The Chinese and Jewish cultures are both great, rich civilizations. These two major societies developed highly civilized forms in ancient times and persist until today, keeping continuous recorded accounts of their origins.

Each of them has had a significant impact on world history, although the two cultures seldom met. As a result, not much was known in China about Jews, Jewish culture and Israel until recently.

During my first visit to Israel and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1988, I made the sweeping statement that “Chinese find Israel a country even more alien and mysterious than those in the Western Hemisphere.” In order to understand just why, one must examine the Chinese knowledge of, and attitude toward, Jews from a historical viewpoint before the 1948 founding of the State of Israel.

Indeed, the Jewish presence in China can be traced back to at least the eighth century. The well-known Kaifeng Jewish community is believed to have arrived in China in the 11th century and has resided in Kaifeng ever since, continually practicing as an observant Jewish community for at least 700 years. But the fact that Jews resided in China does not mean that the Chinese had any great awareness of their presence. The majority of the Chinese knew very little. In fact, until the middle of the 19th century, Jews were simply referred to as Blue-hat-hui-hui (people who came from the West to China) or Tiao-jin-jiao (sect that plucks out the sinews). Both names are based on customs of the Kaifeng Jews. But no one, not even the most knowledgeable scholars in China, had a glimmer of suspicion that the Jews in Kaifeng might represent a larger religious population who were scattered in many countries, held common beliefs and shared a similar life style.

Historically speaking, Chinese society has been quite ethnocentric. China considered herself the Middle Kingdom, which mediated between heaven and earth and was thereby superior to all other civilizations. Traditional Chinese education, therefore, did not cover the Western world, let alone a small ethnic group like the Jews. Encounters between China and the Western world happened frequently at different times in history; however, academic work concerning Occidental subjects remained unknown for a very long time.

The situation began to change at the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th. Western scholarship became very popular among Chinese scholars after they saw the increasing power brought to Japan by her open-door policy to the West. Judaic studies appeared for the first time in Chinese history as an inevitable result of the deepening of Occidental studies in China, since Judaism is one of two main sources of Western civilization. Information about Jews and Judaism was disseminated through China via two main sources: foreigners who now were permitted to enter China for missionary, commercial, trade or diplomatic ventures, and Chinese who had been sent to either study or work abroad and who returned to China with new information gleaned from their exposure to the Western world.

Nevertheless, while some limited knowledge existed among a small number of Chinese intellectuals, the vast Chinese majority still knew very little, if anything, about Jews and Jewish-related matters. The movement to learn from the West was cut short by foreign interference, Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and civil wars between the communists and the nationalists. So were Jewish studies.

The study of Jewish subjects by Chinese scholars restarted at the end of the 1980s, when China adopted a new open-door policy, which accelerated after the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and Israel in 1992. A number of centers for Jewish studies have been established. Among them the Center for Jewish Studies at Nanjing University plays a unique role.

The advancement of Jewish studies in China is great, and the impact on Chinese academia is obvious and strong, but there is still a long way to go and much to be done.

Chinese scholars need to deepen their study of, and research in, Jewish subjects. It is imperative that Chinese scholars upgrade their studies to meet international standards. How to continue to improve their scholarship in general is a challenge currently faced by Chinese scholars, as is how to make unique contributions to the scholarly study of Jewish subjects in particular.

Xu Xin is a professor at Nanjing University, specializing in the history and sociology of Kaifeng Jewry.