By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
China today has a vibrant community of Jewish expatriates, but what has become even larger is the study of Jewish history and culture.
“Jews, or especially Jewish civilization or culture — whatever term they used — were the cornerstone of Western civilization, Western religion, so that’s how the Chinese pay attention to them,” said Prof. Xu Xin, who heads the Institute of Jewish Studies at Nanjing University in Nanjing, China.
Xin, who is active in building a network between China and Jews in the U.S. and Israel, visited Seattle earlier this month as a guest of the American Jewish Committee. Xin spoke with JTNews about the interactions between Jews and the Chinese both past and present.
The Jewish people, from the Chinese viewpoint, have thrived in business and though they suffered throughout history “they still kept their own tradition,” Xin said. “Jewish people survived without a country for 2,000 years. That’s amazing.”
Today, with Tiger moms and staggering economic growth and the massive bank notes China holds on the U.S., it might be difficult to see how the Chinese could see themselves as a people oppressed. But many of the country’s older citizens can remember a time when Western powers tried to carve up the country and its neighbor Japan nearly succeeded in taking China over.
“Jews were considered a model for Chinese then, who wanted to get modernized, who wanted to rebuild a strong country, a strong nation,” Xin said.
It is only in the last 30 to 35 years, when China began its open door policy, that the most populous country on earth began to flex its economic muscle. But it’s from moving to a more capitalistic model that Chinese scholars were able to see the world for themselves — the West in particular.
There were many Chinese scholars [and] professors who have been abroad and have had a chance to contact with Jews,” Xin said. “They come to the idea that China, if we want to do business with the West, we have to know the Western society. If you want to know Western society, Western culture, you have to know Jewish culture.”
In the 1990s, Xin and several other scholars interested in Jews and Judaism pushed to make Jewish Studies an official curriculum at Chinese universities. There are currently 10 across the country that work closely together, with Xin’s own Nanjing University being the first. Nanjing’s Jewish Studies department is housed in the philosophy department, so the subject matter is more abstract, but other universities have their programs based in more diplomatic and political spheres.
Many of the curricula include travel to Israel, now that the two countries have diplomatic relations.
“Each and every one of my Ph.D. students goes to Israel,” Xin said. “We’re hoping we’re able to send some of them to America, to Jewish programs at various universities, because Israel is important, but also Jews in America are important.”
Given that Jewish Studies are being taught by Chinese professors to students with almost no knowledge of Judaism — and most never having even met someone Jewish — the approach is different from Western academia, where a majority of the faculty has a Jewish background.
“A lot of things are more or less the same, but the curriculum is different, because we have to meet Chinese needs in those ways,” Xin said.
Rabbi Anson Laytner, a former director of the AJC’s Seattle chapter and current president of the California-based Sino-Judaic Institute, agreed that though some aspects of the Chinese the education can be abstract, it all comes from admiration.
“It’s absolutely accurate,” Laytner, who has known Xin for more than 20 years, said. And, he added, “the negative stereotype that Christian Europe and, to maybe a lesser degree, America has about Jews is turned on its head and have become positive virtues in China.”
Jewish education in China goes back more than 150 years. Even early on, Jewish culture played a part in educating the Chinese people.
“Asian Jewish literature — Hebrew literature — flourished in the second half of the 19th century in a new form, Yiddish literature,” Xin said. “In China we introduced Yiddish literature as new Jewish literature.”
Seeing how Hebrew was, at that time, a dead language used only in sacred texts, the presence of a second, everyday Jewish language was an epiphany in educating a population that was 95 percent illiterate.
“[If] you want to change that situation, the language should be everyday language. Not a classic they don’t use in their life,” Xin said. “How do you do it? You write articles, you write stories. It should be in everyday language, a colloquial language, not a written language.”
But the history of Jews goes even further back. Evidence of Jews in China, as guides on the Silk Road, goes as far back as the seventh and eighth centuries, if not earlier.
“[When] caravan merchants came to China or traveled along the Silk Road, they needed a guide, because there’s no highway to say which direction you go,” Xin said.
The best-known history of Jews in China comes from the community of Kaifeng, with documentation of Jewish succession that went from the 11th century to the mid-19th century. Xin has written two books on this community.
Since then the number of Jews in China has correlated most often to the business climate, for Sephardic Jews who came to Hong Kong and later Shanghai to export fur and other staples to the West.
A sizeable community of Ashkenazi Jews, originally from Russia, settled in the northern city of Harbing to build the Trans-Siberian railroad, but when the Japanese occupation pushed them out of their jobs, many went south to Shanghai.
After 1930, when the Japanese moved in and occupied China, its citizens “were worried about their survival, nothing to talk about Jews,” Xin said. They had “more interior issues than external.”
But Jews kept coming, though this time it was a matter of survival following Kristallnacht in 1938.
“That’s why a lot of Jews who wanted to leave badly came to China,” Xin said. “Of the country they knew nothing. They were there to survive.”
It’s that history of survival while maintaining their traditions that has most interested the Chinese people about Jews and Judaism, and in many ways has helped to guide how they view their own society.
“We say not knowing Jewish culture is not knowing the world,” Xin said. “It’s not learning the Western culture.”