The Chinese Jews and the Kaifeng Torah

They are the Jewish community settled the farthest from Jerusalem. They maintained their community for over thousand years on the banks of the Yellow River. Eventually they integrated themselves into the Local Chinese Community. 

Jewish arrival to China

Kaifeng was known as Bianliang in the early centuries and was one of the seven ancient capitals of China situated deep in the middle of country on the banks of Yellow River. It is not certain when the Jewish Community arrived in Bianliang. The oral history recommends they were Persian Traders who arrived in the first century and their synagogue is believed to have existed up to 1850. A business letter of 718 written using Hebrew charachter but in Persian language is the evidence that supports their origin. 

A Jesuit missionary in his letters to Vatican from Kaifeng had mentioned about the Jews living there. It is said there are about 6 casual reference to the Jews of Kaifeng by travellers till 1605 but no specific study was made untill 1800 by which time the Jewish community of Kaifeng had disappeared. 

Just like the Jewish Community of Cochin, the Kaifeng community was also prosperous and did not face any persecution or harassment. Much loved by the locals they also proudly displayed many gifts they received from the Emperor in their synagogue. 

The end of the community

The Jewish customs obviously were different from the Chinese way of life and the Confucian way of thinking. Not eating pork, Observing Sabbath and Torah reading at Synagogue, circumcising their children etc.. They did not take second wives nor bound their feet like the Chinese. They also had their own Rabbis as preist, the last one is said to have died in 1810. 

By the middle of 1800 the Jewish community had integrated into the local community so much so that they had nobody among them who could read or write Hebrew halting the Torah reading and subsequently their Synagogue fell without proper repair. Today there is a new Synagogue in its place and there are people who says they are Jews even though they have the physical features same like the other Chinese folks around them.

Kaifeng community is considered as a long lost Jews and some Chinese scholars like Zhou Un of the school of Oriental and African Studies, London, say the Jewishness of the Kaifeng Community is a Western Cultural Invention. 

The importance of the Kaifeng Torah

The Jesuit missionaries when they came across the Kaifeng community was hoping they would get from them owing to their long isolation from the mainstream 'un-corrupted Torahs' which they believed could help in their Biblical interpretations. As we know by the middle of 1800s there were hardly anyone in the Kaifeng community who could read Hebrew and they started selling old copies of their Torah to the inquisitive colonial visitors. The contents of the Kaifeng Torah was similar to the conventional scriptures. They did not have any Chinese Translations to help the later generation to read and understand the content of the scriptures. 

The Making of the Kaifeng Torah Scroll 

It is believed to have been made between 1643 and 1663. At any rate it was acquired by the Kaifeng Jesuit Missionaries in 1851 and was presented to the British Museum in 1852. The scroll is made from the thick sheep skin tied together with silk thread (not animal sinew which is customary). It has 239 columns of text written in Hebrew Square Script similar  to the ones used by the Jews of Persia without any signs to show the vowel sounds. Unfortunately only 7 of the 15 Kaifeng Synagogue Torahs have survived. 

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Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

 A Review

A hard-working, working class Scottish Catholic Father brings up his daughter like a princess giving her his best in everything he could afford. The girl grows up well and gets married and has two kids, a son and a daughter. Her husband is almost like her father, hardworking and committed to the family, bringing home his wages unlike the other Glasgow men who spend most of their weekly wages on wee drinks.   

The young wife soon loses the charm in her settled life and is longing for some action and change. When her second baby is still in her nappies she (at twenty six) runs away from her husband with a taxi driver taking both her kids against the good advice of her parents.

Life looks exciting for a while but soon, though she has got the change she was longing for, she finds out it is nothing like she expected. The protestant man she gets married to and whose name she adopts for her children is unfortunately, in her own words, “..horing bastard”. This reality and the disappointment that come with it destroy her and lead her to alcoholism and later the addiction completely wrecks her family. As soon as the “..horing Casanova” realizes she has gone beyond repair after her suicide attempt he tempts her to leave her parents’ house where they have been living ever since she broke her first marriage and takes her to an abandoned mining quarters far away from Glasgow city and leaves her.

Shuggie Bain is the story of her children over a period of 16 years, two - born from her first husband and one - from the second, how they struggled while growing up, to protect themselves from a self-destructing mother and their love for their mother to protect her from her own harmful self. Douglas Stuart has very successfully portrayed the love, the drama, the anxiety, the poverty and grief from the perspective of the third child whose name is Shuggie Bain.

“…it doesn’t cost anything extra to look your best” is Shuggie Bain’s mother’s favourite quote and Douglas wrote a heart breaking novel drawing a lot from his own life experience which won him the Booker Prize for 2020. The book gives an international reader a realistic view of the working class life in Glasgow, Scotland of the 80’s.