The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions: The Legacy of the Jewish Community in Ancient China

By Tiberiu Weisz

Points East, A Publication of the Sino-Judaic Institute, Vol. 23 No. 2, July 2008
The Covenant and the Mandate of Heaven: An In-depth Comparative Cultural Study of Judaism and China.
By Tiberiu Weisz (iUniverse, 2007)
Reviewed by Vera Schwarcz, Director/Chair, Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University, CT.

This is, simply put, a bold visionary book. It invites readers to contemplate distant and disparate events and thinkers in a way that weaves a common tapestry. The author is generous minded, erudite and provides readers with all the information needed for this cross-cultural journey. The challenge of this adventure remains daunting nonetheless. Kang Youweis words to Guangxu emperor in 1898 (quoted by Weisz on p 177) apply to reading this book as well: It is indeed like climbing a tree to seek fish- tough, but not foolish. In the end, the reward in understanding both Chin and Judaism is immense.
Tiberiu Weisz is not a newcomer to cross cultural dialogues. With origins stretching back to Transylvania (like myself), he is familiar with the mixtures of languages and religions from back home. A long time scholar of the Kaifeng stones inscriptions and of the Jewish communities of ancient China, he was well prepared for a more wide ranging inquiry into the similarities between Chinese and Jews. To his great credit, Tiberiu Weisz took a full decade to assemble and re-translate key original documents from each of these different traditions in order to show a compelling complementarity between them. In the preface to The Covenant and The Mandate, he confesses trepidation at the scope of his inquiry. This is understandable since Weisz book ranges from the ancient Liji and Tanach to the Cultural Revolution and the Holocaust. Even if one does not fully agree with authors conclusion that Judaism is the yang to Chinas yin-there is much in this important work to challenge, and to enrich, a wide variety of readers.
The focus throughout this carefully constructed book is upon similarities that never quite devolve into a forced identity between Chinese and Jewish cultural values. Starting with ideas of holiness embodied in Elohim and Shangdi, Weisz invites readers to follow the travels of Lao Zi beyond the pass. Whether the Chinese and Jewish commitment to the one force underlying all natural phenomena or shared understanding of benevolent kingship can be traced to news of Solomons rule spreading through Central Asia is not, in my view, the central question. Rather what is most startling in this book is a symmetry of historical experiences that does indeed lead Chinese and Jews to become experts in cultural survival. Weisz study goes beyond our current understanding of Chinese and Jewish traditions as the two oldest, uninterrupted cultures in the world. Many previous works (including my own Bridges Across Broken Times: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory) have circled this theme. What is fresh, and important in The Covenant and The Mandate, is the detailed, textual proof of exactly how Chinese and Jews confronted historical catastrophe and survived with renewed vigor.
Three key moments, Weisz argues, defined and shaped Jewish and Chinese worldviews. For Jews, the exile to Babylon in 586-516 BCE, the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the 20th century Holocaust provided fiery moments for self-definition and renewal. For Chinese, it was the imperial unification in 221 BCE, the Mongol conquest (1279-1368) and the more recent Cultural Revolution that challenged Confucianism and led to a new nationalist consciousness. Each of these events (as well as many others) is discussed at length and documented in terms of the thought-legacy that it provided for two civilizations growing more and more skilful in adaptation and survival. Weisz analytical paradigm is most effective when he creatively juxtaposes important thinkers who are rarely considered side by side. For me, reading about the Han Dynasty poet-statesmen Han Yu alongside th

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 6, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595817382

Tiberiu Weisz

Tiberiu Weisz has over 30 years of business and academic experience in Chinese Studies and in China. He is fluent in Chinese and Hebrew, taught Hebrew History and Chinese Religion at local colleges. He has published articles and translated a book into Chinese. Currently he is teaching advance Chinese. He lives with his wife and family in Minnesota.

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Copyright © 2006 by Tiberiu Weisz

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Contents

Introduction

The Testimony of the Stone Inscriptions

Translator’s Note

The Inscriptions

RECORD OF THE

REBUILDING OF THE PURE

AND TRUTH TEMPLE

A RECORD IN HONOR OF

THE DAOJING TEMPLE

RECORD OF THE REBUILDING OF THE PURE AND TRUTH TEMPLE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ON

THE BACK OF THE TABLET

What Do the Inscriptions Tell Us?

Sacrifice and Prayers

Levites and Cohanim

The Temple

History

The Han Dynasty

Assimilation

Glossary of Chinese Names and Terms

Glossary of Hebrew Names and Terms

Bibliography

END NOTES

To the memory of my parents Yoli and Kalman

Introduction

This new annotated translation provides researchers and laypersons a fresh look at the content of the Kaifeng stone inscriptions in a biblical historical setting. They can now for the first time in almost a century analyze and reflect upon the information in a Jewish context. While researching and cross referencing the Chinese text with biblical literature, I gradually became aware that the real purpose of the inscriptions was to remind the next generations of Chinese Jews that they should continue with the practice of the religion, pray to their Elohim, and that within prayer, they would find repentance. And just in case future generations would not remember the words of the prayers, the inscriptions included, verbatim, several prayers and blessings, detailed descriptions of manner of worship, and a reminder not to lose their Jewish identity. The history of the community was mentioned only for background purposes, and they seemed to attach little importance to it. The inscriptions emphasized that the teachings of the Scriptures were compatible with those of Confucius. The close similarities of both teachings posed a real challenge to the community; it exposed the Israelites to rapid sinicization at the expense of Judaism. Chinese worshippers practiced the ritual of three beliefs concurrently: Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Accordingly, the Israelites concluded that no conflict existed between the concurrent practice of Confucianism and Judaism. This was not a paradox in China. If the Israelites had been observing the rituals of Scripture in China for two thousand years, the religion must be continued and preserved; it must not die.

And indeed it did not die. It changed from biblical Judaism into a core of Judaism with a Confucian mask. Not until the seventeenth century were Westerners aware of the existence of Jews in China. When a missionary named Matteo Ricci met a Jew named Ai Tian in Beijing in 1605,¹

each was surprised to discover the faith of the other. The missionary had no idea that Jews lived in China, though once he realized that Ai Tian was indeed a Jew, he tried to convert him, saying that the Jewish faith belonged to an extinct religion. Ai Tian, on the other hand, was surprised to see that there were people outside China who practiced a religion similar to his but who were not Israelites. And so, he could not be persuaded that the Israelite religion did not exist anymore, and he could not be converted to Christianity. Rather, that incident made Ai Tian realize that perhaps the Israelite community in China was the last bastion of Judaism and headed for extinction.

That did not happen. Christian missionaries who ventured deeper into China two centuries later were surprised to come face to face with an entire community of Jews in the city of Kaifeng in Henan Province. They were enchanted with the prospect of converting them to Christianity and left us detailed eyewitness accounts of these encounters (see Smith 1851). Little attention was paid to the stone inscriptions placed at both sides of the entrance gate, though the missionaries rendered their version of the stelae into English. It was not until 1912—when Bishop Charles White, the head of the mission of the Canadian Church of England in China, rediscovered the stelae—that they were brought to the attention of the Western world. He acquired the stelae, made ink rubbings, and translated the text. As a result of White’s efforts, Westerners were able to acquire the remaining artifacts of the Kaifeng synagogue. The salvaged material was analyzed for content, calligraphy, language, ink, and paper for authentication and for dating purposes.

All this material was of utmost importance; it yielded a wealth of information that, when analyzed and catalogued, raised more questions than answers. Of particular difficulty was the irreconcilability of the inscriptions with the accounts and narratives of the missionaries and travelers. Though these narratives provided an eyewitness account of the community and the synagogue, researchers found enough inconsistencies to question their validity. Some of the reports could be corroborated neither by the inscriptions nor by historical data. The Israelites’ claim to antiquity in China and to an audience with an emperor could not be substantiated. Nor could researchers associate the content of the inscription with distinctively Jewish concepts, as Leslie asserted, We hardly ever find passages from Jewish Law translated into Chinese (Leslie 1972, p. 102). Many Chinese classical quotes were identified, and some traces of Judaism were concocted, but the inscriptions appeared to lack any trace of Judaism. Despite these shortcomings, some Western scholars, intrigued by the esoteric nature of the stelae and the missionary encounters, advanced their theories in articles and books. Some did exhaustive research of official Chinese histories with mixed results. Others wrote more popular versions, trying to reconcile the stone inscriptions with accounts reported by later travelers and missionaries. Chinese scholars also joined the ranks of publications. Their efforts netted us some good insight into the Chinese literature of the times, but the stone inscriptions still remained a mystery.

Why were they so mysterious? The most obvious reason was the difficulty of understanding the contents of the text. Scholars hoped to use the texts to recreate the history of the community, but the inscriptions made only a few references to the past, and instead they incorporated many scriptural and liturgical quotes to be read by future generations. The language posed its own difficulty. It was composed in a Chinese vernacular of the fifteenth-century CE, lacking punctuation, references, and annotations. A Chinese researcher, Chen Yuan (see Chen 1934), punctuated the text that served as the basis for Bishop White’s translation. White translated the inscriptions in a flowery language that reinforced his belief that the Chinese expressed themselves in indirect ways. His lack of deeper understanding of Judaism led him to the conclusion that the inscriptions contained very little traceable, distinctively biblical concepts. Western scholars and researchers adopted his translation as the official version; they refined, paraphrased, and recast the translation into more readable English, but, apart from cosmetic changes, the contents remained intact. Chinese scholars who had immersed themselves in this study concentrated on the contemporary history of the Jews in Kaifeng while relegating the inscriptions to secondary importance. Many of the ceremonial and liturgical quotes were not recognized and were subsequently ignored. Bishop

White’s translation served as the undisputed source book for the Chinese Jews.

The complexity of the matter did not end there. Not only did the existing primary and secondary sources emanate from one single translation, they also tried to reconcile the inscriptions with official Chinese histories. After exhaustive research, some of the names mentioned in the inscriptions were identified,² but, not surprisingly, no mention of the Israelites was found in classical Chinese annals. The Chinese in antiquity could hardly distinguish one foreigner from another, let alone distinguish a Jew from a Gentile. If we accepted the Israelites’ claim to their antiquity at face value, the basic fact still remained that they comprised no more than a couple of thousand people in an empire with a population of 43 million (Sa 1971, vol. 4 p. 19). Even their presence in Kaifeng was hard to trace, as they represented a minuscule minority in a city with a population of a quarter of a million households.³ In other words, they were too few and too insignificant to be mentioned in official censuses or local gazetteers.

I faced this problem when my research on a comparative cultural history of China and the Jews reached this juncture. The evidence turned out to be extremely elusive. No matter how imaginative and how flexible I tried to be, the inscriptions were too Confucian to be explained in Jewish terms. Reading and rereading the translation, I got the same feeling as my predecessors did: that the inscriptions contained too few Jewish concepts to be of significant value. That surprised me, because my comparative study told me otherwise. After exhaustive research, I still could not pinpoint the discrepancies, though I realized that something was missing. I had covered all the angles except the original Chinese text. Aware of the complexity of the original inscriptions, I started to examine sections that seemed to be most troublesome. My reading of the text revealed major discrepancies with White’s translation. That prompted me to take a completely fresh look at the original texts, resulting in the new translation.

Once the translation was completed, the discrepancies between the two translations became more pronounced, though at the time it did not seem to be of a major significance. Only when I juxtaposed my new translation with Hebrew context did a new pattern emerge.

The most significant difference between the two versions was that my translation displayed distinct traits of Jewish heritage. I was able to correlate the text to biblical sources. Bishop White’s translation highlighted Confucian and, to some extent, Christian concepts, whereas my version identified biblical references. The text left an unmistaken flavor of biblical Judaism. Historical events could be corroborated with biblical literature, and entire ancient Jewish prayers were reproduced in Chinese. Included in the inscription was an invaluable segment that described an audience with a Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) emperor. Unrecognized and overlooked in any prior research, this information was a critical starting point in recreating the history of the community. All of a sudden, the community had a history; it had an origin. Another significant realization was that the Confucian quotes, misquotes, and partial quotes were not due to lack of knowledge of the Chinese Classics but rather a signal to the future generations not to confuse Judaism with Confucianism.

Tracing the community to its origin was by far the most tedious task. Very little is known of the whereabouts of the Jews after their dispersion from Babylon, and even less is known of the communities scattered in Central Asia and China. To make matters more complex, Western interpretations of events in Central Asia were on a collision course with Chinese interpretations. Western historians did not agree with Chinese historians on the role that the Taklamakan desert, known to the Chinese as the Western Region (Xiyu), played in