China once called Judaism the religion that removes the sinew
Chinese observers noticed that their Jewish neighbours refused to eat a certain nerve in the leg, a rule traced to a verse in Genesis. So they named the faith Tiaojinjiao, roughly the sinew-removing religion. For centuries, Jewish communities in cities like Kaifeng prayed in Hebrew and Chinese and called their synagogue by the same word used for mosques.
How and when Jews first reached China is uncertain. One oral tradition has them arriving via Persia after Titus captured Jerusalem in 70 CE; a Kaifeng stone tablet claims they came from India during the Later Han dynasty. Firmer evidence comes from the ninth century, when the Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh described Jewish merchants, the Radhanites, trading along the Silk Road and living in several Chinese cities.
Kaifeng is the best known community, prominent between the tenth and eighteenth centuries, but far from the only one. Three inscribed steles found there record a synagogue built in 1163, list the community's 70 Chinese surnames and trace the faith from Abraham to Ezra. When a flood in 1461 destroyed Kaifeng's sacred texts, the Jews of the port city of Ningbo sent two Torah scrolls, a sign that Ningbo's community was large and observant. Communities are also known in Hangzhou, Yangzhou, Guangzhou, Beijing and other cities.
Integration ran deep. Jews adopted patrilineal descent, married Han Chinese and were sometimes called the Blue Hat Hui, the dominant population rarely distinguishing them from Muslim Hui. Some converted to Islam. Their own name for the religion, Yicileye jiao, partly transliterates Israel. Over the centuries most became indistinguishable from their neighbours, and the Chinese state does not count them among its 56 recognised minorities. Because their practice is considered to have lapsed, descendants seeking fast-track immigration to Israel must first convert to Orthodox Judaism.
A second wave arrived in modern times. After the First Opium War, Jews of Indian and Iraqi origin settled under British protection. Refugees followed from the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then from the Holocaust in the late 1930s and 1940s, when Shanghai set aside a special area to house them. Most left after the war or around the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.
Source: History of the Jews in China
