Province of today. At the beginning of the second century CE, when the Han Dynasty (206 BCE- 220 CE) started to disintegrate, the Chinese abandoned the Western Regions and the settlers followed their journey unobstructed into the heartland of China.  Thus the descendents of the isolated Jewish community, who left Babylon several centuries earlier and established a settlement at the outskirts of the Western Regions, found itself migrating again, this time into China proper. Based on the reading of the inscriptions, part of the community remained in the Gansu area while others dispersed to other regions. With the rising anti Buddhist sentiments in the Tang Dynasty (609- 960 CE), the Jews joined the mass exodus of religions out of China and went back to the Western Regions. Then, at the invitation of Emperor Taizong (976- 998), the second Song emperor, the Jews returned to China and were bestowed land to build their place of worship. They remained in obscurity until 1605 when Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary, reported an encounter with a Chinese Jew in Beijing. Later missionaries also confirmed the existence of the community, but the strongest evidence of the legacy of the Jews in China was contained in the stone inscriptions.

Three of the four inscriptions were dedicated to the rebuilding of the temple. The community went to extraordinary lengths to preserve and restore the temple and one may wonder what was so important about the temple to deserve such dedication? Reading the existing literature, the impression is that it was an ordinary synagogue; it functioned as a place of worship and community center. But when the text was juxtaposed with biblical history, it revealed that the temple played a far more important role. The Jews in China continued the biblical tradition that accorded the servicing of the temple to the Levites and cohanim (priests) who performed the rituals that were associated with the First Temple (960- 586 BCE). The temple became the focal point of the community. Besides being used as a place of worship and sacrifice, it was also a source of pride that provided the Jews a sense of belonging, and they attributed their long survival to the Temple. In the absence of the temple, the function of the cohanim would have ceased to exist and the community would have vanished without a trace. In addition, the temple work (avodat kodesh) supplemented the income of the cohanim who received a salary from local sources and from teaching. Each time the temple was destroyed, the cohanim lost this source of income and they could barely provide the necessary services to keep the community together. After each disaster, the community lost members and some of them dispersed never to return.  To rectify this situation, the entire Jewish community in China contributed resources to rebuild the temple. Some contributed their salary; others contributed labor while the cohanim contributed their skill to restore the scriptures.

 

Each time the temple was rebuilt it was in Kaifeng, even though that city ceased to be the seat of the Chinese emperor after 1126 CE.  The Chinese court relocated to Hangzhou to establish the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), and Kaifeng became the abandoned capital. Yet the Chinese Jews built and rebuilt the Temple in Kaifeng. Why?  From a Jewish perspective, the events that led to the destruction and the fall of Kaifeng and the subsequent fall of the dynasty in 1126 CE, was reminiscent to the Jewish experience in antiquity. The First Temple that was built by King Solomon in c.a. 960 BCE was looted and destroyed along with the sacred city (Jerusalem) in 586 BCE. That also brought an end to the Kingdom of Israel and the Ten Tribes were led into exile. Seventy years later, Ezra, the last prophet that the Chinese Jews mentioned, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem and asked the exiles to return. These events were ingrained in the mind of the Chinese Jews, and they sensed that the conditions in China at the time (circa between 1100 – 1163 CE) were a prophecy come true. They mirrored the events that led to the exile of their distant ancestors in the Land of Canaan. Kaifeng suffered the same fate as Jerusalem, it was destroyed the course of conquest, the Chinese emperor was driven into exile and the dynasty fell into the hands of the Jurchen “barbarians” to establish the Qin Dynasty. The Temple in Kaifeng became the symbol of Jewish persistence in China, and it directly epitomized their fate and indirectly the fate of the sacred city (Jerusalem). Equipped with the biblical blueprint of the temple envisioned in Ezekiel, it was completed in 1163 and was modeled to be as imposing as the Beth Hamikdash (Temple).  

In light of the new translation and readings of the inscriptions it is evident that the orphaned colony was Jewish in origin with roots that went back to the exile period. Does that mean that the Jews in Kaifeng today and their offspring are Jewish? Efforts were made by some Jewish organizations to recognize them as Jews but most of the Jewish authorities refused to recognize them as such. Their objection is based on the hallacha (law) that says that every male Jew must be circumcised on the eight day after birth (or after conversion), and follow the dietary laws of the Torah. A further obstacle was imposed by the “Who is a Jew” clause that stated that a Jew is a Jew only if born to a Jewish woman. Since none of these conditions prevailed, they are not Jews. The former commandment was biblical in nature while the latter one was hallachic, meaning that it originated in the Oral Law. Since they could not perform circumcision safely, they had to abandon that practice. The 1512 inscription indicated that the Jews in China made every effort to follow the biblical commandment of the dietary laws. And since marrying a foreign woman was not a biblical precept, the Chinese Jews continued the tradition that was widely practiced in exile. They followed a tradition that was pre-rabbinic, and they had never heard of any development in Judaism that was post-exilic. The hallacha started to develop after Ezra returned to Jerusalem and did not become the Oral Law until several centuries later, by which time the Chinese Jews had already been isolated for generations. They had never heard of Mishna, Midrash, Talmud etc., these terms were unfamiliar to them. They were unaware of the split between Judaism and Christianity and they still called themselves Israelites.  In a sense we have a pure sect of observant Jews that lived according to the precepts of the Torah and not the oral tradition.  Circumstances forced them to adapt to the environment, and to maintain their beliefs, they formulated their own hallacha that incorporated many of the local customs. They did the same thing that our sages did in Jerusalem and Babylon; they developed a set of rules that accorded with the local conditions without compromising the sanctity of the Torah. They followed their own hallacha for over 1500 year in isolation and even as late as the 18^th century, when the missionaries encountered the Jews of Kaifeng, the Jews still lived by the same precepts. They never abandoned the ways of the Torah and never ceased to believe in Elohim; they built and rebuilt the temple, the symbol of their existence and they left the stone inscriptions so that future generations know how to be a Jew in the sea of Chinese culture.

Tiberiu Weisz, is the author of The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions: The Legacy of the Jewish Community in Ancient China.