Report to the Institute of World Religions of the
Chinese Academy of Social Science
Daniel J. Elazar
The meeting was arranged by the US Embassy Cultural Affairs
Officer as the centerpiece of their programming for me in China.
The CAO had come to understand that Jewish topics were of interest
to the Institute so, even though it was not listed on my formal
list of topics, he suggested it to them and they grabbed it. My
invitation to China grew out of their request.
The meeting itself was quite closed and included only a selected
group from the Institute --those involved in the Christian Studies
Program, of which Judaism is a part. While it is impossible to
know exactly, I have the impression that only members of the
Program were invited. Indeed, that explains my strange meeting
with Professor Zhao on Tuesday. Zhao, who is a Vice President of
the Academy and the senior person in Christian Studies, indicated
both to the USIA people and myself that he was not planning to be
at the presentation, without offering any excuse or apology. I
wondered about that, but the way that the meeting was handled may
have explained it.
The meeting was presided over by Professor Gao Wangzhi, the
director of Christian Studies. He was clearly the senior man
present, and with the possible exception of the man responsible
for studies of the Orthodox Church, had no competition in the
room. The others were all subordinates -- younger people within
the institute, his of research assisstants, librarians, etc. There
were also three people from the Academy's Foreign Affairs
Department present, a man who left before the end, a young woman
who took copious notes, and the interpreter, who struggled
valiantly to interpret ideas and concepts foreign to her. There
were eight or nine Chinese present from the Institute. Professor
Gao dominated the proceedings, though not unpleasantly. He
introduced me without giving any of my credentials, even less than
were given on Monday by Professor Li at the Academy's Institute of
American Studies. He did not mention my institutional
affiliations or anything, merely turned the floor over to me after
a few general comments about how pleased they were to have me with
them.
I spoke through the interpreter in consecutive interpretation.
The interpreter, who struggled with my words, knew English
moderately well, but not really well enough to interpret since
there were many relatively common words that she did not
understand. Her efforts were supplemented by Professor Gao and by
Bena Camp, the ACAO present, who was of great help, both in
checking the accuracy of the translation and in filling in missing
words. The major problem was simply conceptual. Concepts like
"voluntary", "republican", and "federal" are simply not found in
the Chinese lexicon. In fact, one of the strongest impressions I
came away with was the degree to which the lack of any tradition
of what we would call in the West democratic republicanism is
crucial to even conveying our political ideas to the Chinese. They
simply have no framework within which to place them and at best
can think of them as utter abstractions. Needless to say, I had
to simplify my talk a great deal in order to convey even the few
basic points that I wished to convey.
At least two people in addition to Gao Wanghzi did listen intently
-- a young lady researcher and one of the librarians, also a lady,
who was responsible for dealing with the terms related to Judaism
in the dictionary of religions they are publishing. The young
lady researcher was really from the editorial department
responsible for the publication of their journal. These two women
seemed very interested in Judaism as a subject.
The researcher responsible for Orthodox Christianity may have been
a bit hostile. There was a young archeologist who was interested
in a vague way, perhaps because he was hard put to formulate
questions (at one point he asked me "What about American Jewish
youth?"). The others asked questions with varying degrees of
interest or understanding. I would say that all were, at least,
moderately interested in the topic. Apparently, the only other
speaker on Judaism that they have had was Rabbi Joshua Stampfer of
Portland, Oregon who gave one talk several years ago after he was
found by happenstance by Gao while on a private visit to China.
The questions they asked were good, if quite general. Obviously,
they were in no position to go into much detail on a subject so
foreign to them, although the lady from the editorial staff had
read items on Jewish life in the United States in Time and was
able to ask me about the "National Jewish Committee" (apparently,
the American Jewish Committee) and the Jewish lobby in a
sufficiently focused way for me to give detailed answers. The
student of the Orthodox Church started by asking me a pointed
question as to how many Jews there were in the world and in the
United States. Most of the other questions were less direct --
the vaguest being from the young archeologist who asked about
Jewish youth in the United States and is there any place where
ancient Jewish remains are found?
I emphasized that the Jews are a world civilization as ancient as
the Chinese; a small, but influential people whose influence comes
from being located at the center of every important communications
network in the world beginning with Eretz Israel at the crossroads
of Europe, Asia and Africa. I emphasized the relationship between
Israel and the diaspora and how Jews were different from the
Chinese because of the dominant role played by the diaspora for so
long, how Jewish existence in the diaspora necessitated portable
organization (a concept they could not understand easily) with a
provision for expressing all three dimensions wherever Jews found
themselves. I then broke down the dimensions of Jewish existence
into the Torah-as-constitution, halakhah as the law, organization
and institutions, explaining that the Torah and its accretions
represented the constitution. I did not elaborate on the
accretions. (The librarian in a comment revealing the problem of
translation of terms, indicated that she tried to find a
translation for the term Talmud in English or Russian and could
not find either. In both cases, the word Talmud was used and she
wanted to know why).
With regard to law, I emphasized the idea of halakha as way and
the existence of a Jewish way of life. In connection with
organization, I emphasized that the Jewish community was
republican and egalitarian. They may have understood egalitarian
but they had a hard time with republican. Bea had to fish around
for the proper Chinese word. I indicated my surprise, considering
that China is called the People's Republic of China in English,
but apparently the Chinese word for republic is not exactly
"republic," but rather something like a public group
(collective?).
With regard to institutions, I talked mostly about Knesset-Israel
and bet knesset as a congregation, which I was able to convey to
them since it was a term they seemed to understand.
I went on to discuss how modernization has transformed the Jews,
again trying to suggest a parallel with China; how the major
feature of modernization was the adandonment of Jewish autonomy
and the acquisition of citizenship in their countries of residence
by individual Jews, on the one hand, and the restoration of Jewish
statehood on the other hand. I was going to talk to them about
civil religion and state-diaspora relations in more detail but saw
no way to communicate anything about those two concepts so I went
instead to the organizational principles today, namely how the
Torah has been reinterpreted as constitution, how most Jews no
longer live strictly according to the halakha but have found
modifications, that organization is federal and voluntary with
Israel at the center of concern, and that institutions vary from
country to country. I then described the institutions of US Jewry
by describing each of their five spheres:
religious-congregational, educational-cultural, communal-welfare,
community relations, and Israel-overseas.
I made many references to Israel, trying to emphasize all the time
how important Israel is in the Jewish scheme of things. No one
asked me a question about Israel nor did they refer to Israel
directly. The closest that anyone came was Gao Wangzhzi who
mentioned the United States and "other countries" with "other
countries" clearly referring to Israel. He also congratulated us
on the revival of the Hebrew language, which drew murmurs of
approval. It was extremely obvious that they were avoiding
mention of Israel but were aware of it.
One questioner suggested that Jews in the United States were very
powerful (I believe it was the editorial person). I suggested
that this was the case and that they used their power to work with
other Americans to improve the quality of American life, to
support Israel, and to work for other Jewish concerns such as
Soviet Jewry and Ethiopian Jewry. They listened, but gave no
further response. I talked about the Soviet Jewry struggle and
the exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel and how American Jewry
helped. I talked about American Jewish fundraising for local,
overseas, and Israel purposes.
I talked a great deal about Jewish education. Indeed, there were
many questions about Hebrew as a language, Yiddish and Yiddish
literature. Gao asked about Yiddish and its rich literature (his
words), obviously, to show off that he knew something about it.
This enabled me to explain the whole question of Jewish languages
and the importance of the revival of Hebrew, which they
congratulated us on succeeding to revive. I also explained the
importance of studying classical texts and how Jewish
egalitarianism required that all Jews study the same basic texts
and that any Jew who knew Hebrew could do so, which impressed
them. They drew parallels with classical Chinese texts which can
only be studied by scholars.
Another questioner, whom I also thought was a bit hostile, asked
me to indicate what Judaism and Jews had contributed to the United
States. My guess is that he was thinking in the back of his mind,
"Why should Americans be so concerned about Israel and why should
Jews be so powerful there when they are so few in number?" I
responded by dividing the question into three parts; dealing with
Judaism as an influence on American society; the role of the
organized Jewish community, and the role of individual Jews. I
began by emphasizing how Christianity emerged out of Judaism was a
daughter religion and that those Christians who founded the United
States were particularly close to their Jewish roots so that
American society is much influenced by the Bible. I then
discussed the Jewish contribution to the civil rights struggle and
to the development of voluntary organizations in the United
States, and then I talked about how individual Jews had made
important contributions as Americans. Gao Wanghzi tried to
reenforce that point by mentioning that Einstein was Jewish and
Brandeis was Jewish and a few other names were thrown out by
others -- Einstein seems to be a particularly well known name.
The man who studies the Orthodox Church then asked me a question
about the Holocaust. Why did the Germans choose the Jews? There
was a big discussion about the Holocaust with Gao Wanghzi
mentioning the fact that there is no anti-Semitism in China. This
got us on to the question of the Jews in China, particularly those
of Kaifeng. Gao described his own research and how he had
identified the 100 families that were still aware of their Jewish
ancestry, but were no longer Jews, having assimilated into China
because of the lack of anti-Semitism.
He did not see any of them coming back to Judaism, though he did
see the possibility of erecting a museum to the Jewish community
there. There was no possibility of reconstructing the synagogus
since there is now a hospital on the site and, moreover, the
original synagogue was grand and the Jews or descendants of Jews
there could not afford to rebuild it. I asked him about the
Jewish communities in China and he mentioned a number of other
places where Jews had lived but said that there are no real
records for studying the communities so he does not have data, he
only knows of the fact that there were such communities. He also
mentioned the Jewish refugees in Shanghai but did not mention any
other city. When I mentioned Harbin and Tsiensin, he more or less
nodded his head but did not know much about it.
He and Zhao are the two professors in China who write about Jewish
matters. He gave me an article of his in Chinese about the
origins of the Jewish people, published in the Institute's
journal. The book on the Jews of China by Sidney Shapiro was
published in New York and is barely available in China. He and
Zhao have copies. The Foreign Press Service Bookstore does not
even know about it. Sidney Shapiro apparently wrote the book
because Jews kept looking him up and asking him questions about
the Jews of China about which he knew no answers, so he followed
up matters and wrote the book. Gao contributed an original
chapter. There is one professor of Hebrew at the Protestant
Seminary in Nanjing -- an older man who apparently was trained in
the language outside of China.
The Holocaust seems to be a matter of some modest interest and
something they know more about than anything else. Apparently,
China television has acquired the Holocaust series or are about to
and are preparing to show it, according to Gao Wanghzi. They also
asked about intermarriage in the United States. Again, what they
seem to know about is what they follow in Time and Newsweek. The
two women in auxiliary positions, who read as part of their
responsibilities, seem to know more than the men who are the
researchers.
