This is somewhat beyond my usual range, but it's too interesting to pass up.
"A blue-capped barbarian untangles a speech problem" (Christian Science Monitor)
By Edward Ordman
[...]
In 1986 I lectured in China, in Jinan and Shanghai. I came back very sympathetic to the problems of Chinese students who had tried to learn English in a country where it had not been taught for many years. That sympathy, and my very few words of spoken Chinese, led me to try to help some of the Chinese computer-science students at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. One requirement for a master's degree in computer science here is the delivery of a seminar in acceptable oral English.
[...]
And then I met XuXin. He was invited to come and speak by the university's Jewish Studies program. Professor Xu teaches English in China, and his friendship with an American Fulbright scholar teaching in China had led him to put together book published in the United States as "Legends of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng" (with Beverly Friend, KTAV Publishing, 1995).
The book contains stories of a group of Jews who arrived in China via the Silk Road about AD 900. They explained to the first emperor of the Sung Dynasty that there was a war in their homeland; it was no longer a good place to live. Could they raise their families in China?
After some discussions I won't recount here (I recommend the book), the emperor agreed that the Jews could settle in China on two conditions: They had to adopt Chinese names, and they could not prohibit their children from intermarrying. (Someone had told him what had happened once before, in Egypt.)
The Jews thrived in Kaifeng. A cemetery there has Hebrew inscriptions dating from the 900s to the 1900s. They were first noticed by Westerners in the 1600s, when Christian missionaries reported the existence of Chinese Jews to the Vatican.
There was a great controversy in Europe at the time: How accurately had the old Bible texts been copied, over the centuries? The Jews had arrived in Kaifeng with a handwritten Torah (the first five books of the Bible), and it had been hand copied, as it wore out, for 700 years, without a chance to check it against another copy. The Vatican sent an expert to China to compare the Kaifeng Torah to Torah scrolls in Europe - and found it agreed, letter for letter!
Now that I don't believe for a minute. Scribal transmission of texts simply doesn't work that way. Of course it may well be that their text was quite close to the Masoretic Text, but at minimum there would be small differences in spelling and the odd corruption. In graduate school a Chinese roommate of mine was hoping to find Chinese translations of lost books like the Book of Giants along the Silk Road, although as far as I know, nothing ever came of it. I'd love to see a scholarly review of this book.
