Thursday, May 24, 2012

Why They Came to China - Part II

Proponents of the Song entry theory often cite a passage from the 1489 inscription which reads: “Bringing tribute of Western cloth [西洋布], they entered (the court of) Song, and the Emperor said: ‘You have come to our China; reverence and preserve the customs of your ancestors, and hand them down at Bianliang (Kaifeng).’”[1] Considering all three of the inscriptions mention Judaism coming from India, many have taken the “western cloth” to have been Indian cotton. As late as 1850, the Jews themselves told Protestant missionaries that their ancestors had come bearing “five kinds of variegated cotton, and foreign cloth of five different colors, as tribute to the Emperor.”[2] Writing in 1930, Berthold Laufer stated: “The gift of cotton goods points directly to India, as the cotton plant was not yet cultivated in China under the Sung…It thus stands to reason that it was the cotton trade in the interest of which the Jews came to China.”[3] Irene Eber’s more recent findings agree with this assessment.[4] However, the notion that cotton was not cultivated in China prior to the Song has no basis. Although it did originate in India and remained rare until the 12th century, there is a documented 2,200 years of cotton cultivation in China.[5] In fact, the explorer Zhang Qian mentioned seeing Chinese cotton textiles from Sichuan being sold in Bactria during his travels through Central Asia during the 2nd century BCE.[6] The tribute of cotton could have come from other places besides India. The Song-era port official Zhao Rugua (趙汝适, 1170-1228) referred to four grades of cotton textiles in his book Record of Foreign Peoples (諸蕃誌). The second grade was known ambiguously as “Foreign cloth” (蕃布).[7] Friedrich Hirth comments Song China received raw and processed cotton from Hainan Island, Vietnam, Java, Borneo, India, Persia, the Philippines, and Asia minor.[8] Once more, cotton was probably only one of many items the Jews dealt in. S.D. Goitein explains Jewish merchants active “in faraway countries had to be flexible and have the ability to deal with a great variety of products.”[9] As will be seen, Jewish merchants active in China dealt in everything from sheep to sugar.

Apart from the stone inscriptions, native and foreign records from the Tang to Yuan dynasties attest to the fact that the Jewish presence in China comprised merchants. Sir Aurel Stein discovered a Judeo-Persian business letter while excavating a site in Dandān-Uliq near Khotan in Xinjiang Province in 1901.[10] David S. Margoliouth originally dated the letter to 718 based on a preliminary translation,[11] but it has since then been dated to the year 760.[12] It was written during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) by a Jew upset with a business partner in Persia because he had to sell an inferior flock of sheep. The letter suggests that the Jew also sold textiles and slaves.[13] It is important to note that the letter was written on paper, which was only used in China at that time.[14] According to the 10th century Persian historian Abu Zaid Hassan al-Sirafi, the Chinese rebel Huang Chao (黄巣) attacked Guangzhou sometime between 877 and 878 and “killed 120,000 [Muslims], Jews, Christians, and Magians, who [had become] merchants in [the city], apart from those killed among the Chinese inhabitants.”[15] It is claimed that the number slain among the “four sects” was derived from tax records.[16] There is no way to tell just how many Jews there were among those killed, but the fact that they were included within the report points to a sizable Jewish merchant community. The 9th century Persian geographer Ibn Khurdādhbih wrote about the multilingual Jewish Radanite merchants who traveled from Europe to China via sea and land during this time. These Jews “transport[ed] from the west eunuchs, female and male slaves, silk, castor, marten and other furs, and swords.”[17] They then sold the eastern goods they acquired, such as musk and cinnamon, upon reaching the west.[18]




The Judeo-Persian business letter found in Dandan-Uliq near Khotan in Xinjiang province,
China, 760 CE. It is the oldest known example of New Persian in the world.

During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907-960), the Persian Shipmaster Buzurg Ibn Shahriyār published a collection of “sailor’s tales” called Kitāb 'Aja'ib al-Hind (The Book of the Wonders of India, 953).[19] One story tells of how Iṣḥāq Ibn al-yahūdī (Isaac, son of the Jew) fled from Oman to India to avoid repaying a debt. He later returned to Oman in 300 AH (913/14 CE) with a boat full of Chinese treasure.[20] During his thirty years abroad, he had gone to China and spoken with an unnamed emperor in a town or province known as Lūbīn. The monarch bestowed upon him great riches for giving his queen the gift of a large pearl.[21] Although many of the stories appearing in the book are fanciful, scholars tend to accept Iṣḥāq’s tale as being at least partly true. Donald Leslie believes the location of Lūbīn was Hanoi in Vietnam, which was the southernmost port of the Chinese empire at the time.[22] Mordecai A. Freidman suggests Arabic-speaking Jews were considered Arabs by the Chinese because the emperor referred to Iṣḥāq as such.[23]

Oddly enough, there are no known mentions of Jews in Song Dynasty (960-1279) records. However, in light of the great many references to Muslim merchants in Song China,[24] there is no doubt that Jews were active among them. It is also important to note that the famous Cairo Geniza, a vast collection of religious and secular documents discovered in the storehouse (geniza) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat, Egypt, doesn’t contain any letters referring to Jews traveling to China during this time either.[25] This is surprising because 459 of these letters, ranging from the years 1080-1240,[26] deal exclusively with Jews sailing to India to purchase all sorts of items, including tableware and medicinal aromatic woods imported from China.[27] It seems only natural that the more adventurous individuals among them would have gone onto China. Roxani Eleni Margariti believes this “suggests that the routes between India and China…constituted discreet segments of the maritime Indian Ocean world and that they lay largely outside the shipping reach of those traders who letters ended up in the Cairo Geniza.”[28] “India Traders,” as they were called, often gifted Chinese porcelain to important figures. Though it remained rare among the masses, Chinese porcelain was in common use enough for some Jews to question its religious purity.[29] Goitein explains most of the Chinese porcelain prized by Islamic dynasties in the Middle East and Egypt from the 9th to 10th centuries was brought in via a land route. But from the 11th to 12th centuries, there is evidence that it was being brought in by sea.[30] Rich Muslims participating in far eastern trade are alluded to throughout the specific Geniza letters. For instance, around the 1130s, the Muslim Rāmisht sent an agent to Canton who returned with a boat full of goods worth 500,000 dinars.[31] It’s possible then that Muslims pushed the less wealthy Jewish merchants out of the sea trade in China. This is exactly what happened to their counterparts in India during the 13th century.[32] This might have forced them to resort to overland trade, putting them outside the range for their letters to have made it back to the Geniza in Fustat. As for the lack of references to Jews in Song records, they might have simply been confused with Muslims. 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.[33] This means there was an influx of different foreign people speaking Arabic in eastern lands. Any people speaking the language of Islam in China from that time forward, even Jews, were then no doubt confused as Muslims. A common Chinese name for Jews during the proceeding dynasties was Hui-hui (回回), which was also applied to Muslims.[34] Friedman’s suggestion from above also lends support to this idea.[35]

All of these historical references to Jewish merchants active in India during the Song would appear to contradict what I stated earlier about Tianzhu (See part I). It doesn’t’ because the Jewish India Traders primarily came from Egypt and the Mediterranean. The activities of merchants from Iraq and beyond were not subject to the Geniza.[36] An analysis of the Kaifeng Jews’ own language puts them within the Geniza’s blind spot. This will be explained below.

The Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) has the greatest amount of open references to Jews in native dynastic records. Two of them deal with the prohibition of religious practices. This shows that, by the 13th century, the Chinese and Mongols had become well acquainted with the rituals of the long established foreign communities. The earliest reference comes in the form of a January 27, 1280 proclamation forbidding Muslims and Jews from the ritual slaughter of food animals.[37] This was enacted by Khubilai Khan because a Central Asian tributary mission had refused to eat banquet food since it had not been prepared in the traditional Muslim manner.[38] There are two other decrees along religious lines: the first requires taxes from Muslims, Jews, Nestorian Christians, and Danishmand “except those in actual charge of temples and services” (1320), and the second forbids levirate marriage (1340).[39] As for merchants, one 14th century book refers to the time during 1277-1294 when “the officials in the Hangzhou sugar board were all rich Jewish and Muslim merchants.”[40] The government issued punishment because they had “missus[ed] their positions and [gave] false weights.”[41] An April 10, 1329 edict reads: “Buddhist and Taoist priests, Nestorians, Jews and Danishmand, who engage in trade, [are] to be taxed according to the old regulation.”[42] One ambiguous entry dated May-June 1354 states: “The skilled archers of Ningxia and the wealthy Muslims and Jews from various places were summoned to the capital to volunteer for military service.”[43] Although it does not mention the Jews being merchants, I think there is a high probability that they were considering that is how they most likely made their wealth. Jews are known to have eventually become rich Confucian literati, but there is no concrete evidence for this anytime prior to the 15th century.[44]

Missionaries and western scholars from the 17th to the 20th centuries visited the community and slowly acquired copies of the Jews’ liturgical texts. Many of the documents—Torah, Haggadah, and prayer books, etc.—are written in an ancient language known as Judeo-Persian (Persian transliterated with the Hebrew alphabet).[45] Judeo-Persian was an off shoot of New Persian, which developed along the trading routes of Central Asia during the 8th century.[46] Leslie comments: “New Persian was the lingua franca [a universal language] of most of the foreign traders in India and the Chinese coast for several hundreds of years.”[47] The aforementioned Judeo-Persian business letter written in the Tang Dynasty is considered to be the oldest extant example of New Persian in the world.[48] Evidence of Persian is also found in the inscriptions. The 1489 stone refers to the Jews’ religious leader as the Wusida (五思達), a possible transliteration of the Persian word Ustad, meaning “teacher.”[49] So, Jewish merchants traveling to and within China used Persian to communicate with their business partners and other foreign merchants. (This means that there were still many foreigners speaking Persian in China despite the aforementioned Abbasid Caliphate call to speak Arabic. And not all Jews who came to China arrived from Arabic-speaking lands, as evidenced by the Judeo-Persian letter. The Persian-speaking Jews were still probably confused as Muslims since the Chinese had come to associate Persian and Arabic with Islam.) Once they officially settled in China during the Song Dynasty, the Kaifeng Jews continued to use Persian in their daily and liturgical lives since it was no doubt the language of their original homeland. European Jesuits who visited the community as late as the 18th century recorded in their travel logs that the Jews were still able to communicate in broken Persian.[50] And considering their language, some of these Jesuits suggested the term Tianzhu Xiyu (天竺西域) from the 1512 inscription refers to Persia.[51]



Moses ben Maimon, a.k.a. Maimonides (1135-1204)

The contents of the Jews’ liturgical texts even have ties with merchants active during the Song Dynasty. Researchers have noted that they contain vast similarities to the rituals of Yemen and those appearing in Maimonides’ (1138-1204) Mishneh Torah.[52] Yemen, particularly its city of Aden, was a major hub for the merchants involved in the India Trade.[53] Maimonides was a noted Andalusian Rabbi and polymath who compiled the Mishneh Torah, a codification of Jewish Law, in Egypt between 1168 and 1177.[54] Apart from his vocation as a physician, Maimonides and his brother David were merchants dealing in precious stones and medicine.[55] His son even married into a famous India Trading family.[56] Maimonides later commented in a letter to the Rabbis of Lunel, France that his Mishneh Torah had been disseminated all over the Jewish world. He wrote: "Only lately some well-to-do men came forward and purchased three copies of my code which they distributed through messengers...Thus the horizon of these Jews was widened and the religious life in all communities as far as India revived."[57] Leslie suggests there could have been a Persian ritual based on Maimonides’ work.[58] Therefore, it could have spread into Central Asia from India, beyond the periphery of the Geniza, and influenced the religious texts and rituals of the Jews in that area.[59] Then these texts could have spread into China via merchants in much the same way as Buddhism.[60] Support for the transmission of Jewish texts along the Silk Road to China comes from a textual analysis of the Kaifeng liturgy. Elkan Nathan Adler found that the Persian rubrics were of the “Bokharian dialect.”[61] Bukhara lies along the northern Silk Road route.[62]

In conclusion, the two main theories on why the Jews came to China are that they arrived as religious refugees during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), or as merchants during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE). The Han entry theory is based on the 1512 inscription which states that the Jewish religion came to China during the Han. Based on oral legends related to them by the Jews, 18th and 19th century Jesuit missionaries suggested arrival times coinciding with the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and even as early as the birth of Christ. Later scholars used this as a foundation to push the time back to the earliest years of the Han. However, due to the fact that the Jews set their arrival date further and further back into history with each proceeding inscription (1489, Song; 1512, Han; and 1663A, Zhou), the Han is an embellishment added to make it seem like they settled in China centuries before they actually did. There is also a chance that it is related to the Jews’ apologetic appeal to the three main religions of China. All three stones mention Judaism hailing from India. Tying Judaism to Buddhism through India would imply both entered China at the same time, the Han. Chen Yuan did not accept the theory because Chinese records over the course of 1,000 years—from the Han to the Song—do not mention Jews or any structures built by them. Modern researchers, such as Tiberius Weisz, have searched for supporting evidence in the inscriptions themselves. Weisz tried to connect the Kaifeng Jews to those who survived the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in the 5th century BCE via passages about biblical elders and religious practices in the 1512 and 1663A stone inscriptions. He also tried to connect them to Semitic-looking people mentioned in Han-era Chinese records. But I have shown all of these were either based on conjecture, mistranslation, or the act of purposely misquoting a source. The Song entry theory, on the other hand, has support from a wide array of sources. The 1489 inscription mentions the Jews bringing a tribute of “western cloth,” probably some kind of cotton fabric, to the Song court. Chinese and Persian records from the Tang to the Yuan dynasties attest to the fact that the Jewish presence in China comprised merchants. The records also explain that these Jews traded in everything from sheep to sugar. This suggests that the Kaifeng Jews were most likely merchants and the cotton fabric was one of many items they specialized in. A linguistic and textual analysis of their own language and liturgical texts ties them to merchants as well. The texts are written in the Judeo-Persian language, an offshoot of New Persian, which developed outside of China on the trade routes of Central Asia long after the Han Dynasty. The rituals described within the texts are also strikingly similar to those used and disseminated by merchants active throughout the Jewish world during the Song. All of this points to the Kaifeng Jews coming to China as merchants during the Song Dynasty.

Notes


[1] White, Part II, 11. I changed the Wade-Giles to Pinyin. Weisz translates it as: “You returned to my China…” (Weisz, 10). He claims this discrepancy comes from a past misreading of the Chinese character gui (歸) that all other scholars have since followed. Considering the Jews were non-Chinese, Weisz supports his reading by citing a speech given by the future founder of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋, 1328-1398) to non-Chinese tribes. The people had formally lived under Chinese rule, but later fell under the jurisdiction of Barbarian overlords. In the speech, Zhu states: “Those who return (gui) will find everlasting peace in China, and those who oppose us will find calamity beyond the borders” (Ibid, 11 n. 41). So if this usage of gui is to be believed, then the emperor had to have known about Jewish settlements prior to the Song Dynasty (960-1279), thus supporting the Han-entry theory. However, gui has different meanings. Another sense of the word is allegiance or submission. For instance, Mencius IVA:9 reads: "得天下有道:得其民,斯得天下矣;得其民有道:得其心,斯得民矣;得其心有道:所欲與之聚之,所惡勿施,爾也。民之歸仁也,猶水之就下、獸之走壙也。故 為淵敺魚者,獺也;為叢敺爵者,鸇也;為湯武敺民者,桀與紂也。" D.C. Lau translates this as: “There is a way to win the Empire; win the people and you will win the Empire. There is a way to win the people; win their hearts and you will win the people. There is a way to win their hearts; amass what they want for them; do not impose what they dislike on them. That is all. The people turn to (歸) the benevolent as water flows downwards or as animals head for the wilds. Thus the otter drives the fish to the deep; thus the hawk drives birds to the bushes; and thus Jie and Zhou drove the people to Tang and King Wu" (D.C. Lau, Mencius: A Bilingual Edition, rev. ed. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003), 159). Therefore, the use of “come” by White and Leslie (Leslie, 23) is still valid because it is referring to the Jews’ allegiance or submission to the Song emperor. Even the quote used by Weisz could be read in this context.
[2] White, Part I, 115.
[3] Ibid, Part III, 9.
[4] Irene Eber, “Overland and By Sea: Eight Centuries of the Jewish Presence in China,” Chinese Journal of International Law 4, no. 1 (2005): 237.
[5] Chao Kang and Jessica C.Y. Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U.P., 1977), 4.
[6] Ibid, 9.
[7] Zhao Rukuo, Friedrich Hirth, and William Woodville Rockhill, Chau Ju-Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-Fanchï (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp, 1966), 217-218.
[8] Ibid, 219, n. 50.
[9] S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza: 'India Book' (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 33.
[10] David S Margoliouth, “An Early Judaeo-Persian Document from Khotan in the Stein Collection, with other early Persian Documents,” in Studies of the Chinese Jews: Selections from Journals East and West, ed. Hyman Kublin (New YorK: Paragon Book Reprint Corp, 1971), 25-36.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ludwig Paul, “Early Judaeo-Persian in a Historical Perspective: The Case of the Prepositions be, u, pa(d), and the Suffix rā,” in Persian Origins - Early Judaeo-Persian and the Emergence of New Persian: Collected Papers of the Symposium, Göttingen 1999, ed. Ludwig Paul (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), 178.
[13] Bo Utas, “The Jewish-Persian fragment from Dandan-Uiliq,” Orientalia Suecana, Uppsala, 17 (1968): 123-136.
[14] Xu, The Jews of Kaifeng, China, 153.
[15] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 7-8.
[16] Ibid, 8.
[17] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 6.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Buzurg ibn Shahriyār and G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, The Book of the Wonders of India: Mainland, Sea and Islands (London: East-West, 1981), vii.
[20] In the Islamic calendar, AH is an abbreviation for “After Hijra.” This refers to Muhammad’s immigration from Mecca to Medina in the year 622 CE.
[21] Buzurg, 62-66. Some of the dates and name punctuations come from Goitein, India Traders of the Middle Ages, 124.
[22] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 11.
[23] Goitein, India Traders of the Middle Ages, 125. George Hourani states in his book Arab Seafaring: “In this book ‘an Arab’ means anyone who speaks Arabic, ‘a Persian’ anyone who speaks Persian; ‘an Arabian’ means an inhabitant of Arabia, ‘an Iranian’ an inhabitant of Iran. In the pre-Islamic period all Arabs were Arabians, except some tribes in the Egyptian desert between the Nile and the Red Sea; and all Arabians were Arabs, if we include Himyaritic and other South Arabian dialects as branches of Arabic. After the Islamic Expansion, an Arabic-speaking inhabitant of Iran may be termed either an Arabian or an Iranian; a Persian is one who continued to speak Persian. But we do not always know what language people spoke at (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), 3).
[24] See, for instance, note #72.
[25] Goitein, India Traders of the Middle Ages, 6.
[26] Ibid, 5, n. 5 and 14.
[27] Ibid, 375 and 619 n. 31.
[28] Margariti, p. 151
[29] Goitein, India Traders of the Middle Ages, 387.
[30] Ibid, 388.
[31] Ibid, 145.
[32] André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Boston, MA: Brill, 2002), 92.
[33] Hourani, 65. See also footnote #23.
[34] Rudolph Loewenthal, “The Nomenclature of Jews in China” in Studies of the Chinese Jews; Selections from Journals East and West, ed. Hyman Kublin (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp, 1971), 55-84.
[35] To my knowledge, I am the only researcher who has drawn parallels between the Kaifeng Jews and the Mediterranean India Traders mentioned in the Cairo Geniza records. Leslie lists two of Goitein’s works on the Geniza in a comprehensive bibliography about Judaism in China, but he doesn’t connect it to the Kaifeng Jews (Donald Leslie, Jews and Judaism in Traditional China: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica Institute, 1998), 128). I am also the first to give a plausible reason for why there is a dearth of information on Jews in Song Dynasty records.
[36] S.D Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza – Volume V: The Individual (University of California Press, 1999), 18.
[37] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 14.
[38] Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 200.
[39] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 12 and 14. A Danishmand (答失蠻 Dashiman) is a Mullah, or Muslim teacher (Ibid, 12 and 216).
[40] Ibid, 14. I changed the Wade-Giles to Pinyin.
[41] Ibid, 15.
[42] Ibid, 12.
[43] Ibid, 13. I changed the Wade-Giles to Pinyin. The original quote had a question mark next to “Muslim.” This is because Leslie was puzzled by the way the Chinese records listed Muslims and Danishmand (Mullahs) as two separate entities (Ibid, 12 n. 1).
[44] Ibid, 27.
[45] Ibid, 118-119.
[46] 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.
[47] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 118.
[48] Paul, 178.
[49] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 23 n. 2.
[50] Ibid, 18 n. 1.
[51] Donald Leslie, “Persia or Yemen? The Origin of the Kaifeng Jews,” in S. Shaked, ed., Irano-Judaica (Jerusalem, 1982), 102.
[52] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 157.
[53] Goitein, India Traders of the Middle Ages, 7.
[54] Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 316.
[55] Ibid, 161-162.
[56] Goitein, India Traders of the Middle Ages, 117.
[57] Moses Maimonides and Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1972), 481-482.
[58] Leslie, The Survival of the Chinese Jews, 157.
[59] See Walter J. Fischel, "The Jews of Central Asia (Khorasan) in Medieval Hebrew and Islamic Literature," Historia Judaica, New York, 7 (1945): 29-50.
[60] Francis Wood believes Central Asian merchants were among the people who unofficially introduced Buddhism to China during the 1st century BCE (Wood, 93). See also Mitchell, 197-199.
[61] Elkan N. Adle, Jews in Many Lands (London, 1905), 221.
[62] Wood, 13.

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Bottom of Form

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