The reason that scholars favor the overland route is because the Kaifeng liturgy is written in Judeo-Persian, Persian transliterated with Hebrew,[1] an offshoot of New Persian which developed on the trade routes of Central Asia during the 8th-century.[2] Another reason is that the Persian is a particular dialect associated with the Central Asian city of Bukhara, which lies along the northern Silk Road route.[3] However, it’s more likely that these documents made it to China after the Song Dynasty since a recent study found that they have linguistic similarities with Judeo-Persian texts from the 14th-century onward.[4]
These documents could have come overland during the following Yuan Dynasty. Liu Yingsheng explains: “The Mongols conquered Central Asia earlier than the Chinese Song (960-1279) Empire, and consequently large numbers of Muslim soldiers, officials, merchants, scholars, and slaves accompanied the Mongol troops when they entered China and most of them finally settled in China.”[5] Frederick Mote adds that these Semu (people of varied categories), the favored class of foreigners brought in to help administrate the country, included Uighurs, Turks, Arabs, Persians, and Europeans.[6] Jews certainly would have been among these people.[7] In addition, Persian was one of the official languages of the Yuan, as well as the lingua franca of diplomats, scientists, and the Hui (回) Muslim ethnicity.[8] Persian-speaking Jews would have flourished in this environment.
Given this information, it’s very possible that the Kaifeng Ancestors came during the Yuan. The Semu were given preferential treatment by the Mongol rulers and shared in the culpability of marginalizing the Chinese people. Zhu Jiang points out that broken Arab and Persian tombstones discovered in the foundations of an early Ming-era wall in Yangzhou show that there was anti-foreign sentiment after the fall of the Yuan.[9] The hatred for foreigners at this time was so extensive that the first Ming emperor issued a 1368 decree against the “killing, pillaging, destruction of buildings, or desecration of graves, of the vanquished.”[10] Therefore, the reason that the 1489 stone sites the Song Dynasty could be because the Jews wanted to predate their entry in order to deflect the anger of their Chinese neighbors. This might explain why the proceeding 1512 and 1663 stones date their entry further back in time to the Han and Zhou Dynasties, respectively. In essence, the predating was a protective maneuver; it was their way of claiming that they were just as Chinese (read: loyal to the Chinese empire) as their neighbors.
This might also explain certain discrepancies in the aforementioned stones. For instance, the 1489 inscription casts the Jews as being fully Sinicized with Chinese surnames upon their arrival during the Song. Past researchers have noted that the Jews most likely took surnames sometime during the Yuan-Ming period.[11] This could be an example of "telescopic history," in which the Kaifeng Jews mixed events from their past (taking surnames during the Yuan) and present (engraving the stone during the Ming) to create a sort of folk history (having Chinese surnames in the Song). Also, the same stone refers to Kaifeng as Bianliang (汴梁), which was the name of the city during the Yuan, not the Song.[12]
There may have been a Yuan-era inscription that predates the 1489 stone. This is because a law enacted by the Mongols dictated that all houses of worship had to erect a stone describing their religion. This stone could have been destroyed by the Chinese in the fray at the end of the Yuan dynasty. On the contrary, it could have been destroyed by the Kaifeng Jews to hide their association with the Mongols. Yin Gang believes that the latter scenario is the most likely. He writes:
The Han people resumed their regime with the establishment of the Ming 明 Dynasty. In case of their being brought to account by the Han people, both the Jewish and the Muslim community destroyed their biographical documents during the Yuan Dynasty, which is why we could not find any historical account written by either community. This was especially true for the Kaifeng Jews […] Among the documents destroyed, there must have been a brief history of each foreign community and the basic doctrine of their religious beliefs engraved on stone tablets, since the Yuan rulers asked them to do so and the stone tablets had to be placed at the entrance of all synagogues and mosques.[13]The purposeful destruction of material would explain why there is a conspicuous lack of information on the community during the Yuan Dynasty. This deserves more focused study in the near future.
Notes
[1] Donald Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews: The Jewish Community of Kaifeng (Tʻoung pao, 10. Leiden: Brill, 1972), 118-119
[2] Bo Utas, “Semitic in Iranian: Written, Read and Spoken Language,” in Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic, ed. Éva Ágnes Csató, Bo Isaksson, and Carina Jahani (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 72.
[3] Elkan N. Adler, Jews in Many Lands (London, 1905), 221.
[4] Fook-Kong Wong and Dalia Yasharpour, The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 59.
[5] Liu Yingsheng, “A Lingua Franca along the Silk Road: Persian Languages in China between the 14th and the 16th Centuries,” In Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea, ed. Ralph Kauz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 87.
[6] Frederick Wade Mote, Imperial China, 900-1800 (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University press, 1999), 490.
[7] George Hourani explains that the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate Dynasty of Baghdad called for “Muslim unity” between Persians and Arabs by requiring Iranian converts to speak Arabic. This caused 9th-century Arab records about Middle Eastern merchants traveling to the east to mention “Persians” less and “Arabs” more (George Fadlo Hourani and John Carswell, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 65). He explains, “Arabic-speaking Moslems of Iranian origin would naturally be classed as [Dashi 大食], Arabs” (Ibid, 62). The term Dashi may have also been used to designate speakers of Persian since it is originally a transliteration of the Persian word “Tāzīk” or “Tāžīk,” a term that distinguished Iranians from Turks (Ye Yiliang, “Introductory Essay: Outline of the Political Relations between Iran and China,” in Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea, ed. Ralph Kauz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 5.). Therefore, Jews speaking languages associated with Muslims may have led to the two being conflated by the Chinese. Yin Gang suggests that some of the Semu who graduated the Yuan imperial exams with the prestigious rank of Jinshi (进士) may have been Jews since they have surnames similar to those of the Kaifeng Jews (Yin Gang, “Between Disintegration and Expansion: A Comparative Retrospection of Kaifeng Jewish and Muslim Communities,” in Peter Kupfer, Youtai: Presence and Perception of Jews and Judaism in China, ed. Peter Kupfer (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), 192).
[8] Liu, “A Lingua Franca along the Silk Road,” 87-92.
[9] Zhu Jiang, “Jewish Traces in Yangzhou,” in Jews in Old China: Studies by Chinese Scholars, ed. Sidney Shapiro (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988), 146-147.
[10] Ibid, 146.
[11] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 27.
[12] William Charles White, Chinese Jews: A Complication of Matters Relating to the Jews of K’ai-Feng Fu, 2nd ed (New York: Paragon Book Reprint, 1966), vol. II, 21 n. 14.
[13] Yin, “Between Disintegration and Expansion,” 193.
Bibliography
Adler, Elkan N. Jews in Many Lands (London, 1905).
Hourani, George Fadlo, and John Carswell. Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Mote, Frederick Wade. Imperial China, 900-1800. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University press, 1999.
Leslie, Donald. The Survival of the Chinese Jews: The Jewish Community of Kaifeng. T’oung pao, 10. Leiden: Brill, 1972.
Liu, Yingsheng. “A Lingua Franca along the Silk Road: Persian Languages in China between the 14th and the 16th Centuries.” In Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea, ed. Ralph Kauz, 87-95. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010.
Utas, Bo. “Semitic in Iranian: Written, Read and Spoken Language.” In Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic, ed. Éva Ágnes Csató, Bo Isaksson, and Carina Jahani, 65-78. London: Routledge Curzon, 2005.
White, William Charles. Chinese Jews: A Complication of Matters Relating to the Jews of K’ai-Feng Fu, 2nd ed. New York: Paragon Book Reprint, 1966.
Wong, Fook-Kong, and Dalia Yasharpour. The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Ye, Yiliang. “Introductory Essay: Outline of the Political Relations between Iran and China.” In Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea, ed. Ralph Kauz, 3-6. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010.
Yin, Gang. “Between Disintegration and Expansion: A Comparative Retrospection of Kaifeng Jewish and Muslim Communities.” In Youtai: Presence and Perception of Jews and Judaism in China, ed. Peter Kupfer, 185-200. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008.
Zhu, Jiang. “Jewish Traces in Yangzhou.” In Jews in Old China: Studies by Chinese Scholars, ed. Sidney Shapiro, 143-158. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988.