Villager features: Tiberiu Weisz, author

Author helps uncover 1,000-year history of Jew in China

By Dave Page
(Reprinted from Villager, January 31, 2018)

When Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylonia in 538 B.C., he gave the enslaved Israelites permission to return to their homeland. The prophet Ezra led many Jews back to Palestine, but others were reluctant to give up their Gentile wives and instead traveled eastward with their families.
These “priests, nobles and Levites” many have ended up in India, according to Tiberiu Weisz, author of the newly published A History of the Kaifeng Israelites and a resident of Minneapolis’ Hiawatha neighborhood. Over the centuries, these Jews continued moving through Central Asia, perhaps working as horse traders on the western end of what is now known as the Silk Road, Weisz said. They eventually settled in Kaifeng, a Chinese city south of Beijing, at the invitation of Emperor Taizong (976-998).
Weisz has spent much of the past 15 years unraveling the back story of the Kaifeng Israelites, and he maintains that at least a handful of their descendants are still living in China and practicing a form of Judaism.
Weisz, who is Jewish, was born in 1950 in Romania and immigrated with his family to Israel in 1964. He graduated from high school in Israel and served in the military before moving to Ohio in 1974 to pursue a degree in Asian Studies at Oberlin College. After receiving his B.A. he earned a graduate degree at the University of Minnesota.
With and advanced degree in Asian Studies, Weisz found jobs translating contracts for American companies doing business in China. At a symposium for translators, a Japanese scholar noted how Westerners thought they could understand Chinese after studying for 100 years. “The Japanese have been studying Chinese for 1,000 years’, the scholar said, and still don’t understand it.” Weisz recalled.
The problem is that Chinese, like English language, has changed over the centuries. The same symbol can mean different things in different regions in China. Their meaning may also change depending on the character’s placement in a text. “So you have to know when, where and what context something in Chinese was written to truly begin to decipher its meaning,” Weisz said.
Weisz and some colleagues applied these lessons to their translation of the Kaifeng stelae, three ancient stone tablets that are each about the size of a desk and tell the story of what brought the Israelites to Kaifeng.
Modern scholars have relied on translations of the stelae by early 20th century Christian scholars. These scholars did not have a firm understanding of both Jewish and Chinese cultures, Weisz said, and there were bound to be errors in their interpretations. He thought he could do better.
The oldest of the stelae was carved in 1489 long after the Venetian explorer Marco Polo reported meeting Jews in the 13th century Beijing and well before the reports of Chinese Jews by early 17th century Jesuit missionaries.
Although the Kaifeng Israelites were Jewish by blood and religious practices, they were not recognized as such by Jewish authorities, according to Weisz. Jewish scribes around the 2nd century AD had affirmed that Judaism was matriarchal in descent, and the Kaifeng Israelites were descended from Jewish husbands and non-Jewish wives.
In the 12th century, these Israelites built a temple in Kaifeng that stood close to 700 years, until its destruction around the time of the American Civil War. Those who remained eventually sold off the temple land and the Torah scrolls and all but disappeared, according to Weisz. However, an Anglican bishop by name of Charles White recovered the stelae and incorporated the stone carvings into the cathedral he built in Kaifeng in the early 20th century. Today, the stelae are located in the Kaifeng Jewish Museum.
Weisz’s latest book is the third that he has written on the Kaifeng Israelites. Although it is not focused on the translation of the stelae, A History of the Kaifeng Israelites include illustrations of the tablets’ various interpretations by Weisz and White. The book also describes the ancient Chinese texts that appear to corroborate portions of the stelae or to shed light on incidents described in the stelae.
After 1,000 years of dispersal and assimilation into the Chinese culture, descendants of the Kaifeng Israelites “keep on resurfacing in unusual manners and places,” Weisz said.
At the end of the book, he includes an interview from the late 1990s with a woman called “L” who claimed to be descended from one of the original eight Jewish families in Kaifeng. The woman is quoted as saying her family “had a special Jewish sign that we touched when we entered or left the house.” L’s family also observed the Jewish Sabbath on Friday, according to Weisz, and they read a Chinese version of the traditional Jewish prayers.
The determination of the Kaifeng Israelites to maintain their religion after all those years is a lesson for everyone, according to Weisz.
“Mass extermination, genocide, holocaust and other means of eradicating minorities only strengthens their determination to fight for their beliefs and faith,” he said.