Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Awakening of China by W.A.P. Martin
page 49 of 330 (14%)

Of the condition of the Jews of K'ai-fung-fu, as I found them,
I have given a detailed account elsewhere.[*] Suffice it to say
here that the so-called colony consisted of about four hundred
persons, belonging to seven families or clans. Undermined by a
flood of the Yellow River, their synagogue had become ruinous,
and, being unable to repair it, they had disposed of its timbers
to relieve the pressure of their dire poverty.
[Page 44]
Nothing remained but the vacant space, marked by a single stone
recording the varying fortunes of these forlorn Israelites. It
avers that their remoter ancestors arrived in China by way of India
in the Han dynasty, before the Christian era, and that the founders
of this particular colony found their way to K'ai-fung-fu in the
T'ang dynasty about 800 A. D. It also gives an outline of their
Holy Faith, showing that, in all their wanderings, they had not
forsaken the God of their fathers. They still possessed some rolls
of the Law, written in Hebrew, on sheepskins, but they no longer
had a rabbi to expound them. They had forgotten the sacred tongue,
and some of them had wandered into the fold of Mohammed, whose
creed resembled their own. Some too had embraced the religion of
Buddha.

[Footnote *: See "Cycle of Cathay." Revell & Co., New York.]

My report was listened to with much interest by the rich Jews of
Shanghai, but not one of them put his hand in his pocket to rebuild
the ruined synagogue; and without that for a rallying-place the
colony must ere long fade away, and be absorbed in the surrounding
heathenism, or be led to embrace Christianity.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge