The kidnapping last month of Guo Yan, a descendant of the ancient Jewish community in Kaifeng, is a disturbing new chapter in the annals of a tiny community that existed under the radar for a thousand years – until now
Published in "Haaretz": https://www.haaretz.com/magazine/2023-05-24/ty-article-magazine/.premium/guo-esther-yan-was-abducted-her-tale-does-not-bode-well-for-chinas-kaifeng-jews/00000188-4ea7-df79-a19d-febfe4240000
In mid-April, Noam Urbach received a worrying letter by email. “I am Guo Yan, a descendant of the Jews of Kaifeng,” the letter began. “Seven days ago, on April 7, 2023, in the evening, I was abducted by a number of men as I was walking in the street, and was forced into a car in which there were two men wearing civilian clothes who did not present identification documents. They claimed they were government employees. After driving several hours far from the city, I was taken to a hotel room under guard. Not having my mobile phone with me when I was kidnapped, I asked to use a phone in order to inform my family, so that my sudden disappearance would not make then anxious, but they wouldn’t let me.
“After five days, I was driven back to Kaifeng and taken to an empty room, where I was interrogated by four men. One of them was wearing a police uniform and claimed he was a police officer. They recorded the entire conversation. At no stage did they state the reason for abducting me or claim that I had violated any law or regulation. I was released after the interrogation.”
Urbach, a China scholar and commentator on Chinese affairs who has spent many years studying the history of China’s Jews, was only one of the people who saw the letter – which was sent to a group of Jewish activists who are connected with the U.S.-based Sino-Judaic Institute, which maintains ties with the descendants of the historic Jewish community in Kaifeng. The city, which is in Henan Province in central China and has a population of about 5 million, was in the past the country’s capital. It’s also known as the only place where an active Jewish community existed in imperial China.
Why was Guo disappeared for five days? Why did a large number of government agents wander about the vicinity of the building where she lives while she was gone? The abductors didn’t explain, but Guo, who also uses the Hebrew name Esther, has a theory. On the days she was absent, the Polish ambassador to China visited Kaifeng. Guo is certain that the two events are connected: that the authorities removed her from the city as a preventive measure, so that she would not be there should the ambassador request to meet her or other descendants of the Jews of Kaifeng. “I was held as a captive not because of something I did,” she wrote, “but because someone wanted to meet with me.”
That might sound paranoid to those unfamiliar with the background. In the past few years, the Chinese government has taken a hard line against ethnic and religious minorities across the country. From the Buddhists in Tibet to the Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and the Christians in the east of the country, the authorities object to every manifestation of religion that is not authorized by the government. This persecution has also affected the tiny Jewish community of Kaifeng. Urbach terms this a policy of “total totalitarianism,” which reaches down to the lowest resolution: persecution of every expression of religious life, however small and local.
Guo, who is in her early 40s, can be said to represent that small, local level. She is a significant figure among the descendants of Kaifeng’s Jews – indeed, Urbach has written about her activity in his academic work and she has spoken to Western journalists in the past. “She stood out especially because of her unique stance,” Urbach says. “Instead of focusing on hopes of immigrating to Israel or the United States, she advocated the reconstruction of the unique Jewishness that existed in Kaifeng.”
Guo’s home is adjacent to the site where the historic synagogue in Kaifeng once stood. The ancient structure was demolished in the 19th century, but the family preserved objects associated with the Jewish community. Today, Guo maintains a private, unofficial museum at the site that is devoted to the city’s Jewish heritage. These days, the authorities prohibit the public display of anything identified with Jewishness, and as such they are opposed to the use of the venue as a historical or religious site.
Although Guo is fearful for her fate, she is no longer reluctant to go public. After all, the authorities know who she is, and international exposure might make it more difficult for them to persecute her. In an interview with Haaretz earlier this month, she agreed to talk about the abduction. She requested that we communicate by email, as her mobile phone is under surveillance by the powers that be, she says. She responded to questions in English with answers in Chinese, which have been translated here.
“I was born in 1980,” she wrote, by way of background. “My mother is a descendant of the Kaifeng Jews; her father was born to a Jewish father.” She attached a photograph from 1906 of her great-great grandfather standing next to a stone tablet from the year 1679. In the past the stone stood next to her house, near the synagogue site, but it is now apparently in the possession of the municipal museum of Kaifeng and is not on display. “In the year of my birth there was a reform that allowed foreigners to enter China,” she adds. “The appearance of foreigners from all over the world in Kaifeng, among them Jews, led me to infer from what my parents, my neighbors and visitors said, that I am Jewish.”
Guo is devoting her life to documenting Jewish history and culture in Kaifeng. “If there are visitors who want to learn about the culture or history of Kaifeng’s Jews, they are invited to contact me.” She says she is not connected to any organization or religion, does not cooperate with organizations and activists in China or elsewhere, nor, she adds, is there any element of extremism in her work, as the authorities are liable to allege. “I am only telling about history,” she says. “The interpretation – extreme or not extreme – is in the eyes of the beholder.”
The recent incident was unusual, she says, but it wasn’t the first time she was harassed. “I am frequently harassed,” she notes. “In some cases they removed and wrecked informative signs outside my home that advertised my research activity and ways to contact me. In one case, when I held a reception in my apartment, cameras and inspectors showed up below the building. When my mother came to visit me, I was detained and asked what she wanted.” She adds that people who identified themselves as government officials have knocked on her door many times and said they wanted to talk to her. They also informed her that her telephone was being monitored.
Do you expect help of any sort from Israel or from the world Jewish community?
“No, I don’t expect help, because the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews are not recognized as Israelis (or Jews) by the government of Israel or the government of China. I have only a Chinese ID card. What I went through is the result of the Chinese government’s conception that Jewish history and culture are not an appropriate subject for the Jewish descendants to tell foreign visitors about.”
Have you considered leaving China?
“I want to learn about the development of Jewish culture in Kaifeng. Leaving Kaifeng would mean giving up that work. I can’t just give up the work because of danger. They might hope that I will give up and leave, but I do not want to leave, at least not at this stage.”
Indeed, the city’s Jewish community is a riveting and extraordinary slice of history. “It’s actually the only Jewish community that is documented in China,” Urbach says. “There are modern communities, like the Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai, the Russian Jews in Harbin, and afterward also Yekkes [German-speaking Jews] and other Holocaust refugees, but that is a completely different subject. There is no connection between the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews and communities of foreign Jews who live in China. In fact, the foreign communities are forbidden to take part in Jewish activities with Chinese citizens – including the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews – because Judaism is not officially recognized in China and is effectively legitimate only for foreigners.”
Students of the subject think that the community’s first members were Persian-speaking merchants who apparently arrived via the Silk Route between the 10th and 12th centuries C.E. According to the earliest stone tablet that has been found, from 1489, a synagogue – the only one known ever to have existed in China – was inaugurated in the year 1163, so it’s likely that this was when the merchants coalesced into a community. Once established there, Urbach notes, they also underwent a process of Sinicization.
“They created a kind of syncretism of Jewish elements – such as the use of Hebrew, at least in writing – with the Chinese language. For example, there are stone tablets on which a Chinese text has been engraved that vaguely tells the biblical story, from Noah and Abraham to Moshe and even Ezra, but it’s mixed with Chinese mythological figures and the discourse bears distinctly Confucian features. There were also rituals that were unique to the Kaifeng Jews. The synagogue was managed in large measure like a Confucian temple and included ancestor worship.”
The community’s existence became known to the Western world only hundreds of years later. “The community was discovered by chance in 1605 by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who is known as the first missionary in China,” Urbach relates. “The Jesuits visited Kaifeng several times, documented what they knew about the community and sent the information to Europe. It’s a fascinating history, and it has moved a great many people, Jews and Christians alike, from that time to the present. For no few Jewish Sinologists, China is ostensibly a foreign and remote area of study, yet suddenly a Jewish connection is revealed.”
The encounter with the Kaifeng community was meaningful for Urbach, too. “In 1999, I was in Kaifeng as a student for half a year,” he says. “I didn’t find a functioning Jewish community when I was there, but I discovered the immense importance of the story of the local Jewish community for the city, as well as the tension and sensitivity around the question of its existence. I’ve been back to visit a few times, the last was in 2018.”
Urbach is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the subject of Christian influences on the Kaifeng Jewish community. He spent two years as a researcher and a teacher of Hebrew and Talmud at what was the first center of its kind in China for the study of Judaism at Shandong University in eastern China. For more than a decade Urbach taught Chinese at universities in Israel and helped Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in translation of texts, films and other Holocaust related material into Chinese for Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Parallel to his academic research, he also collected material for a documentary film about the Jewish community in Kaifeng. However, fearing for the consequences for the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews who took part in the filming, he decided to shelve the project for the time being.
Urbach says that research estimates that the community reached its peak size at the beginning of the 17th century, toward the end of the Ming Dynasty, totaling a few thousand individuals. The members of the community didn’t speak Hebrew, but there are testimonies to the effect that at least the elders of the community could read the Torah in Hebrew. According to Urbach, not much is known about the community’s observance of the Jewish festivals. “It’s thought that they practiced circumcision, but the custom wasn’t preserved beyond the beginning of the nineteenth century,” he says. “They also observed Shabbat in some way and held prayers.”
During prayer service, the male congregants customarily wore a tallit-like headdress. One of the Jesuit priests who visited the community related that a blue kippa set them apart from their Muslim-Chinese neighbors, who wore white head coverings, and so the Jews were known as “blue-capped Muslims.” In the past the community was also known as the “sinew-plucking sect” – an apparent reference to the ban on eating the “gid hanasheh” (the sciatic nerve) of animals, thereby differentiating their laws of kashrut from the dietary laws of their Muslim neighbors.
If we leap ahead in time, in the 19th century, there was no longer a real community in Kaifeng.
“True, according to documentation by the British, who arrived in 1850, they found the synagogue with the books and some inscriptions intact, but the community was sparse, and lacking in vitality. The British envoys succeeded in buying some of the objects in the synagogue, including Torah scrolls and also a genealogical book that documented all the deceased of the community over a certain period in the 17th century. It’s the only document anywhere that combines Hebrew and Chinese, and it attests to a religious existence that combined the two languages.”
At the beginning of the 20th century, Urbach relates, an Anglican bishop who lived in the city tried to bring together the community’s members, but to no avail. Despite this, there was always an awareness that there were descendants of Jews living in the city. “By the 20th century,” he says, “they already knew that they were part of a well-known community called ‘Yuotai’ – Jews.”
After the 1949 revolution, there was a process of registering China’s official minorities. Were the Jews recognized by the authorities as an ethnic minority?
“There is documentation to the effect that the local government in Kaifeng sent representatives of the descendants of the Jews to Beijing in order to be recognized as an official minority, apparently out of the understanding that there was a world Jewish community and a Jewish state, and because there are descendants of such a community here, too, it should be given recognition. The delegation met with the prime minister, but it was decided not to recognize them as a minority. At the same time, it’s recorded by government officials that their rights should be preserved and they should not be subjects of discrimination. It was simply a small group and didn’t really exist as a [functioning] community.”
After the death of Mao Zedong, when China began opening up to the world, a number of processes took place concurrently. “There was enthusiasm at the discovery of the community’s descendants, but it was a romantic enthusiasm, both on the part of Jews in the West and on the part of Christians as well,” Urbach relates. “There was curiosity that led to visits by individuals and groups that came to Kaifeng in order to discover the Chinese Jews. City authorities responded to that interest from outside. That led to a program to revive a physical presence of Jewish history in Kaifeng.
“Following the opening of the Israeli embassy in Beijing, in 1992, the feeling in the local government was that the preservation of Kaifeng’s Jewish heritage had been given the go-ahead. A plan to rebuild the synagogue at the original site and in its historic form was quickly approved, this time as a museum of the history of the local Jews and rather than a functioning house of worship. In addition, a society for the research of Chinese Jewry was established in Kaifeng, and local authorities recognized the descendants of the Jewish community as Jews on a semi-official basis. These developments also stirred hopes among both local descendants and enthusiasts from abroad for the community’s revival. At the same time, some of the descendants also harbored the hope that immigration to Israel would be possible.
But in the mid-1990s, all these plans came to an abrupt halt. The research society was shut down, as was the office that was in charge of establishing the museum, and the registration of any local residents as Jews was erased. Urbach says: “Apparently the central government realized that something was happening in Kaifeng that was liable to give rise to a sentiment of religious revival. They decided that it must be nipped in the bud.”
The government homed in on the person who was perceived as the leader of the Jews’ descendants, a professor from Beijing who headed the society for the study of Jewish history and culture in Kaifeng and who had also visited Israel. “Having become a representative figure of the community, he was forced to leave Kaifeng, was pensioned off early from the National Academy of Social Sciences and was silenced. He was placed under house arrest, and to a certain degree remains under house arrest to this day,” Urbach says. “I visited him in his home and found a cowed, defeated man.”
According to Urbach, at the time there was no active Jewish community in Kaifeng, but there were potentially hundreds or even thousands of descendants who might identify themselves as Jews given the right conditions. Most of them were not actively engaged with questions of their Jewish identity, but there were always a few dozen activists who did deal with the subject. They were in contact with the foreign visitors, requested support from the authorities and from abroad, and some said they wanted to immigrate to Israel.
At the end of the 1990s there was in fact a small aliya (after official conversion), and during the 2000s there was something of another Jewish awakening, which the authorities chose to ignore. “People organized to mark Shabbat and Jewish festivals at a community level,” Urbach says, “and two unofficial study centers were opened in rented apartments with foreign teachers and foreign financing.”
Who was behind all that?
“The Sino-Judaic Institute in the United States and the Jerusalem-based Shavei Israel organization, which succeeded Amishav [an organization that maintained ties with groups connected with the Jewish people that were not under the purview of the Jewish Agency, such as the Bnei Menashe in India and the descendants of the anusim, who were forced to abandon Judaism]. There was also support from Christian groups.”
What is Israel’s position in this?
“The approach in Israel, at least in the diplomatic context, was to see it as an historic symbol of friendship between the nations. China too had an interest in promoting this message: an ancient Jewish community, a thousand years old, that had never suffered antisemitism. It’s a slogan that both sides, and especially the Chinese, liked, and still do.”
Urbach also offers an illustration of the complex relations between Israel and the descendants of the Kaifeng community, who are not considered Jews by the Chief Rabbinate. “Israel’s first ambassador to Beijing, Zev Sufott, decided that his initial official visit as ambassador outside the capital would be to Kaifeng. He sought to carry out a historic gesture by the government of Israel toward China, and it was actually his Chinese hosts who introduced him to the community’s descendants. I interviewed him for my research, and he told me that it was plain to him that the descendants of the Jews whom he met ‘are Jews like I am Chinese.’”
The final stage in the story of the Kaifeng community began with the rise to power of the current president of China, Xi Jinping, a hardliner when it comes to ethnic and religious minorities. “In the middle of the past decade, there was a clear change for the worse in the attitude toward the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews,” Urbach notes. “The change is related to the Chinese policy that opposes any manifestation of religion that goes outside the official organizations which are supervised by the Communist Party. However, in my opinion there is also a specific apprehension about importing a Jewish-Muslim conflict into China, given that in the old part of Kaifeng there is also a significant Muslim-Chinese population.”
According to Urbach, “It actually started with an optimistic report in The New York Times, possibly too optimistic, about a Passover seder held in Kaifeng in 2015. The report drew attention in Beijing and angered the authorities. Afterward the two Jewish study centers were shut down. One of the families of the descendants arrived in New York and requested political asylum on the grounds of religious persecution. The request was apparently granted.
“After that event, the authorities began cracking down, and prohibited any public manifestation of Jewish historic existence in Kaifeng. A stone monument that had been installed outside the historic synagogue a few years earlier by the authorities themselves was suddenly removed. The municipal museum, which had an entire wing devoted to the city’s Jewish history, was shut down in order to construct a new building. When the new museum opened, in 2018, there was no longer a trace of the Jewish wing and no mention whatsoever of the Jewish past. They simply erased the Jewish history that was unique to the city. Instead of taking pride in the historic stone tablets, they are hiding them.”
In the same year, according to Anson Laytner, the president of the Sino-Judaic Institute, Jewish communal gatherings were barred and an SJI teacher was expelled from Kaifeng. The national authorities, he tells Haaretz, “are attempting to obliterate all traces of Jewish life in Kaifeng, present and past, not as a result of antisemitism, but as an extension or consequence of the government’s campaign against non-unauthorized religions. Judaism,” he explains, “despite a 1,000-year history in China, is not an authorized religion, nor are Jews a recognized ethnic minority.”
Laytner adds, “If Israel were to express its concern in a non-confrontational, friendly way, China might be inclined to find an internal resolution to its ‘Jewish problem’ by talking with the Kaifeng Jewish descendants.”
In the meantime, Urbach discerns extreme caution also among Chinese academics, who are afraid to address the subject of Chinese Jews. A case in point, he says, is a study by a Chinese anthropologist who investigated the story of the two dozen or so Jewish descendants from Kaifeng who underwent conversion to Judaism and immigrated to Israel. Her study included an analysis of their complex identity. But in complete contrast to academic custom, her article, which was published in English in a scientific journal last September, appeared under a pseudonym.
“After looking into the subject, we know almost for certain who wrote the article,” Urbach says. “She is a Chinese research student who learned Hebrew in Beijing and did the research within the framework of M.A. studies at a prestigious university in England. But she has since returned to China, and it was apparently made clear to her that publishing the article in her own name was liable to be harmful to her.”
There was hope that in this period, with China reopening after Covid, the government would show renewed acceptance of Kaifeng Jews or at least ignore the community’s barely noticeable activity, as it had in the past. “But events such as the abduction [of Guo] and the publication of an article under a false name are a clear indication that things are moving in the opposite direction,” Urbach says.
Guo, for her part, says she will continue with her work, but that she is genuinely concerned for her safety. “What will happen the next time a foreign visitor wants to talk with me about the Jewish community?” she wrote in last month’s letter. “Suddenly, I will be abducted again. And if I resist strongly, maybe the abductors will decide simply to solve the problem once and for all. It might be, say, that a drunk truck driver will run me over the next time I’m out in the street. Therefore, while I am still able to speak out, I am writing this and trying to send it to you.”
The letter ends by cautioning the letter’s readers not to call her, because, she says, her cell phone is under government surveillance. “Your reply will only bring you unnecessary troubles,” she notes, and sums up: “I am sending you [this information] not to ask for help or a response from anyone, but simply to complete my work: to document and tell the history.”
דיויד סטברו 