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The history of Kaifeng's Jewish community is fascinating. From the 12th Century to the 19th Century Kaifeng had a thriving synagogue. Jews traveled the Silk Road to the Song capital for commerce. Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci met a Kaifeng Jew in 1605 in China. Ricci was amazed and the Jew, named Ai Ti'en, was puzzled because he'd never heard of Christians. Marco Polo documents meeting Jews in China four centuries earlier. In putting the existence of a thriving Jewish community in the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty into some kind of perspective, it helps to keep in mind that large Jewish communities in Central Asian cities like Tashkent and Bukhara trace their history back at least 2000 years -- and probably further, to the exile periods of Daniel and Esther. The borders of Tang Dynasty China stretched west of the Pamir Mountains and took in protectorates that reached the borders of modern Iran.
The Jewish Synagogue of Kaifeng was first built towards the end of the Southern Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD) by the Jewish immigrants resident in the city. The earliest record of the synagogue in the west was in the late sixteenth century, when it was discovered that the building contained all five books of Moses, written in scroll form and, at that time, over 500 years old. The Synagogue was repeatedly damaged and rebuilt before it was finally destroyed by a huge Yellow River flood in 1850. The flood did more than just destroy the temple however, since many of the Jewish community themselves were killed. The synagogue was never rebuilt due to a variety of circumstances, all related to the flood, including a lack of funding, a lack of integrated community and a dying out of religious beliefs. The synagogue is now almost unrecognisable, a part of Kaifeng's No.4 hospital. The only relic still in place is an old, iron covered well that still contains water.
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