Jews in China

Jews in China PDF Author: Irene Eber
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271085851
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Irene Eber was one of the foremost authorities on Jews in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a field that, in contrast to the study of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and the Americas, has been critically neglected. This volume gathers fourteen of Eber’s most salient articles and essays on the exchanges between Jewish and Chinese cultures, making available to students, scholars, and general readers a representative sample of the range and depth of her important work in the field of Jews in China. Jews in China delineates the centuries-long, reciprocal dialogue between Jews, Jewish culture, and China, all under the overarching theme of cultural translation. The first section of the book sets forth a sweeping overview of the history of Jews in China, beginning in the twelfth century and concluding with a detailed assessment of the two crucial years leading up to the Second World War. The second section examines the translation of Chinese classics into Hebrew and the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Chinese. The third and final section turns to modern literature, bringing together eight essays that underscore the cultural reciprocity that takes place through acts of translation. The centuries-long relationship between Judaism and China is often overlooked in the light of the extensive discourse surrounding European and American Judaism. With this volume, Eber reminds us that we have much to learn from the intersections between Jewish identity and Chinese culture.

Jews in China

Jews in China PDF Author: Irene Eber
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271085851
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

Book Description
Irene Eber was one of the foremost authorities on Jews in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—a field that, in contrast to the study of the Jewish diaspora in Europe and the Americas, has been critically neglected. This volume gathers fourteen of Eber’s most salient articles and essays on the exchanges between Jewish and Chinese cultures, making available to students, scholars, and general readers a representative sample of the range and depth of her important work in the field of Jews in China. Jews in China delineates the centuries-long, reciprocal dialogue between Jews, Jewish culture, and China, all under the overarching theme of cultural translation. The first section of the book sets forth a sweeping overview of the history of Jews in China, beginning in the twelfth century and concluding with a detailed assessment of the two crucial years leading up to the Second World War. The second section examines the translation of Chinese classics into Hebrew and the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Chinese. The third and final section turns to modern literature, bringing together eight essays that underscore the cultural reciprocity that takes place through acts of translation. The centuries-long relationship between Judaism and China is often overlooked in the light of the extensive discourse surrounding European and American Judaism. With this volume, Eber reminds us that we have much to learn from the intersections between Jewish identity and Chinese culture.

Jews in Old China

Jews in Old China PDF Author: Sidney Shapiro
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The accidental discovery in the 17th century of a Jewish community in the city of Kaifeng, and the findings there by Jesuit missionaries, marked the beginning of widespread interest in the subject of Jews in China. In the centuries that followed, Western Sinologists arrived in China and engaged in a variety of investigations. In the 1f980s, however, Sidney Shapiro, a former New York lawyer who has lived half a century in Beijing, felt that "there was a crying need to learn what the Chinese scholars themselves have to say about the history of Jews in China." With that in mind, he compiled the remarkable fruits of research conducted by Chinese social scientists, and edited and translated them into English. Jews in Old China was originally published by Hippocrene Books in 1984 with considerable success. It was then translated into Hebrew and published in Israel in 1987. This newly expanded edition offers a rich exposition, according to the Chinese investigations, on the origins of these Jewish migrants-when and why they came, the routes they followed, where they settled, and descriptions of their religious and social lives under the Hans, the Mongols, and the Manchus. This book provides a wealth of information about the conflicts, contributions, adaptation and ultimate assimilation of the Jews in China. It also introduces, from the Chinese perspective, the Radanites, the great medieval Jewish mercantile traders, who provided an important link between China and the West.

The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China

The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China PDF Author: Fook-Kong Wong
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004208100
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This comprehensive, textual treatment of the Kaifeng Passover Rite is a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion of the community’s origins in particular and to comparative Jewish liturgy in general. The book includes a facsimile of one manuscript and a sample of the other, the full text of the Hebrew/Aramaic and Judeo-Persian Haggadah in Hebrew characters, as well as an English translation. Following a review of the community’s history, sources for study, and related scholarly work conducted to date, the languages used in the Haggadah and their backgrounds are discussed in detail. Analysis of the order of the service allows for comparison of the Kaifeng Jewish community’s recitation of the Passover liturgy, performance of ritual, and consumption of ceremonial food to other communities in the Jewish Diaspora. The various parts and chapters of the book, including its extensive and meticulous annotations and bibliographical references, provide much fresh and useful material for scholars and readers interested in pre-modern Jewish, Judeo-Persian and Chinese literary traditions and cultures. David Yeroushalmi, Tel Aviv University, 2015

China and the Jewish People

China and the Jewish People PDF Author: Salomon Wald
Publisher: Gefen Publishing House Ltd
ISBN: 9789652293473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
The Jewish people and world Jewish leadership are facing critical dilemmas, opportunities and challenges. These create a need for systematic thinking to examine the range of decisions that may affect the standing of world Jewry in the decades to come. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) was established as an independent think tank whose mission is to contribute to the continuity of the Jewish people and Judaism, and their thriving future. China and the Jewish People' is the first document in a series of strategy papers dedicated to improving the standing of the Jewish people in emerging superpowers without biblical tradition.China and Jewish People: Old Civilizations in a New Era by Dr. Shalom Salomon Wald, is a crucial book that addresses the Jewish people and their issues with China.

Chinese Perceptions of the Jews' and Judaism

Chinese Perceptions of the Jews' and Judaism PDF Author: Zhou Xun
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136835091
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
While prejudice against Jews is a real and ongoing category in Western culture, little attention has been paid to the myths of the Jews' and their impact in countries outside the West. This work draws on a wide variety of source materials from the past two centuries to examine the images of the Jews' as constructed in China. However, the interest here does not lie in the determination of the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it lies in the implications associated with the Jew' as an other', which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the self' amongst various social groups in modern China. Although it has been noted by a few scholars that the use of the Jews' as a category was important to many thinkers of modern China in the construction of their nationalistic and socio- political ideologies, this is the first systematic study in the field to be published. This book is also more than a historical book on China in that it opens a new arena for modern Jewish studies from a unique angle.

The Chosen Few

The Chosen Few PDF Author: Maristella Botticini
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691144877
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.

Chinese and Jews

Chinese and Jews PDF Author: Irene Eber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
A collection of essays translated from the English, some of them published previously. Pp. 62-91, "Ha-ya'ad Shanghai: Heterei kenissah ve-asherot ma'avar, 1938-1941" ("Destination Shanghai: Entry Permits and Transit Certificates, 1939-1941"), discuss the immigration of European Jews to Shanghai during the Holocaust. After the "Kristallnacht" pogrom thousands of Jews were forced by the Nazis to leave Germany and Austria; since most countries would not accept them, many fled to Shanghai. The port and a part of the city were officially extra-territorial, and there was no passport inspection. In August 1939 both the Japanese authorities and the Shanghai Municipal Council, fearing a huge influx of poverty-stricken refugees, restricted immigration; however, the restrictions varied, and many Jews managed to obtain permits. In July 1940 there were further restrictions, but by then it had become more difficult to leave Europe in any case.

The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng

The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng PDF Author: Anson H. Laytner
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498550274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This scholarly collection examines the origins, history, and contemporary nature of Chinese Judaism in the community of Kaifeng. These essays, written by a diverse, international team of contributors, explore the culture and history of this thousand-year-old Jewish community, whose synthesis of Chinese and Jewish cultures helped guarantee its survival. Part I of this study analyzes the origin and historical development of the Kaifeng community, as well as the unique cultural synthesis it engendered. Part II explores the contemporary nature of this Chinese Jewish community, particularly examining the community’s relationship to Jewish organizations outside of China, the impact of Western Jewish contact, and the tenuous nature of Jewish identity in Kaifeng.

Essential Outsiders

Essential Outsiders PDF Author: Daniel Chirot
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295976136
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential “outsiders.” In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination, even when they are formally integrated into the nation.

The Last Kings of Shanghai

The Last Kings of Shanghai PDF Author: Jonathan Kaufman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.