![]() ![]() Shanghai was notable for its special area assigned to Jewish refugees, most of whom left after the war, the rest relocating prior to or immediately after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. ![]() A surge of Jews and Jewish families was to arrive in the late 1930s and 1940s, for the purpose of seeking refuge from the Holocaust in Europe and were predominantly of European origin. Many more Jews arrived as refugees from the Russian Revolution of 1917. ![]() The second community came in the first decades of the 20th century when many Jews arrived in Hong Kong and Shanghai during those cities' periods of economic expansion. Many of these Jews were of Indian or Iraqi origin, due to significant British colonialism in these regions. ĭuring the period of China's opening to the West and British quasi-colonialism, the first group to settle in China were Jews who arrived in China under British protection following the First Opium War. The medieval Italian explorer Jacob of Ancona, the supposed author of a book of travels, was a scholarly Jewish merchant who wrote in vernacular Italian, and reached China in 1271, although some authors question its veracity. He mentioned the presence of Jewish merchants in a number of Chinese cities, and the important economic role they played transporting merchandise as well as transmitting scientific and technological expertise by land and sea all the way from Spain and France via the Middle East to China. In the 9th century, the Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh noted the travels of Jewish merchants called Radhanites, whose trade took them to China via the Silk Road through Central Asia and India. The presence of a community of Jewish immigrants in China arguably began sometime in the Song Dynasty though a number of scholars have argued for their presence there in earlier Tang dynasty times. By the time of the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, only a few Jews were known to have maintained the practice of their religion and culture. In the first half of the 20th century, thousands of Jewish refugees escaping from pogroms in the Russian Empire arrived in China. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish merchants from around the world began to trade in Chinese ports, particularly in the commercial centres of Hong Kong, which was for a time a British colony Shanghai (the International Settlement and French Concession) and Harbin (the Trans-Siberian Railway). ![]() Relatively isolated communities of Jews developed from ancient all the way to modern China, most notably the Kaifeng Jews (the term "Chinese Jews" is often used in a restricted sense in order to refer to these communities). Though a small minority, Chinese Jews have had an open presence in the country since the arrival of the first Jewish immigrants during the 8th century CE. Chyneez fews nere me full#The Jewish Chinese community manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions and it also encompasses the full spectrum of Jewish religious observance. Other Jewish ethnic divisions are also represented, including Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews and a number of converts. Jews and Judaism in China are predominantly composed of Sephardi Jews and their descendants. ![]()
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