Chinese and Jews: Encounters Between Cultures

The essays featured in this important book span an entire millennium, from the arrival of Jews to Chinese shores during the Tang Dynasty in the 9th Century to modern times, illuminating the fascinating encounters between the two cultures. The first part of the book deals with the arrival of Jews to China and their organisation and life in the remote and isolated community of Kaifeng, the settlement of Jews after the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century and finally the story of the Jewish refugees who flocked to China to find a haven from Nazi persecution in the twentieth century.The second part reflects on the intellectual exchanges between Jews and their Chinese hosts, how the Jewish communities maintained their identity and how their respective cultures met and merged in surprising and powerful ways through scholarship, literary exchange, the translation of Chinese and Yiddish works and through religious reciprocation. Unique in its breadth and depth of analysis, Irene Eber’s account of the intellectual and inter-cultural history of these two civilisations, at first sight so diverse, is of great value to scholars and general readers alike.