2009 My Kaifeng Adventure

Steven B. Zwickel
Sunday, July 26, 2009

Kaifeng, China

I took a four-credit course in college called “History of the Jews” and I remember Prof. Rivlin explaining that there had once been a Jewish community in China but that it had been assimilated and disappeared. That piqued my interest and, forty years later, when I learned that I would be near Kaifeng, I remembered what she’d said and I looked on-line for more information.

According to a paper published by the Center of Jewish Studies Shanghai, the ancient community of Jews in Kaifeng, China ended when their synagogue (originally built in 1163) was destroyed by a flood and they were assimilated.<http://www.cjss.org.cn/newa1.htm> Other sources online indicated that the Kaifeng Jews still exist, but that the only remnants of the synagogue are near some hospital on the northeast side of Kaifeng. From one of these websites I copied the Chinese characters for Jewish and the pinyin. I printed it out in Weishi, so I had a small piece of paper to show people that said 

Yóu tài  犹太

So my task was fairly straightforward: go to a city of 4,000,000 people where I can’t read the signs or speak the language and ask people who have no idea what Jew or Jewish means where I can find the Jewish community. No sweat.

The bus for Kaifeng doesn’t leave from the regular bus terminal. I had to go to a hotel on the east side of Zhengzhou to catch the bus, which costs 7¥ ($1) and takes about an hour to travel the 45 miles. The weather was beautiful, sunny and not too hot. The young woman who sat next to me uses the English name of Erica and, when she found out I teach at a university, she asked me a lot of questions about my trip to China and about my work. Erica is a student at Henan University in Kaifeng and she was on her way to a birthday party there. When she asked me why I was going to Kaifeng I told her I wanted to see the sights and that I was looking for Yóu tài, and I showed her my printed note. She looked at me and said, “You don’t look like a yóu tài.” 

I told her that she didn’t look Chinese to me and she looked startled. “I can’t tell if you are Chinese or Japanese, Vietnamese, Mongol, Korean, Tibetan, or American. There are many people in my city who look like you.” It took a while for her to digest this.

She asked me for help with an English essay she is writing, so I did a little editing and some teaching and we rolled along into Kaifeng, arriving there about 11:45.

I told Erica I wanted to find a hotel where I could get a map of Kaifeng and she offered to share a cab with me. We went to the center of town and she let me off on Dongda Jie across from the Bianjing Hotel, where I bought a Chinese language map (no English one available there, although I did find a very good one online). {Remember the Bianjing Hotel; it comes up later in the story!}

A word about street names in China and in Kaifeng in particular. Most of the millions of streets in China do not have street signs identifying them. Even in big cities, like HangZhou and GuangZhou, you will rarely find a sign telling you what street you are on. There are some in Chinese, here and there. English signs are rarer still. So, even with a map you don’t always know where you are. In Kaifeng, which is thousands of years old, different segments of the same street often have different names. The street the Bianjing Hotel is on is called Dongda Jie, but a few blocks to the west the same street is called Xida Jie and a few blocks to the east it is Caizhengting Lie.

I headed a few blocks west to see SongDuYu Jie, a street of old style buildings that is a major tourist attraction. I took a side street to avoid some heavily armed tourist traps and decided it was time to start looking for the lost Jews of China. I tried a small shop and the woman behind the counter shook her head (the first of about 50 people to do so—I got used to it after a few hours). But another woman from the same shop came running after me as I was leaving and lead me to an alley. She pointed towards an odd-looking building, so I went to take a look. What luck! It had a middle-eastern look to it. I went around back and spotted a small brick structure that must have been the mikva (ritual bath). It was too easy. Some men who looked vaguely middle eastern were standing near the door. As I watched, they took off their shoes and went inside. Then I could hear them praying. It was a mosque.

OK. Back to SongDuYu Jie. Interesting shops along the way, mostly filled with calligraphy supplies and tourist trinkets. I tried showing my Yóu tài card to some shopkeepers, but they all shook their heads.

At the end of the street is LongTing Park and the Dragon pavilion which looked very inviting. I paid my 45¥ and entered. It was such a lovely day. They have a wonderful lake divided by a long causeway decorated with fiberglas statues of great figures in Chinese history. Almost all the signs were in Chinese (The Chinese have not yet come to understand that non-Chinese visitors are put off by a lack of international signage), but this was once an imperial capitol, so I could tell that many of them were images of the emperors and heroes (According to Wikipedia, Kaifeng was the largest city in the world from 1013 to 1127, when the Song Dynasty gave way to the Mongols.)

I left the park via the northern gate. I could see another popular tourist destination in the distance because it towered over the northeast corner of the city. The Youguosi Pagoda (佑國寺塔), now known as the Iron Pagoda (鐵塔) dates back to 1049. It isn’t really made of iron, but the ceramic tiles make it look like metal. I could have walked straight towards it along the little Beizhi River, but I have always followed the “road less travelled” so I walked east around Panjia (the eastern half of the lake).

I passed some women who were selling songbirds in cages. In one shop, I showed the man my Yóu tài card and he nodded vigorously. “Yóu tài good, very good!” he said. I asked him “Zai nar?” Where are they? and he shrugged his shoulders.

I wandered through the back streets of the city, stopping every once in a while to pull out my Yóu tài card. When I reached the intersection of a wide avenue, I stopped to ask the owner of a foodstand. This fellow looked very full of himself in a Mussolini kind of way. No, he shook his head and informed me, in English, that there were no Yóu tài living in this district. If I wanted to find Yóu tài I should look on the other side of the avenue.

So I crossed over and walked another few blocks until I came to an outdoor fabric market. I stopped to look at some cloth printed with the official insignia of The Ohio State University®©™. (Sometimes I think C in a circle stands for “no copywrite in China”). The man at the next booth at first seemed puzzled by my Yóu tài card. Then his face lit up and he pointed directly towards the south. That didn’t feel right, so I asked him several times if he was sure about the direction. He was absolutely positive. So I turned back to the south.

I got about 100 meters when his daughter caught up to me, all out of breath. She pointed back to the north. Her father was now absolutely sure that the Yóu tài are north of here.

And so it went. I kept showing my Yóu tài card to people and no one was able to help me. One well-dressed man who spoke fluent English informed me that the Yóu tài lived to the southwest of Henan University. I headed east until I reached a great gateway, but there were no signs in English to tell me what it was. I stopped a man with a briefcase and he told me that I was in front of Henan University. I showed him my Yóu tài card and he offered to call Mr. Tai for me if I had a cellphone number. I thanked him and started walking to the southwest.

No luck. After a block or two I began showing my Yóu tài card to people again. Finally, a hotel desk clerk told me that she knew exactly where the Yóu tài were. She wrote it out for me on the back of a receipt. I needed to walk south as far as XueYuanMen Street, where I would find something called Si Men. That’s where the Yóu tài can be found.

I walked back to the same broad avenue I’d crossed an hour ago going east. This time I was going west. Just as I got to the other side I met a man wearing the white brimless cap worn by Chinese Moslems. He stopped me and pointed at his cap and then at my head. I didn't understand what he was saying. Perhaps he was scolding me for not wearing a hat on a sunny day, but it seemed to me that he had determined that I looked like a follower of Islam and he wanted to know why I wasn’t keeping my head covered. I said to him in Mandarin, “Wo shi Yóu tài ren.” I am a Jew. He looked shocked and walked away like he’d seen a ghost.

I passed a house with an official “Tourist Site” sign on the front gate. A group of nicely dressed men and women were leaving and I asked them what the place was. They said it was where Liu Shaoqi, former Chairman of the PRC, died (Wikipedia later informed me that he died from medical neglect in 1969).

I was on a quest to find out if there are any remnants of the old Jewish community of Kaifeng, Henan Province, China. I had wandered around the city for 3 hours showing people a card that said “take me to your Jews” and I had just been told to go to a street called Xue Yuan Men Liu to look for Si Men.

Xue Yuan Men Road had a street sign in English! I walked west half a block and saw some young men sitting at a table outside the gate of a building. I asked about Si Men.

“Sorry, this is a hospital. We don’t know anything called Si Men.” This was good news, I thought, because the Jewish community was supposedly near a hospital. I walked on to the corner, where I came to a street with a covered market. I asked at one stall and then another, “Zai nar, Si Men?” Where is Si Men? One man gestured up the street. I showed him the note with Si Men written on it. He nodded energetically and pointed again. “Nar.” It’s over there.

I walked north, up the street, past the end of the covered market. The street narrowed to an alley and turned abruptly to the right and then to the left. I was starting to feel a bit silly, but I kept going. At the very next cross street, I found it. There stood a large, Western-style building with imposing windows and a broad front staircase. And a big cross on the roof.

Obviously there was some confusion in the minds of the Chinese about the different Western religions. I thought that maybe the priest would know where the Yóu tài could be found, so I went into the church looking for him. I didn’t know the word, so I called out “Ba-ba,” hoping that “Father” is used the same way in Chinese. No luck. I walked around in back and found a nice older lady who was wearing a cross around her neck. I asked her where the Ba-ba was and she smiled, crossed herself, and put her palms together. “Bu shi Christian; “Wo shi Yóu tài ren.” I am not a Christian; I am a Jew. She smiled. I smiled and walked away.

After four hours of searching, I decided to hang it up. I had tried dozens of people with no luck. Even if I kept at it, I would probably wind up at a mosque or a church again because the Chinese had no understanding of what I was trying to find. I was sunburned, I was tired, and I had just been charged 5¥ (about double the going rate) for a bottle of water. I headed back towards the west. I planned to walk until 5:30, then get something to eat, and then take a cab to the bus stop.

I walked west through a street filled with music schools. In one shop two boys were playing classical guitar. In another a girl was murdering a song on a clarinet. I saw one boy playing a hulusi like the one I bought in Hangzhou. I was on a small side street when I noticed a tour bus parked so as to block the sidewalk. It was right next to a beautifully decorated gate. I took a photo of the gate and peeked into the bus.

It was empty except for the driver and a young woman sitting in the guide’s seat. “May I help you?” she asked.

“You speak English!” I was a bit surprised.

“Of course, I am a tour guide.”

“Good. May I ask you where are your tourists?”

“They have gone shopping.” She gestured towards the next cross street.

“Are the Americans?”

“They are from Belgium.” Then she added that the gate I’d admired was the entrance to a sculpture garden and that I should consider going in to see it.

I thanked her and walked on. The garden didn’t look all that interesting and the entrance fee was 20¥, so I kept going.

The shopping street looked like a hundred others I’ve seen in China—shoes, jewelry, designer® clothes. Boring. If only I could find someone here who spoke English, who knows the city, who can tell the difference between Jews and Gentiles, and who might just know where the Yóu tài ren are. . .

Imagine your correspondent on a late afternoon standing in the middle of a moderately busy shopping street—sunburned and sweaty, clutching a folded city map that he can’t read—as he suddenly realizes what has just happened. Right in the middle of this scene, he throws back his head and shouts an obscenity.

I am not proud of the phrase I chose, but sacred excrement seemed appropriate at the time (and besides which, it was in English, so maybe nobody understood what I said.)

I raced back to the corner; the tour bus was still there. The guide was in her seat.

“Sorry to bother you, but I have one more question.” I showed her my Yóu tài card. She read it and looked at me.

“Are you Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to find the Yóu tài ren? OK” She wrote in pinyin and Mandarin on the back of my precious Yóu tài card. Nán jiào jīng hú tŏng. “you go here. There’s no synagogue, but the family there, they are Jews. The family name is Zhào. Go to number 21. Do you know hú tŏng?”

“Yes, it’s a narrow alley.” (Before the Olympics last summer, the government destroyed hundreds of ancient communities in Beijing built along the hú tŏng. Thank you Brian Williams and NBC News)

“It’s kind of far. You should take a taxi. Show this to the driver.” She added some Chinese to the paper. “It’s near a school. He’ll know where to drop you. Walk down the street across from the school and it’s the first hú tŏng on the right.”

I thanked her and half-ran back to the shopping street. I caught a cab in 15.6 nanoseconds and showed the driver the directions. He nodded and we were off.

How do you define irony? We went south a few blocks, then east. The street looked familiar. We passed the Bianjing Hotel (remember?) going east. One block past the hotel, he pulled over. The school was on the north side of the street. We were one block from where I’d started five hours ago.

I paid and got out. Less than 50 meters from the main street I came to a hú tŏng on the right. No sign, but it was in the right place, so I kept going. A group of people were building a wall with red bricks. One of them saw me and made a comment about weiguoren—non-Chinese. I glared at him and kept going.

I found #21 and a sign that said Chinese & Hebrew Cultures Corner. Another sign on the wall informed me that this was #21 Teaching-the-Torah Lane. I called out, but got no reply. I took some photos and was about to leave when a woman came out of the house next door. She nodded at me and waved towards #21, indicating I should go into the courtyard. I did.

“Shalom aleichem!” I called out. No answer.

A door to my left opened and a Chinese man walked towards me and spoke. “Shalom. Anee Yehudee.” Hello. I am a Jew.

“Shalom aleichem. Gam anee Yehudee, m’Aratzot Abrit.” Hello. I am also a Jew, from the United States.

He invited me in and showed me to a chair. A plaque on the wall had the Shema (Hear, O Israel prayer) in Hebrew and Chinese. He introduced me to his wife, Guo Yan.

I got very emotional. I had found what I set out to find and it was kind of overwhelming. Guo Yan is a descendant of the original Kaifeng Jews, who have lived here for more than 1000 years. She has dedicated her life to reviving the Jewish community and to making it part of Chinese history. You can read Guo Yan’s story on her website at <http://hi.baidu.com/yisrael/blog/item/90d46ecec371c435f9dc61cd.html>. She has always known that she was Jewish, but has only recently been able to learn more about her ancestral faith. The rabbis in Israel have determined that the Kaifeng Jews’ blood is so diluted with Chinese that they have to convert before they can emigrate to Israel. Some of Guo Yan’s family have moved to Israel, where they are having a tough time adjusting.

In Mandarin, the word for to go is qù and the word for to return is huí. I was taught that you never say that you will go home in Mandarin, because you are returning, so huí is the only correct word to describe going back to a place from which you started. When Esther Guo Yan talked about going to Israel, she always used the English word “return,” but I think her own mind she was thinking huí.

Guo Yan is learning Hebrew and has chosen the name Esther for her Hebrew name. She told me it is a very popular name among the Kaifeng Jews. I suspect that is because it is Persian and many of them came to China from Persia by way of India.

Esther Guo Yan told me that it was difficult to persuade the Kaifeng authorities to recognize the Jewish presence in the city. They finally got a plaque put up to mark the site of the old synagogue, which was destroyed by a flood in the mid-1800s. The same flood washed away the Jewish cemetery and many of the houses in the Jewish quarter. Guo Yan’s home survived the flooding (it must be several hundred years old) and the synagogue used to be just a few meters north of the house. Her grandfather started to build a model of the synagogue, but never finished it. It sits on top of a cabinet where Esther Guo Yan has been collecting artifacts and evidence of the Jewish presence in China. The torah from Kaifeng is now in Cincinnati at the University. A stone marking the site of the synagogue is in the Kaifeng Museum.

I met Esther Guo Yan’s grandmother and bought a paper-cutout made by her sister which says, May God give you blessings Fú shàng dì cí in Chinese.

Esther Guo Yan’s husband, Yang Wen Jiang, is not a descendant of the Kaifeng Jews and he is wrestling with learning Hebrew. He videotaped my entire meeting with Esther.

I asked Esther Guo Yan if she had found something that was missing in her life and she said yes. What do you want me to tell people about the Kaifeng Jews, I asked her. Tell them that we are real and that we exist, she replied. Learn more about Esther Guo Yan  at the website <http://hi.baidu.com/yisrael>.

If you’d like to learn more about the Kaifeng Jews, here are some resources:

Leslie, Donald D., The Survival of the Chinese Jews; the Jewish community of Kaifeng , Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975.

Malek, R. (Ed.) (2000). From Kaifeng…to Shanghai: Jews in China. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series XLVI (Sankt Augustin, 2000).

Xu, Xin, The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture and Religion, Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2003.

You will learn that the Kaifeng Jews were invited to live in China a thousand years ago by the Song Emperor, who wanted them to bring their knowledge of raising and dyeing cotton with them from India (they were in the shmata trade even then!). Over the centuries, they became assimilated and are now indistinguishable from the Chinese. It’s an interesting story.

I intended to leave my business card with Esther, but I think I picked it up by mistake as I was leaving. She asked for help pronouncing some Hebrew words and I did my best, but I told her that my godson Ezra is far more skilled at the language than I am and that, since she and he both have Skype accounts, she should be able to communicate with him directly.

We said our goodbyes and I left them there. I was kind of dazed. I walked back past the Bianjing Hotel because I wanted to laugh out loud.