What prompted the first Anglican bishop in China to seek out the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng? And why for centuries were missionaries the only ones to transmit word of these Jews westward?

In 1850, a radical change overtook Christianity in China. Setting foot on Hong Kong’s Victoria Beach on March 29, Bishop George Smith established a new bastion of the Anglican Church, aiming to spread the gospel all over China and Japan. His efforts were made possible by the British Empire’s victory over China’s Qing dynasty in the First Opium War (1839–42), after which the Daoguang Emperor was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Nanjing. Great Britain thus gained permanent control of Hong Kong as well as free access to five other Chinese ports, including Shanghai. Foreign diplomats, merchants, clergymen, and missionaries could now visit and settle there at will. 

Smith’s small step soon led to the West’s rediscovery of an ancient Chinese Jewish community. In fact, everything we know about Jews in China – including their origins – is based on Christian sources. Jesuits had first stumbled across the tiny Jewish presence in the city of Kaifeng in 1605. The community was culturally Chinese; documenting the rituals performed in its Temple of Purity and Truth, the missionaries concluded that this temple was the only one in existence combining Jewish customs with Confucianism and Chinese ancestor worship. 

Jesuits maintained contact with the Kaifeng community until 1724, when the Yongzheng Emperor severely restricted foreign missionary activity. Yet word of these legendary Jews still resonated in Christian circles in Europe over a century later, when the Anglican Church arrived in China in the wake of the Opium War.

Six months after Bishop Smith set up shop, he dispatched two Chinese Christian converts from Shanghai to see if the Jewish community in Kaifeng still existed. Their mission was to observe any Jews and establish contact. This expedition was the Church’s first foray into the Chinese interior, apart from the free ports. Why were the Anglicans so desperate to reconnect with a tiny, irrelevant minority instead of concentrating on what was surely their main task: the mass conversion of China’s enormous indigenous population?

Looking for Jesus in the Bible

Anglican curiosity about Chinese Jews dates back to the Hebraists, medieval Christians anxious to uncover Christianity’s Jewish roots. The Hebraists studied Hebrew so as to read the Bible – and sometimes even the Mishna and Talmud – in the original, often with Jewish teachers, and were aware of missionary activities in China, including with Jews. 

In the 17th century, the Jesuits developed a conspiracy theory to explain why the Old Testament includes no clear prophecies regarding the advent of Jesus: With the birth of Christianity, rabbinic Jews had carefully erased all such predictions in order to prevent the spread of this rival religion. The Jesuits hoped that the original Bible, predating such malicious editing, had been preserved among a group of Jews who’d been out of touch with other Jewish communities for many centuries. The Kaifeng contingent seemed a perfect example of such an isolated tribe, so the Jesuits were eager to examine its Scripture and discover lost references to Jesus and his return at the end of days. 

Today Kaifeng’s Jews are generally assumed to be descendants of Persian-speaking merchants from Central Asia who traversed the Silk Road in the 10th century. But the Jesuits thought otherwise in the 1700s, when monk Jean Domenge visited Kaifeng repeatedly in search of the missing prophecies. Domenge painstakingly compared the community’s Scripture with his Hebrew Old Testament but found no traces of Jesus or the Second Coming.

In the early 19th century, non-Jesuit Hebraists also took an interest in the Kaifeng congregation. They were headed by Benjamin Kennicott, an Anglican theologian from Oxford specializing in biblical criticism. Far from seeking proof of anti-Christian editing, he wanted to lay hands on a Kaifeng Torah scroll or even possibly a Bible, looking for earlier and perhaps more accurate versions of the biblical text. Research by Prof. David Katz of Tel Aviv University has shown that Christian Hebraists weren’t the only ones pursuing Kaifeng’s Jews in search of a more authentic version of Scripture. English Jews wrote to their brethren in China with similar purposes in mind, but as long as China was closed to westerners, there was no hope of anything more concrete than correspondence. 

Then in 1809, the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews was founded. Although the organization was initially busy providing for penniless Jewish immigrants in London’s East End, its long-term plans were activist, ambitious, and far-reaching – and sometimes contradictory. Alongside converting the Jewish masses in order to hasten the Second Coming, the society saw the Jews’ physical return to the land of Israel as a harbinger of that event. In addition, members felt that Christians should learn about their Jewish roots while also cultivating Christian Hebrews – groups of Jewish converts who eventually became the Messianic Jews or Jews for Jesus we know today.