The Jews of China

Abstract While small Jewish communities have existed at various times in China for at least a millennium, there was an active Jewish community in Kaifeng at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when it was visited by Jesuit priests. The members of that community can truly be considered to be “Chinese Jews,” in that they became Chinese while remaining Jews. More recent Jewish communities in China have been very different, from the Sephardi Jews of Baghdadi origin who settled in Shanghai in the nineteenth century through to those who have arrived since the opening up of the 1980s. The members of these communities, by and large, have not become Chinese, but rather have resided in China as foreigners, eventually leaving the country again. This chapter gives an overview of these various communities.