After locking down Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and tearing down church crosses in eastern China, President Xi Jinping’s campaign against unapproved religion and foreign influence has turned to an unlikely adversary: a small group of Jews whose ancestors settled in this now faded imperial city near the banks of the Yellow River more than 1,000 years ago.
A few hundred residents had staged a lively, sometimes contentious rebirth of Kaifeng’s Jewish heritage in recent decades, with classes, services and proposals to rebuild a lost synagogue as a museum. Some residents even migrated to Israel. For years, the city government tolerated their activities, seeing the Jewish link as a magnet for tourism and investment.
But since last year, authorities have come down hard on the revival, in an example of how even the smallest spiritual groups can fall under the pall of the Communist Party’s suspicion. The government has shut down organisations that helped foster Jewish rediscovery, prohibited residents from gathering to worship for Passover and other holidays, and removed signs and relics of the city’s Jewish past from public places.
Only about 1,000 people claim Jewish ancestry in this city — a drop in China’s ocean of 1.35 billion people or Kaifeng’s population of 4.5 million — and only 100 or 200 of them have been active in Jewish religious and cultural activities, experts say.
Nobody outside the government seems to know for sure why this tiny band of believers came to be viewed as a threat. But officials appear to have become alarmed about their growing prominence sometime last year as Mr. Xi’s government demanded that religious groups and foreign organisations bow to tighter controls. Judaism is not one of China’s five state-licensed religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism and Taoism.
“Xi has said that religion is a major issue, and when he speaks, that has consequences,” said a burly local businessman who has supported the Jewish revival.
Kaifeng’s Jews, as well as their supporters abroad, said the clampdown did not spring from outright anti-Semitism, which is relatively rare in China. Shanghai and Harbin, a northeast city, have organised displays and events celebrating their role protecting Jews who fled persecution in Europe.
“It’s fear about religion, not just us Jews,” a businessman said.
The current clampdown has gone much further than previous ones, residents said. Some cited accounts through the community grapevine that a Jewish woman from Kaifeng had won asylum in the United States after claiming religious persecution. — New York Times News Service
