[13] That prior to the Song, Jewish merchants were active in China appears probable from the fact that the Eastern Islamic Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh in his Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-Mamālik) ca.

In all likelihood, all of the founders of the community were male Jewish merchants: the arduous, dangerous nature of the route, and the length of time which they needed to spend in order to travel on it, would have probably forced them to rule out bringing their wives, and after they settled in Kaifeng, they married Chinese women.

[20] A century later, the Arab geographer Abū Zayd Ḥasan al-Sīrāfī mentioned (910) a massacre which occurred in Canton in 878/9 in which not only Muslims and Christians but Jews were also killed, attesting to the latter group's presence in China.

[22] The point of departure for determining precisely when a community (kehillah) was established relies on two forms of evidence: the information surviving in inscriptions from four stelae recovered from Kaifeng, and references in Chinese dynastic sources.

[24][25] Others followed this up with a claim that the Song History provides a precise date for a large population of Jewish expatriates accompanying Ni-wei-ni from India who putatively arrived in Kaifeng on 20 February 998.

[j] Both the sēng (僧) used to describe Ni-wei-ni in the Song dynastic history and the shāmén (沙門) in the Buddha Almanac of Zhi-pan mean "Buddhist monk", not rabbi.

This, it is affirmed, commemorates the construction in 1163 of a synagogue called Qingzhensi (清真寺; qīngzhēnsì; 'True and pure Temple'),[28] the customary term for mosques in China.

It adds that they brought Western cloth as tribute for an emperor, unnamed, who welcomed them with the words: "You have come to Our China; reverence and preserve the customs of your ancestors, and hand them down at Bianliang (汴梁; Biànliáng)," i.e., Kaifeng.

[23] The same stone inscription also associates the building's establishment with two names: An-du-la (俺都喇; Ăndūlǎ perhaps Abdullah)[29][m] and a certain Lieh-wei (列微; Liè wēi),[n] probably transcribing Levi, who is described as the Wu-ssu-ta (五思達; Wǔsīdá) of the community.

[33][34] At this time northern China was ruled by the Jurchen Jin dynasty (金朝; Jīncháo (1115–1234)), while the area south of the Yangtze river was controlled by the Southern Song.

Irene Eber, among others,[35] assumes that this context suggests that the Kaifeng Jews must have settled in this Song capital, then known as Bianjing, no later than 1120,[36] some years before the Song-Jin alliance broke down.

[37] Recently, Peng Yu has challenged the Song-entry consensus, favouring instead a variant of the "second wave" theory of Kaifeng Jewish origins, one version of which holds that Jews probably figured among the large number of peoples collectively known as the Semu (色目人; sèmùrén) who were captured during Mongol campaigns in the West and conveyed east to serve in the bureaucracy and assist the Mongols in administering China after its conquest.

An-du-la, on the basis of the 1679 stele, he reads as the religious name of the An Cheng (俺誠; Ăn Chéng), said to be a Kaifeng Jewish physician, who "restored" the synagogue in 1421 (not 1163).

The dynasty was marked by a distinct anti-foreign sentiment expressed in coercive decrees that enforced assimilation, and therefore, Yu infers, the Kaifeng Jews, under the Ming, claimed in their monumental stone inscriptions that their roots in China were ancient, going back at least to the nativist Song if not indeed to the Han period.

[46] Kaifeng was a cosmopolitan industrial metropolis with 600,000[47] to a million inhabitants in Northern Song times,[48] which formed an intense hub for overland trade via the Silk Road and the commercial riverine networks connecting it to the eastern seaboard.

Its strategic importance and wealth were recognized by successive dynastic powers over the period 905–959, such as the Liang (who gave it its present name), Jin, Later Han and Later Zhou who all made it their capital, as did the Northern Song when they unified the empire, until the city was conquered by the Jurchen in 1127.

By the early 16th century, an inscription mentions not only craftsmen, farmers and traders among them, but also scholars, physicians and officials, political and administrative, as well as military men in important posts.

[56] To what degree these measures were applied is unknown, but is evident from their Memorial Book that intermarriage took place on a large scale among the Kaifeng Jews certainly from Ming and it may be assumed, in Qing times.

[59] They obtained some from Ningxia and Ningbo to replace them, and another Hebrew Torah scroll was bought from a Muslim in Ningqiangzhou (in Shaanxi), who acquired it from a dying Jew at Canton.

[61][aa] This term arose from observing that, in memory of Jacob's wrestling with the angel, their butchers extracted the sciatic nerve (Gid hanasheh) as required in Nikkur, marking them as distinct from Muslims who otherwise, like them, also refrained from eating pork.

Abraham (阿無羅漢; Āwúluóhàn) was recorded as wakening as from sleep to the 19th generation from Pangu[ab]-Adam (阿躭; Ādān), and grasping profound mysteries, founded Judaism.

[65] Within a few centuries, nonetheless, practices regarding the coming of age ceremony, wedding and death and burial were acclimatized to the respective Chinese customs,[66] though the text of the Kaddish in the Memorial Book suggests the prayer was recited at funerals.

[ad] According to the account in De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas,[72] Ricci's visitor, named Ai Tian (艾田; Ài Tián), was a chüren (舉人; jǔrén) – someone who had passed the provincial level of the imperial examination decades earlier in 1573.

Nonetheless, apparently concerned with the lack of a trained successor, the old rabbi offered Ricci his position, if the Jesuit would join their faith and abstain from eating pork.

To avoid the threat of becoming defunct, the Kaifeng community dispatched members to Shanghai in order to seek help from Sephardic European Jewish merchants active there.

[am] In 1948, Samuel Stupa Shih (Shi Hong Mo) (施洪模) said he saw a Hebrew language "Religion of Israel" Jewish inscription on a tombstone in a Qing dynasty Muslim cemetery to a place west of Hangzhou.

[90] Their registration as "Jewish descendants" (猶太後代; Yóutàihòudài) was changed to Han Chinese (漢; Hàn) out of official concerns that an ethnic status might lead them to seek privileges.

Qu Yinan's family abstained from certain foods, such as shellfish and pork, similar to the stipulations of kosher dietary law, which marked them off from most neighbouring Chinese.

[6][7][8] In the 21st century, both the Sino-Judaic Institute and Shavei Israel sent teachers to Kaifeng to help interested community members learn about their Jewish heritage, building on the pioneering work of the American Judeo-Christian Timothy Lerner.

The title character, the Chinese bondmaid Peony, loves her master's son, David ben Ezra, but she cannot marry him due to her lowly status.