Jews and China in Eighteenth-century Literature PDF Download

Author: Rudolf Loewenthal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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Author: Jordan Paper
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554584043
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A thousand years ago, the Chinese government invited merchants from one of the Chinese port synagogue communities to the capital, Kaifeng. The merchants settled there and the community prospered. Over centuries, with government support, the Kaifeng Jews built and rebuilt their synagogue, which became perhaps the world’s largest. Some studied for the rabbinate; others prepared for civil service examinations, leading to a disproportionate number of Jewish government officials. While continuing orthodox Jewish practices they added rituals honouring their parents and the patriarchs, in keeping with Chinese custom. However, by the mid-eighteenth century—cut off from Judaism elsewhere for two centuries, their synagogue destroyed by a flood, their community impoverished and dispersed by a civil war that devastated Kaifeng—their Judaism became defunct. The Theology of the Chinese Jews traces the history of Jews in China and explores how their theology’s focus on love, rather than on the fear of a non-anthropomorphic God, may speak to contemporary liberal Jews. Equally relevant to contemporary Jews is that the Chinese Jews remained fully Jewish while harmonizing with the family-centred religion of China. In an illuminating postscript, Rabbi Anson Laytner underscores the point that Jewish culture can thrive in an open society, “without hostility, by absorbing the best of the dominant culture and making it one’s own.”

Author: Xin Xu
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
ISBN: 9780881255287
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Even today there are people in Kaifeng who remain aware of their ancestry and register as Jews on official census forms.

Author: Ivan Davidson Kalmar
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584654117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
A fascinating analysis of how Jews fit into scholarly debates about Orientalism.

Author: Jonathan Goldstein
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 9780765601032
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
An impressive interdisciplinary effort by Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Western Sinologists and Judaic Studies specialists, these books scrutinize patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation, and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately A.D.1100 to 1949.

Author: Jonathan Goldstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317456017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
An impressive interdisciplinary effort by Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Western Sinologists and Judaic Studies specialists, these books scrutinize patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation, and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately A.D.1100 to 1949.

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.

Author: Donald Leslie
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004645292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Author: Chi-ming Yang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance—theatrical, ethnographic, and literary—and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

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