Chinese Jews of Kaifeng

Anson H. Laytner is former president of the Sino-Judaic Institute and the author of Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition.Jordan Paper is professor emeritus of East Asian and religious studies at York University and author of The Theology of the Chinese Jews, 1000–1850.

• Introduction, Jordan Paper and Anson LaytnerPart I: PastChapter 1: Radhanites, Chinese Jews, and the Silk Road of the Steppes, Nigel ThomasChapter 2: Eight Centuries in the Chinese Diaspora: The Jews of Kaifeng, Erik ZürcherChapter 3: Kaifeng Jews: Sinification and the Persistence of Identity and History, Irene EberChapter 4: The Confucianization of the Chinese Jews: Interpretations of the Kaifeng Stelae Inscriptions, Andrew H. PlaksChapter 5: The Old Testament and Biblical Figures in Chinese Sources, Donald Daniel LeslieChapter 6: The Issue of the Jewishness of Chinese Jewish Magistrates, Jordan PaperChapter 7: Zhao Yingcheng from Fact to Fiction: The Story of “The Great Advisor,” Moshe Yehuda BernsteinPart II: PresentChapter 8: A History of Early Jewish Interactions with the Kaifeng Jews, Alex BenderChapter 9: Delving into the Israelite Religion of Kaifeng: The Patriotic Scholar Shi Jingxun and his Study of the Origins of the Plucking the Sinews Sect of Henan, Xianyi KongChapter 10:

"Never has so much been written about so few," the editors of this diverse collection of articles concerning the Kaifeng (China) Jewish community concede. The 12 chapters (some by specialists, others by amateurs; some original, others reprinted; some new, others dated) range from antiquity to the present and vary greatly in quality. Most were previously delivered at conferences of the Sino-Judaic Institute. Valuable recent scholarship by Xu Xin and Lihong Song, among others, receives little notice here, while a "fictionalized" biography of Zhao Yingcheng and a political screed against supposed "right-wing messianic Zionist organizations" currently operating in China are printed in full. Still, the best articles—the discussion of recent interactions with Western Jews (including Israelis)—and the recommended reading list make this volume a useful addition to the already considerable literature on the subject. For specialized collections. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.