Jews of China: From Kaifeng to Shanghai and Beyond

The Most Unexpected Diaspora

When people think about the Jewish diaspora, they think of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East — perhaps even Ethiopia or India. China rarely makes the list. And yet Jews have lived in China for more than a thousand years, their story one of the most fascinating and least known chapters in Jewish history.

It is a story that stretches from the Silk Road to the Second World War, from an ancient synagogue in the heart of imperial China to the teeming streets of wartime Shanghai. It includes merchants and refugees, scholars and survivors, assimilation so complete that a community nearly vanished — and a modern rediscovery that is still unfolding.

Kaifeng: A Thousand Years of Chinese Judaism

The city of Kaifeng, in central China’s Henan province, was once one of the largest cities in the world. During the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), it was the imperial capital — a cosmopolitan center of trade, culture, and learning that drew merchants from across Asia and beyond.

Among those merchants were Jews. Exactly when they arrived and from where is debated, but the most widely accepted theory places their arrival along the Silk Road sometime in the tenth or eleventh century, likely from Persia or Central Asia. They brought with them Torah scrolls, religious knowledge, and a determination to maintain their faith in a land where no one had heard of Abraham or Moses.

The Kaifeng Jews built a synagogue — or, as they called it in Chinese, a libai si, literally a “temple of worship” — that stood for nearly seven hundred years. Records indicate it was first constructed in 1163 and rebuilt multiple times after floods (the Yellow River, which flows near Kaifeng, is notoriously destructive). At its peak, the community may have numbered over a thousand families.

What makes the Kaifeng community extraordinary is how it navigated two worlds. The Jews of Kaifeng adopted Chinese names, spoke Chinese, dressed in Chinese clothing, and participated in the imperial examination system. Several members achieved positions of prominence in the Chinese bureaucracy. At the same time, they maintained Jewish rituals — circumcision, dietary laws, Sabbath observance, and the reading of the Torah.

They were known to their Chinese neighbors as the Tiao jin jiao — the religion that “plucks the sinew” — a reference to the Jewish prohibition against eating the sciatic nerve (Genesis 32:33). It was, perhaps, the most distinctively Jewish practice that outsiders noticed.

The Long Decline

Isolated from other Jewish communities by thousands of miles, the Kaifeng Jews gradually assimilated. Without rabbis, without access to Jewish learning centers, without the reinforcement that comes from contact with a wider Jewish world, each generation knew a little less than the one before. Intermarriage with Chinese families diluted the community further. The last rabbi is believed to have died in the early nineteenth century. The synagogue fell into disrepair and was finally demolished — or simply collapsed — around 1860.

By the time Western travelers and missionaries rediscovered the Kaifeng Jews in the nineteenth century, the community was a shadow of its former self. The Torah scrolls were sold to collectors (several are now in libraries in Europe and North America). The stone inscriptions that recorded the community’s history were documented and preserved. But the living practice of Judaism in Kaifeng had essentially ended.

Shanghai: Refuge at the Edge of the World

If Kaifeng is the story of Jews who came to China by choice, Shanghai is the story of Jews who came because they had no choice.

In the 1930s, as Nazi persecution escalated in Europe, Jews desperately sought countries willing to accept them. Most doors were closed. The United States had strict immigration quotas. Britain restricted entry to Palestine. Canada, Australia, and most of Latin America turned Jews away.

Shanghai was different. It did not require a visa. Technically under partial Japanese occupation and governed by a patchwork of international authorities, Shanghai was, in the words of one refugee, “the port of last resort.” Between 1938 and 1941, approximately 18,000-20,000 European Jews — mostly from Germany, Austria, and Poland — arrived in Shanghai.

They found a city that was itself chaotic, impoverished, and dangerous. The refugees were concentrated in the Hongkou district, a bombed-out area of the city. Conditions were difficult — overcrowding, tropical diseases, and poverty were constant companions. But the refugees were alive. In a world that had largely abandoned them, Shanghai had taken them in.

The Jewish community in Shanghai built schools, newspapers, theaters, synagogues, and cafes. They created a cultural life that transplanted fragments of Vienna, Berlin, and Warsaw to the banks of the Huangpu River. The Shanghai Jewish Chronicle published in German. Yiddish theater flourished. Children attended Jewish schools.

In 1943, under German pressure, the Japanese occupiers forced all “stateless refugees” (a category that applied to Jews who had lost their citizenship) into a designated area within Hongkou — effectively a ghetto, though not on the scale of European ghettos. A Japanese official named Kanoh Ghoya controlled exit permits and was known for his erratic and sometimes cruel behavior.

Despite it all, the vast majority of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees survived the war. When the war ended in 1945, most eventually emigrated — to Israel, the United States, Australia, or elsewhere. By 1950, the Jewish community in Shanghai had largely dispersed.

Other Jewish Communities in China

Kaifeng and Shanghai are the most famous chapters, but Jews lived in other parts of China as well.

Harbin, in northeastern China (Manchuria), had a significant Russian Jewish community in the early twentieth century, drawn by the Trans-Siberian Railway and fleeing pogroms and later the Russian Revolution. At its peak in the 1920s, the Harbin Jewish community numbered around 20,000 and built synagogues, schools, hospitals, and Jewish newspapers. Most left after the Japanese invasion and the Communist revolution.

Tianjin and Hong Kong also had small but active Jewish communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely composed of Sephardic Jews from Baghdad — the Sassoon and Kadoorie families among them — who built trading empires across Asia.

Rediscovery and Revival

In recent decades, descendants of the Kaifeng Jewish community have begun exploring their heritage with new interest. Some have studied Judaism, learned Hebrew, and connected with Jewish organizations. A number have made aliyah — emigrating to Israel — where they have undergone formal conversion and built new lives.

The Chinese government’s relationship with this rediscovery has been complicated. China officially recognizes 56 ethnic minorities, and Jews are not among them. In recent years, authorities have periodically discouraged Kaifeng residents from publicly identifying as Jewish, viewing foreign religious influence with suspicion.

Yet the interest persists. Online communities connect Kaifeng descendants with Jewish learning resources. Scholars like Xu Xin of Nanjing University have dedicated their careers to preserving the history. And visitors to Kaifeng can still see a small alley called Jiaojing Hutong — “Teaching Scripture Lane” — marking the site where the synagogue once stood.

What Kaifeng Teaches Us

The story of China’s Jews is, at one level, a story about the limits of Jewish diversity. Without connection to the wider Jewish world, without institutions of learning and renewal, even a community that maintained its identity for centuries can fade. Kaifeng shows what happens when isolation becomes complete.

But it is also a story about resilience. The Kaifeng Jews survived for a millennium in a culture vastly different from anything their ancestors knew. The Shanghai refugees survived the worst catastrophe in Jewish history by reaching a city most of them had never heard of. And today, descendants of both communities are reclaiming their heritage — proving that Jewish identity, even when it seems to have disappeared, has a way of finding its path back.

From the Holocaust’s darkest hours to the rediscovery of ancient roots, the Jewish story in China reminds us that the diaspora reaches further, endures longer, and surprises more profoundly than we might imagine.