Vol. XVIII, No. lo WASHINGTON 



October, 1907 



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THE CHINESE JEWS 



By Oliver Bainbridge 



THE Chinese history affirms the 

 city of Kaifengfu to have been 

 the metropolis of the province 

 and the seat of the empire during a long 

 succession of monarchs, till it was at 

 length overflowed and covered with sand 

 by a great inundation. It is situated in 

 a large fertile plain, about 5 or 6 miles 

 from the Yellow River, and its low situa- 

 tion occasioned its ruin in 1642, when it 

 was closely besiecred by the rebel Li- 

 Chung, at the head of 100,000 men. The 

 general who was sent to relieve it con- 

 ceived the fatal design of drowning the 

 besieging armj^ by breaking the great 

 'bank which had been reared at a vast 

 cost to preserve the country from being 

 overflowed by the Great Yellow River. 

 His project succeeded, indeed, but proved 

 the ruin and destruction, not only of the 

 noble capital, but of three hundred thou- 

 sand of its inhabitants, by the violence 

 and rapidity of the inundation. 



Some fifty years after this dreadful 

 catastrophe a Jesuit missionary, going 

 upon some occasion into the province of 

 Honan, found a considerable synagogue 

 in the cit}' of Kaifengfu. He soon be- 

 came acquainted with some of its learned 

 chiefs, who introduced him into their 

 synagogue and showed him one of the 

 parchments or rolls of the Pentateuch 



written in Hebrew, together with the 

 books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, 

 some of the prophets, and others contain- 

 ing their liturgy and commentaries. They 

 owned they had lost some of the sacred 

 books and some of their targums or 

 paraphrases. This loss was caused by a 

 violent overflowing of the great river, 

 which had laid the capital wholly under 

 the water and had damaged their Torah, 

 or roll of the Pentateuch, and upon which 

 they ordered twelve new copies to be 

 taken from it. Today I find no syna- 

 gogue, owing to another overflowing of 

 the Yellow River — ^"China's Sorrow" — 

 but in its place a dirty pond and a stone 

 erected on the site bearing the following 

 strange inscription : 



"A monument in memory of the Great 

 Ching Ching Cenoby. Oh Wu Lo Hau, 

 the creator of this religion and grandson 

 of the nineteenth generation of Punku, 

 the principal ruler of the Mythical Era, 

 was born in 146th }'ear of the Chow dy- 

 nasty (976 B. C). He proved himself 

 to be very wise, prudent, and merciful. 

 He understood the mysteries of creation 

 and the ideas of creation and could trace 

 the troubled source of religion. The re- 

 ligious elements were not to believe in 

 any idolatrous representation and not 

 to flatter the ghost and fairy, and so 



