Rare Breed: A Chinese Jewish Quest

We, as readers, even as historians, too often assume that the Jewish experience unfolded only in the Middle East and in Europe and North America. In this we are missing an entire page of Jewish history. We in the West are blinded by the experiences – often not happy ones – of Jews in the West. The time has come that we look to the East. The time has come to fill in this missing page, to publish the memoirs and diaries and history that tell of the experience of the Jewish people in the eastern world.

What would be the headlines on that missing page? Jews in India; Jews in Japan; Jews in China. And what we would read on that page – on those many pages – is an almost unbelievable history. In this book, Irene Chu has created an understanding of the hitherto barely known history of the Jewish communities in the East. She has done extensive research on the very early history of the Jewish settlement in Kaifeng and, with authorial licence, has woven into that history the story of her own family. After generations, her ancestors made the long trek from Kaifeng to Shanghai. And after yet more generations, she and members of her family emigrated to Toronto, Canada, where they live now.

In Japan, thousands of Jews lived not only free of hostility but actually welcomed – and this during the perilous years leading up to World War II, when no other country in the world would open its doors to them. And in China? That is the story of this book: the story of just one of the myriad Jewish families who lived for over a thousand years in security in China.