As even the most tenuous speaker of Chinese can tell you, travels in that country mean having the same Inevitable Conversation over and over. And over.
“Oh!” the locals will pretend to swoon. “Your Chinese is excellent!”
“No, no,” comes your polite or honest reply. “It’s really nothing.”
“Where are you from?” “What is your salary?” “Are you married?” “What do your parents do?” “What are you doing in China?”
Of the literally hundreds of times I’ve gone through this routine, one exclamation — usually around the “Who are your ancestors?” part of the conversation — has come up often enough to raise an eyebrow: “Oh, Jewish! Very clever! Very good at business!” So nu?
Full disclosure: I am not, strictly speaking, Jewish. Not that my Chinese interlocutors care; I can explain all I want about a New York upbringing, guilt, bagels and Reform recognition of patrilineal descent, but such nuances often get lost in a response as deafening as it is sudden: “Very clever! Very good at business!”
“But,” I protest, “those are other Jews. Really! I’m terrible at business! I’m not here to despoil you from my position at the apex of the world economy! I want to study history and —”
“So clever!”
“No, Woody Allen — ”
“So good at business!”
“But Trotsky — ”
“Very clever!”
“Sigh.”
Nor are the Chinese alone. During World War II, a cabal of Japanese generals styled as “Jewish experts” designed the secret (and ultimately unrealized) “Fugu plan” to harness the Jews’ financial sorcery by rescuing refugees from Europe and resettling them in China’s occupied northeast. (The arms of the Japanese were never entirely open to begin with: The plan took its name from the Japanese blowfish, the delicacy that is lethal if incorrectly handled.) On a Mongolian train, an inquisitive Buddhist gentleman pointed to my brain with an effusive thumbs-up.
This much is clear: Most of Asia lacks the “killed our Savior” chip so firmly lodged on Western Christendom’s shoulder, and shares such values as education and prosperity. “Controlling the world’s banks,” the thinking goes; “What’s wrong with that? We would if we could.” Money might be part of the explanation: It’s certainly true that many East Asian well-wishing phrases for holidays heavily emphasize “wealth” and “prosperity,” where Westerners might invoke “love” and “happiness.” But in China, Jewish cachet seems especially pronounced, and there’s a good deal more to the Jewish story in China, and the Chinese stories of Jews.
Anecdotal evidence abounds for some strange Jewish-Chinese cultural axis across the ages. Unprompted, an ethnic Chinese woman in Vietnam compared her people to the Jews; another in Thailand did the same. Within China itself, the city of Wenzhou’s business-savvy reputation has led to such book titles as “The Fearsome Wenzhounese: China’s Jews,” a sentiment echoed in my Beijing classroom and in casual conversations beyond. Bookstores abound with “Financial Success the Jewish Way” and similar titles. Even back in the States, a Chinese friend en route to a lecture referred to the speaker as “some Jewish guy.” “Well,” I asked, “how do you know that?”
“He has a Jewish name.”
I bristled: “What do you know from Jewish names?”
Her response was as irritating as it was bulletproof: “Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Solomon Brothers….” Sigh.
Moreover, it seems like my friends were more or less correct that their Chinese diaspora constitutes the “Jews of Asia.” From Hanoi to Bangkok to Jakarta and beyond, the merchant classes are overwhelmingly peopled with well-educated ethnic Chinese whose connections to the homeland and each other — the “Bamboo Network” — constitute a huge business advantage. They are also, like the Jews, periodically expelled (from Vietnam), repressed (under Indonesia’s Suharto) and rioted against (in Malaysia, Thailand and really everywhere else). Like Jews, they are fiercely proud of their heritage, assimilating somewhat while maintaining temples that assert identity. With so many similarities — which extend to the immigrant clichés of “Eat, Eat,” and demanding that their sons become doctors — it shouldn’t be too surprising that Chinese people find a certain resonance vis-à-vis the Jews with whom they come into contact. And with so many roving Jews over the past few millennia, the odds were decent that at least a few would wander into one of the world’s most powerful and ancient civilizations. And wander in they did.
The first recorded settlement of Jews in China dates from the ninth century, when some Silk Road merchants schlepped into the Song Dynasty capital of Kaifeng and settled down. Intermarriage led to near-total assimilation, and the synagogue was lost to the sands of time (and floodwaters of the Yellow River), but despite the loss of nearly all Judaic languages, books and customs, some in Kaifeng still consider themselves Jews. China’s reasonably benign policies toward statistically insignificant and politically low-profile minorities (for example, not Tibetans) have even led a dozen or so descendants to file for official minority status, which brings special protections and exemptions.
The next notable Jewish jaunt in China came with the 1840s, when a Baghdad-born Sephardi named Elias David Sassoon moved to Shanghai from British Bombay. The Sassoons made a fortune in matzo — just kidding! It was opium — and invested in the Shanghai real estate market, then better known as “rice paddies.” By the early 20th century, patriarch Victor Sassoon was throwing bashes, building a world-class hotel and quipping with the best of them: “There’s only one race greater than the Jews, and that’s the Derby.” His chutzpah notwithstanding, anyone who laid eyes on Shanghai’s opulent waterfront architecture would be hard pressed to disagree. Other Sephardic families, like the Hardoons and Kadoories, also dominated business in Shanghai, leaving a dizzying array of real estate and business interests whose footprint remains, despite the past few years’ redevelopment frenzy.
Pogroms and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought floods of Jewish and/or Russian refugees to Shanghai’s open port, with a similar flow passing through the far northeastern city of Harbin (the childhood home of Ehud Olmert’s father). Later, as the Holocaust engulfed the Jewry of Europe, a few courageous Chinese and Japanese consular officials defied orders from home and granted desperate Jews passage to Shanghai. The city’s Japanese occupiers interned some 20,000 Ashkenazic Jewish arrivals in a ghetto but refused requests from their German allies to kill or hand them over, owing perhaps to the ultimately unsuccessful Fugu plan. With the war’s end in 1945 and the approaching communist takeover of 1949, Shanghai’s Jews began to leave the country. The wealthy Sephardic Jews fled for British Hong Kong (which sports a Kadoorie Avenue to this day), while the Ashkenazic refugees mostly left for England, Australia, the United States and the emerging State of Israel.
Over these near-dozen decades of heavy Jewish presence in Shanghai, not a few ethnically Chinese Jews were sired. (Among these is my nonobservant Jewish step-grandfather’s London acupuncturist, a fact that bore the following exchange: “What time shall we say next week, Dr. Chang?” “Sorry, Mr. Cohen, it’s the High Holy Days.” “What?”). But by the mid-1950s, there was scant remainder of Shanghai’s disparate but flourishing Jewish community besides a handful of Chinese Jews in the outlying district of Hongkou — that and one of Asia’s earliest and most dramatic skylines, a testament to the Sephardic Jews’ ruthless business prowess and a powerful symbol of what Jews meant to the Chinese collective memory.
Besides businessmen and refugees, China has played host to another Jewish paradigm: the radical bourgeois intellectual. Joining the Chinese Communist Party as a foreigner required direct approval of the Politburo’s highest-ranking members (Mao Zedong and friends) and among the few outsiders who joined the party, became Chinese citizens or were permitted to live in China, the Jewish presence sticks out like a sore thumb. Sidney Shapiro, Sidney Rittenberg and Israel Epstein were the best known, and while none of these lefty expatriates was particularly influential either as a Jew or a communist, their mere presence in Beijing reinforced a panoply of clichés enunciated in everything from Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” to Allen’s wife. (Rittenberg, who now runs a corporate consulting firm, seems to have lost some of his Red zeal, though that probably has as much to do with his 16 years in solitary confinement as with his Jewish business acumen.) While the foreigners were comfortably put up in the Beijing Friendship Hotel (or, depending on the political winds, doing hard time), the Chinese people suffered one catastrophe after another, so impoverished and battered by half-baked economic schemes and destructive political campaigns that when Mao’s death finally ushered in market reforms, moneymaking was ready to swing back into fashion. Kvelled Deng Xiaoping, “To get rich is glorious”; with China’s opening, legions of foreign investors — including you know whom — poured in.
Interesting enough — but how, you might ask, does this all connect to the “very clever” routine? Or, for that matter, Jews’ own clichéd predilections for mah-jongg, mu shu and the odd Asian girlfriend?
Throughout Chinese history, the actual Jews were sufficiently few and high profile that they’re not hard to trace. Chinese conceptions of Jews today — and vice versa — aren’t always as clear. One important concept in Chinese society is diwei, or status, and it is expressed by forms of address, protocol in table manners and myriad other everyday social interactions. Besides chatty curiosity, the purpose of the Inevitable Conversation is to gauge your diwei through the normal indicators (salary, education, marriage status). Intelligence and moneymaking ability are highly respected, and if Chinese people know that you’re Jewish — even if you insist you’re here to study literature or observe rare tree ants or overthrow capitalism — it may nonetheless give your diwei a boost.
Challenge this all you like, but they’ll just shrug: “Well,” they say, “I was simply always told that Jews are smart and good at business.” And indeed they were; moreover, it’s a prejudice irrelevant to their everyday lives, not to mention that any Jews whom an average Chinese might meet are liable to be students or businessmen — not exactly the demographic to subvert the “Clever! Good at business!” stereotype.
Said students and businessmen, moreover, are illustrative of the disconnect between China’s Jewish past — littered with scholars and schnorrers, rich and poor, roustabouts and refugees, colorful types like Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen — and China’s staid Jewish present. The modern Jewish population is largely severed from the past: almost entirely expatriate, secular, and indistinguishable from other foreigners. Visible assertions of Jewish identity are generally restricted to the odd Chabad House or event at the Israeli Embassy, while China itself — pork juice in your vegetables, sir? — is not very hospitable to observant Jewish tourists. Outside of a few major cities, you won’t find a minyan for hundreds of miles in any direction, unless you count Israeli backpackers, who are probably too stoned to pray anyway.
The Jews of Kaifeng are the only remaining link — a tenuous one — to China’s more distant Jewish past. And they weren’t even known as such; instead, the Chinese called them “Blue-Hatted Hui,” or just another type of Chinese Muslims (not such a stretch when you consider that both groups eschew pork, worship one God, wear tiny hats and are Abraham-affiliated).
As China’s modern Jewish landscape is fairly barren, so are historical sites just that: historical, with scarce culture or community that can claim direct descent back to the earliest Jews in China. Players of the “Oh, is he/she/it Jewish?” parlor game will find anecdotes galore — Kaifeng, Shanghai, Rittenberg, “We’re the Jews of Asia!” and more — but you can’t connect the dots. If you weren’t playing the Jewish parlor game, you likely wouldn’t notice a thing, except a Shanghai synagogue or two.
Skepticism firmly in mind, a friend and I stumbled across the Shanghai Jewish Studies Center. We could hardly believe what we found: a Hebrew-speaking Chinese girl, a recent college grad, with an interest in Judaism that tended irresistibly toward fetish. The conversation was Manhattan-meets-Brooklyn, Upper West Side vs. Crown Heights:
“Hi! Thanks for coming! Sorry, my English isn’t so good. How’s your Hebrew and Yiddish?”
“Uh,” we stammered, dumbfounded, “we… don’t… speak…”
“I’ve been to Israel twice. How many times have you been?”
“Actually… we’ve never…”
Before we could steer the conversation back to Trotsky, Freud and Heeb magazine, she had already revealed her ambitions to marry a Jewish guy and move to Israel, and as we perused the contents of the office, she explained how she had learned Hebrew at the only university in China that teaches it. Seeing a Chinese with such an acute interest was equally informative and mystifying; because, really, what the hell? Here we’d been trying our best not to read too much into anecdotes, to avoid the “Who’s Jewish?” parlor game myopia, and then this girl hit us in the face with so many inverted stereotypes that we were rendered nearly speechless (too speechless, in retrospect, to get her phone number).
So what’s really going on here? Lifetimes of research and the writing of weighty tomes should precede any final pronouncement, and it would surely be a disservice to two of the world’s most ancient cultures to render a crude summary. But here goes: Jewish history in China is interesting but not too special; after all, Jews scattered all over the world and did all sorts of interesting things. Taken together, the parallels and encounters are undoubtedly striking; but, the connection between China’s Jewish past and Jewish present is dubious. The American Jewish love affair with mah-jongg and mu shu — to say nothing of the famous lefty Jews living in Mao’s Beijing — lacks any meaningful connection to Kaifeng or Shanghai. The Jewish clichés of preordained doctor or lawyer careers are common to many American immigrant cultures, to say nothing of “Eat! Eat!” So nu? I’m not sure — but, if the Jewish parlor game is your thing, you can certainly do worse than China. In fact, you may want to visit anyway: The chow mein is excellent, and there’s mah-jongg every night.
Nick Frisch is a writer in Taipei. He studied Chinese language and history at Columbia University.
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If China is to be the dominant force in the world within a hundred years, and if it has no Jewish influence or interest in Jews worth noting-- which, ploughing through this recitation, seems to be the main message-- Jews are going to find the climate colder: a lot colder than when Europe and America, aka "the West", called the shots and laid its dubious mantle of protection over Jewry. There is not much concern with Jewishness in India or Japan either. The "rebalancing" of the world towards Asia, politically as well as economically, may mean the Jews finally stop trying to pass for white and admit they are a Near Eastern sub-group of a semitic collection which also includes, in considerably larger numbers, the Arabs. Will the rise of the Far East accidentally force semites to come together and stop cutting each other's throats? I hope we will, sooner rather than later, hear Israeli Jews described as "the Chinese of the Levant";-)
To David L Nilsson: I didn't quite understand what you mean, are you suggesting Israeli Jews to start "acting" like "true Semites" instead of "Europeans"? I say thank God that Israel is more western than the average Middle Eastern country.
Thanks for a hilarious and informative piece of history that until recently has largely been underreported. Frisch is right on the money (no pun intended) with his description of the Chinese perception of Jews, the similarity of our cultures (don't even get me started on the Jewish Mother/Chinese mother guilt thing... oy and aiii -yah!), and the disturbing irony of Jews being respected and admired for the same stereotype that made them so hated and brutally persecuted in the Western world. There's a great documentary about the Holocaust refugees in Shanghai called "Shanghai Ghetto," I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to furthur explore the history of Jews and Jewish influence in China (and vice-versa) and how two persecuted peoples thrown together in intolerable circumstances dealt with their situation. Oh, and then there's that whole Chinese-dinner -and -a movie-at-Christmas thing...
For readers who would like to engage the topic of Chinese-Jewish relations on an on-going basis, with a particular focus on Kaifeng, please consider joining the Sino-Judaic Institute and subscribing to Points East. Go to www.sino-judaic.org. Anson Laytner President
Interesting essay however the statement that the only "Visible assertions of Jewish identity are generally restricted to the odd Chabad House or event at the Israeli Embassy" is a bit unfair. Jewish communities throughout Asia are continuosly growing and developing. Perhaps your travelbook was a bit outdated but a number of communities have not only religious schools but Jewish day schools, the reform movement is present throughout Asia, the international Anne Frank House exhibition made its China debut, kosher food is available, kosher restaurants are springing up and many of the modern Far East Jewish communities have strong historical ties. The mah-jongg is great but there is much more to Jewish life in Asia than you have experienced.
March 14, 2008 Harbin, PR China To the editor, My American friend, a Harvard professor, brought the article “Schnorientalism: The Tao of Jews” (The Forward Wednesday, February 06, 2008) to my attention. Reading the entire text I found it to be very difficult to follow, insulting, full of misconceptions and mistakes, stereotypical innuendos, defaming, liable, and a work of ignorance. In other words – too many problems that make it difficult to respond seriously even to such a relatively short piece. Thus I will make several observations only, of which, most are addressed to you and your readers, and one to Mr. Frisch. I am not sure what your purpose in printing such text was. Nor do I know whether it was indented to be in the “funnies”, the editorial or in the opinion sections. Being so full with “red”, “yellow”, “green” and occasional “blue”, it may have been printed in the graphics section. Since it is not an educational or informative piece, the text can be misleading and the editor should have had to make a note of it. I do not know what area of history Mr. Frisch studied in Columbia University. It is most apparent that it was neither Chinese nor Jewish. If he was well educated on the matter of Jewish experience in China he would have known that the so called “Jews of Kaifeng-fu” is a disputed issue at the very least. That this story was written by Ricci, a Jesuit monk, who was not fluent in Jewish matters, and Muslims could have been Jews for him. And that the present proclamations by Moshe of Kaifeng are yet to be proven. Thus, it should have been mentioned as an anecdote rather than a fact. Mr. Frisch refers to Harbin just in passing. That is wrong. Jews came to Harbin as early as 1898 with the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. By 1903 there were a sizable number of Jewish families in the booming town, most of them professionals, teachers, musicians, and businessmen along with Jewish soldiers who were part of the Russian army. Among the soldiers was Yosef Trumpeldor. There were 8 synagogues in Harbin; the first was established in 1903. The Main Synagogue of Harbin was constructed in 1907, and the New Synagogue 10 years later. Both synagogues were preserved by the city authorities along with many other private and public Jewish establishments. The New Synagogue is now the Jewish Museum of Harbin. The Jewish cemetery on Huangshan (Royal Mountain) at the outskirts of the city is the largest in the Far East. In the 1920s the Jewish population of Harbin was quoted as more than 20,000. Under the Japanese occupation of the city its numbers started to decline. The last member of the Jewish community of Harbin died there in 1968. Not like Shanghai, the Jewish community of Harbin was a fully functioning communal organization. It established and built schools (the Jewish High School still stands in its original form today), hospitals, banks, communal and social institutions such as Women Charity Association, old-age home, youth organizations, orchestras, as well as participated in rich cultural events. The Jewish community of Harbin constituted a homogeneous group. Its institutions were established by the community, not by 4 or 6 wealthy families, as it was in Shanghai. And, Harbin hosted 3 of the International Jewish Congresses. Harbin was an international city constructed and developed by Russians on Chinese soil. It was a place were many different cultures met. As such, Harbin became, and is today, the subject of international research in several disciplines, including the notorious Japanese Unit 731 that carried its infamous atrocities in the Ping Fang part of the city. Contrary to Mr. Frisch assertion that there is almost nothing that may interest people “If you weren’t playing the Jewish parlor game, you likely wouldn’t notice a thing, except a Shanghai synagogue or two…” those who are interested in contemporary history find it exiting to visit Harbin. It is evident in the number of scholars, researchers and tourists, Jews or none-Jews, who come to Harbin each year. The Sino-Israel Research and Study Center at Heilongjiang University School of Western Studies, has been engaged in research activities such as “The Chinese Perception of the Jews” and “The Jewish Community of Harbin Under Japanese Occupation”. The Center has been recognized internationally for its work, and is now part of a joint international research project headed by the University of Heidelberg in Germany and Heilongjiang University in Harbin with members from distinguished universities in the US, Canada, Japan, Russia and Israel. Mr. Frisch should have known that before writing his piece. I consider his written words on people such as Sidney Shapiro, Sidney Rittenberg and Israel Epstein, as pure defamation as well as liable. I knew several of the people he referred to, and Israel Epstein was a personal friend of mine. I knew him well and respected him as a person, as a writer and journalist, and his wisdom and will. Just few months before his death, when I complained about my poor Chinese, he comforted me by saying: “Do not worry about it… I know many Westerns who speak Chinese well but know nothing about China.” I will be ashamed to tell Wemby, Epstein’s widow, that a distinguished American newspaper, such as The Forward, described her late husband as “radical bourgeois intellectual”, that Israel Epstein’s “lefty” life in China, stretching over 89 years, “sticks out like a sore thumb,” and that his “mere presence in Beijing reinforced a panoply of clichés enunciated in everything from Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” to Allen’s wife…” What an insult. Shakespeare’s question “to be or not to be” is apparent through most of Mr. Frisch’s text. Although he attempts to convince the readers in his “full disclosure” that “I (he) am not, strictly speaking, Jewish”, he goes on to fill his pages with New York’s Jewish liberty of lost identity; Well, he says… Yes, I am Jewish but it is none of your business because I want, and have God’s given liberty, to assimilate into the American fabric. Mr. Frisch knows perfectly, and that is where his guilt surfaces, that according to many of his American fellows, he may remain only as a stain on the fabric. Dear Mr. Editor, I am color-blind and do not know the spectrum or tint of The Forward’s political orientation. After reading the text I could very well guess Mr. Frisch’s disorientation, but I wonder where your journalistic obligations and ethics are. It seems you do not like young Israelis, Chinese and maybe others. Did you check the text before printing it? Did you check the “facts” as presented? Do you agree with Mr. Frisch that “…Israeli backpackers… are too stoned...”? Is it a general fact or one of Frisch’s illusions, mirages? Didn’t you think it was good to check Mr. Frisch’s habits before printing such defamations? Should I conclude that all young Americans are under the influence…? Are Chinese girls an easy American target for a “telephone number”? What a chauvinistic notion. And, so it goes on… and on… and on. What you have printed is far from being humor. Finally, Mr. Frisch, come and visit me in Harbin when you have the time. Although you may think of me as “radical bourgeois intellectual” and “lefty” because I respect China, love her people, culture and tradition, I may be able to offer you a lesson or two in Chinese history, Jewish history in China, and show you the legacy of the Jews in Harbin. Prof. Dan Ben-Canaan Heilongjiang University, School of Western Studies Director, the Sino-Israel Research and Study Center - HLJU Research Fellow, Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences Member of the International Panel on transcultural processes between different ethnic, national and religious communities – History, Culture, Urban Development and Communities of Harbin from 1898 to 1949. University of Heidelberg, Germany – Heilongjiang University, China Harbin, PR China
Professor Ben Canaan provides us above (posted 3 times no less) with a shocking misreading of what is surely intended as a light-hearted exploration of a quirky cultural phenomenon. However, the nature of this tongue-in-cheek personal recollection is lost on this humorless critic. You ask what the purpose of the article was, Professor Canaan. Well, for someone like myself who has studied and worked in China for a number of years, speaks excellent Chinese (and YES, you must speak Chinese to have a chance at understanding China), and has been befuddled in numerous instances by Chinese views of my fellow Jews, this was an entertaining piece and one that very accurately laid out the zeitgeist. If we see the article in this light, and not as the article of record for the history of Jews in China, than Mr. Frisch has done a fine job. Mr. Frisch could have more soberly explored and analyzed the reasons for these views, how they got established in the Chinese conscious, and what this says about Chinese society; nevertheless, every article has its own purpose. As for Professor Ben-Canaan’s defense of Shapiro, Rittenberg and Epstein, collaborationists or outright supporters of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, well, at least we now know where the Professor stands. It is almost hilarious that the Professor than turns his acerbic pen to criticizing Mr. Frisch’s Jewish identity, for it was these Jewish stooges of the Communist Party that seem to have had the greatest identity issues of all.
Two books will rectify the ignorance of Mr Frisch about the Jews in China: 1. Tiberiu Weisz: "The Kaifentg Stone Inscriptions, The legacy of the Jewish Community in ancient China" (iUniverse 2006), and 2. Tiberiu Weisz: "The Covenant and the Mandate of Heaven, An In-depth comparative cultural study of Judasim and China" iUniverse 2008. Both are available on Amazon.com.
Two other books may contribute to this discussion, or perhaps guide its focus. Ehrlich, M.A., (Editor) The Jewish – Chinese Nexus: Ancient Civilizations in Modernity (Routledge, 2008); and Ehrlich, M.A., Jews and Judaism in Modern China (Routledge, 2009).
As for the future course of Chinese - Jewish relations, we at the Israel - Asia Center www.israelasiacenter.org are developing programs and strategy to guide its trajectory and invite interested parties to contribute their insight in more practical ways. Avrum