Antisemitism without Jews or Deep Roots

China’s old history does not know Jews and has no cultural, religious, or political memory of a Jewish influence comparable to the West. Two cities are often remembered for a local Jewish presence. A small Jewish community flourished in Kaifeng (once the capital of the Song Dynasty) from the 12th to the 19th century and never faced discrimination. Until the late 19th century Kaifeng’s Jews were not regarded as a remote branch of a several thousand-year-old people spread across the globe, but as one of China’s many small foreign sects that followed their own special customs but respected China’s Imperial rule and culture. And in the 20th century, the city of Shanghai gave precious refuge to more than 20,000 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution who would not have survived the Holocaust in Europe. There were also small Jewish communities in Harbin and Tianjin, which dissolved in the 20th century by emigration.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, political reformers who visited the West discovered that Chinese and Jews in the West had something in common: they were both oppressed. One of these reformers was Sun Yat-sen. At the same time and during most of the Republican period (1911-1949) some antisemitic stereotypes also arrived from the West and casually entered Chinese newspapers and intellectual discourse.⁷ “Stingy” or “greedy” were colloquial antisemitic stereotypes for Jews. Such stereotypes did not target real Jews in or outside of China, except for rare comments about unwelcome refugees or rich Sephardi Jews in Shanghai. Also, some Chinese nationalists opposed colonialism which included in their eyes, Zionism. No important political or cultural movement in China absorbed and amplified antisemitic stereotypes. This was a critical difference with the West and Russia. The Jew was not an enemy, Japan was. From early on, the main foreign transmitters of antisemitism were Christian missionaries, some of whom warned of Jews as enablers of Communism, or as plotters who wanted to rule the world. Other transmitters were Chinese students returning from abroad, including France and Nazi Germany. The example of China’s most famous 20th century writer, Lu Xun shows that the Western definition of antisemitism is not always transferable to China. Lu’s stories occasionally portray Jews as “greedy” or “calculating.”⁸ Was he antisemitic? In 1933, as soon as Hitler came to power, Lu Xun went with a group of Chinese writers and politicians to the German consulate in Shanghai to protest the onset of antisemitic persecution in Nazi Germany. Lu Xun’s party had themselves photographed in front the closed doors the Germans had refused to open.

During the Republican and even more recent periods, Chinese references to Jews often showed a wish to know more about them. This included interest in the resonance of Jewish writings in China, from the Hebrew Bible to the Yiddish and Israeli literature of the 20th century. In the early 21st century, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) nominated the Israeli novelist Amos Oz year after year, but in vain for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His books, all featuring Israel, were popular in China. It is also noteworthy that none of China’s top Communist leaders, from the early 1920s until recently, were known to be personally or ideologically antisemitic – in significant contrast to many Soviet and other East European Communist leaders. President Xi Jinping’s few statements about Jews and Judaism indicate that at least until a few years ago he opposed antisemitism. On May 15, 2019, Xi Jinping opened a “Dialogue of Asian Civilizations” in Beijing. He called the Talmud, the source of Jewish law, one of the greatest Asian contributions to the civilizations of the world.⁹ The Chinese, but no known Jewish or Israeli media reported his praise of the Talmud. On September 14, 2020, Xi clashed publicly with Germany’s Angela Merkel and the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen who had criticized Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs. Xi hit back by attacking the rise of antisemitism in Europe.¹⁰ Until 2019/20, China had stood apart (together with India) as a civilization with no major old or current history of indigenous antisemitism.