The Jews of Kaifeng China

The city of Kaifeng, located southeast of Beijing on the banks of the Yellow River, hosts approximately 500 people today who appear to be of Jewish descent.

A stone monument in Kaifeng suggests that Jews lived in the city since at least 231 BCE. Others believe the community was started in the tenth century when a Sung Dynasty emperor invited a group of Jews from Central Asia to settle and manufacture cotton fabrics in Kaifeng.

The Kaifeng Jewish community built a synagogue in 1163, and flourished into the seventeenth century. While the community remained identifiably Jewish until the mid-19th century, it then withered away. The synagogue was destroyed by floods. Wars, poverty and isolation led to assimilation.

In Kaifeng today, there are virtually no remnants of the community. Another building now stands where the synagogue once stood. In Britain and the United States, however, substantial records and artifacts of the community have been compiled since the Kaifeng Jewish community was discovered by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century.

Due to intermarriage with local Chinese, Kaifeng Jews are indistinguishable in appearance from their non-Jewish neighbors. Some of the assimilated Jews of Kaifeng still avoid eating pork, however, which does set them apart in China. Other than this practice, it is hard to identify the Chinese of Jewish descent in Kaifeng today as Jews.

While most descendants of Kaifeng's Jewish community are only vaguely aware of their ancestry, some do claim that their parents and grandparents told them that they were Jewish. New contact with Western Jewry today is spurring on a revival of local interest in their Jewish heritage. It is expected that some descendants of Kaifeng's Jewish community will become Jewish, actually undergoing conversion, in the years to come.