More on China's new interest in Judaism

MORE ON CHINA'S NEW INTEREST IN JUDAISM:

The Chinese Discover Jews and Israel and Can’t Seem To Get Enough
Chinese Scholars On a Visit to Israel Say Their People Want To Know ‘What the Jewish Nation Is All About’

By Nathan Jeffay (The Forward)
Published January 26, 2011, issue of February 04, 2011.

Tel Aviv — Back in 1991 Chen Yiyi was, as he puts it, a “bored” law student at Peking University. At the time, China was in the process of formalizing relations with Israel, and the Chinese Education Ministry and Israel’s Foreign Ministry selected his university as the site of China’s first Hebrew course taught by visiting Israeli teachers. When the class fell short of its eight-student enrollment target, Chen was persuaded to sign up to boost its numbers.

Little did Chen know at the time that he was embarking on a career in what would soon be a burgeoning field within Chinese academia: Jewish studies.

Chen, who is now director of Peking University’s Institute of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, teaches a Bible course at his school that is billed as a class in Tanach, using the Hebrew word for the Bible and drawing upon Jewish interpretations. Now in its eighth year, the class can accommodate a maximum of 200 students each session, but it regularly has 500 students sign up.

“People see it that the best students of the best university need to know about the cornerstones of other civilizations, and the cornerstone is Tanach,” Chen said.

Chen — whose accomplishments include translating the Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua into Chinese — was part of a delegation of 10 Chinese scholars of Jewish studies who visited Israel for a weeklong study tour in mid-January. The academics brought with them stories of their bursting-at-the-seams lecture halls and classes where Tanach, Hebrew and even Aramaic are studied, despite the fact that the field of Jewish studies essentially didn’t even exist in China 20 years ago.

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In Song’s telling, the curiosity reflects “Judeophilia” rather than “Judeophobia.” As the Chinese nation has embarked on a process of economic and technological advancement, it looks upon Jews, another ancient people that seems to have excelled in this area while maintaining a distinctive identity, as a “model it can employ to modernize itself,” he explained.

Song said that Judaism is perceived by Chinese people as being part of the foundation of Western civilization. As a result, they see Judaism as synonymous with “Western,” and many take the view that to learn about the West, one should become familiar with Judaism.

Indeed, Song observed that Judaism is not just seen as Western, it is seen as the best of the West. In China, he said, many erroneously believe that John Rockefeller and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were Jewish. “Everything that is successful, smart and rich is regarded as Jewish,” he said.

While the most popular Jewish subjects in China are those related to Jews in finance and contemporary Jewry, some Chinese want to go back to basics and learn about scripture. The study of the Bible has never been particularly popular in China, where the dominant faiths have been Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and where religion was repressed by the communist authorities. In today’s era of openness, however, it is the focus of much curiosity.

Since Christianity and Judaism are both regarded as foreign faiths, there is no reason that studying the Bible through the Christian tradition would necessarily seem more natural than through the Jewish tradition. And even among Chinese Christians there is an interest in studying Judaism. Many Jewish studies students are Christians who “think that they could do with understanding Judaism to understand Christianity,” Song said.

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Related post here. This current article puts the earlier one in a less creepy context.