Silk Road And The Ancient Chinese Jews Study

This paper aims to take the relationship between the Silk Road and Jews in traditional China as the research subject, and to try to solve problems of Chinese Jews from the angle of the Silk Road. Generally speaking, the so-called Silk Road can be classified into three phases, namely Early Silk Road, Silk Road in the Sui and Tang Dynasties, as well as the Silk Road in the Song and Yuan Dynasties. Although there had been certain Jewish colonies spotted along the Early Silk Road, Jewish people had little motivation at that time to move into China by the Silk Road due to their pro-agricultural economic structure; Diasporic Jewry might have spread to most stations of the Silk Road when time went on to the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and Jewish people, at that time, had turned their hands largely to the area of long-distance trade, for those reasons above, there are adequate evidences to prove that Jews entered into China during that period, yet in terms of the distress situation in late Tang China, the scale of Jews in China by that time might not be too large. In fact, those we later called Chinese Jews living in Kaifeng, Ningbo, Hangzhou and Ynagzhou were believed to immigrate into the Middle Kingdom during the Song and Yuan Dynasties when China's oversea trade is at its peak. Going forward to the Ming Dynasty, however, Jewish communities in old China were gradually acculturated into local Chinese society as the traditional Silk Road, both land and marine, being cut off.