“Most of my Chinese friends are Jewish”
Here’s an article from the NY Times that I came across through that “most frequently e-mailed articles” function the Times has. The title caught my eye, “Journey From a Chinese Orphanage to a Jewish Rite of Passage.”
It’s not a very deep piece. But it describes one of those interesting unforeseen social phenomena. Over a decade ago, adoption of Chinese infants became possible and popular in the US, due to the shortage of adoptable babies here and a surplus there. At the beginning, because of a combination of restrictions on family size in China and a preference for boys, the vast majority of adoptees were girls.
And so now we have the result: a fairly substantial group of female teenagers of Chinese ethnicity, some of them adopted by Jewish couples and coming of Bat Mitzvah age.
The article spotlights a few of these girls, who sound pretty well-adjusted to me. In the case of Cece, the girl most featured, this is despite a rather complex familial background, including—in addition to her transracial adoption—Lesbian parents, one of whom is a convert to Judaism.
But as another girl, Olivia, says, “Judaism is a religion, Chinese is my heritage and somewhat my culture, and I’m looking at them in a different way,” she said. “I don’t feel like they conflict with each other at all.”
And Olivia is quite, quite correct—perhaps more correct than even she knows.
Contrary to what many people believe, not only is Judaism a religion that accepts converts of any race or ethnicity, but there are already Jews in virtually every nation on earth (or there were until they were killed, driven out of some of those countries, and/or emigrated to Israel in recent years).
And so yes, even China has had a Jewish community–for over a thousand years. Take a look:
Archaelogical evidence suggests that Jews were in China as early as the 8th Century, having arrived from Persia along the Silk Road. In 1163 the Emperor ordered the Jews to live in Kaifeng, where they built the first Chinese synagogue. Marco Polo recorded that Kublai Khan celebrated the festivals of the Muslims, Christians and Jews, indicating that there were a significant number of Jews in China in the 13th Century.
There were other Jewish people in China who were more recent arrivals, but this earlier community ended up being physically indistinguishable from the other Chinese people surrounding them. In other words, they looked ethnically Chinese. Ultimately, they appear to have assimilated:
Of those [six Jewish communities in China], only Kaifeng Jewry flourished sufficiently to survive for a millennium, preserving some traces of their Jewishness until their synagogue was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1840s and the last of them assimilated. The only remnants of the community today are a knowledge of the site of the synagogue, upon which another building now stands; a stele from the Middle Ages with inscriptions of major events in the history of the community carved into it, but no longer legible; and a practice, still preserved by some, of avoiding the eating of pork.
But for Cece and Olivia and the others—who, to be sure, are extremely unlikely to be the actual biological descendents of these original Chinese Jews—it all begins again. As Cece herself says, “Most of my Chinese friends are Jewish.”
Does that mean you get hungry for more Torah knowledge an hour after you finish studying?
For anyone who is looking for a good read, try Pearl S. Buck’s book Peony. (Well, actually try any of her books, they’re wonderful.) Tells the story of a Jewish family/community in China and the choice of whether to assimilate or preserve their separate identity.
An additional reason is the Chinese respect for age. Its upper age limit has been higher than other countries with children for adoption. As the oldest prospective adoptive parents tend to be both career-driven and family-supportive, this would tend to have a Jewish concentration.
The story has always been that Chinese people with curly hair may well descend from Jews who settled in China. Certainly, when I was growing up, I was happy to joke that one of my best friends, who had curly hair, was a close genetic cousin to me, a Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jew.
I’ve only got a few Chinese friends…none of them are Jewish, unless you consider Christians to be Messianic Jews, as I do.
camojack,
You have the right to whatever mistaken consideration you like. There is nothing Jewish about Christians other then the man they worship. To be a Jew is not ambiguous in any sense. In the Bible you will find most of the clues to Jewishness and in the Rabbinic commentary you will find these clues pieced together into clear form. A Jew is one whose mother is Jewish. A woman who is Jewish will have become so in one of two ways; either by being a descendent of Abraham, through his son Isaac and on through the grandson Jacob or by becoming Jewish through a fairly rigorous study program and taking on the yet more rigorous life-style of keeping to the 613 laws as given in the Torah. Nothing in the Jewish tradition mentions a requirement of faith in a man through whom one can reach G-d and gain salvation. In fact, the second commandment requires that we have a direct communion with G-d and that we keep “no other gods before Him”. Since the main requirement for being a Christian is faith that between yourself and G-d stands this man Jesus, Christian faith is a breaking of the second commandment and not at all related to Jewish life. This cute and contrived definition you invented for Christian is utterly rejected by Jews who practice the laws given to us by G-d. The only Christians we consider Jews are those who strayed from our tradition and mimic the ways of gentiles. In time they either assimilate or return.
But as another girl, Olivia, says, “Judaism is a religion, Chinese is my heritage and somewhat my culture,
I disagree. Olivia is probably about as culturally Chinese as Jerry Seinfeld. Why would she be, she’s an American who’s a religious Jew, where is the Chinese cultural influence going to come from? Her adopted parents might teach her about Chinese culture, but that’s not the same. I’m half Chinese, and I see how UNchinese I am when I’m with other Chinese. Adopted parents shouldn’t be afraid to raise their adopted children as their own, not as part of a culture that they were removed from. They adopted them, they didn’t borrow them from a baby library.
I”m a Chinese girl with curly hair. For > 20 year I always thought I looked different from other Chinese girls. Recently I found out my mother had surname of Persian Jewish ancestry to settled around Quanzhou city in Fujian provence. No wonder my cousin has curly hair and looked Caucasian!
I would like to find a group of teenagers adopted form China. My daughter is 14 and need a friend with a similar story. Thank you Leslie