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Jews have lived in Kaifeng, a city in central China’s Henan province, for over 1,000 years. This makes the Kaifeng Jews the oldest Jewish community in China.
The exact time Jews arrived in Kaifeng is not entirely certain. Most scholars believe that Jews first arrived during the Song Dynasty (960-1127 C.E.), from India or Persia (present day Iran), stops on the Silk Road. During this period, the Chinese people called the Jews “Tiaojiaojin” (the religion that removes the tendon) because Jewish dietary law (
kashrut) forbids the consumption of the sciatic nerve. A bit later, during the Ming Dynasty, the emperor assigned Jews one of eight last names because he found Hebrew names confusing. To this day Kaifeng Jews can be recognized by their last names: Ai, Shi, Gao, Gan, Jin, Li, Zhang or Zhao.
by Fred Halliday
March 200
I read this book in Arabic and translated it as accurately as I could. I will try to enumerate as concisely as feasible what the author
Fred Haliday considers as the 100 fallacies on the Middle East.
Most of the explanations are less than half a page of small format, so I would consider these fallacies
as work in progress and sometimes indeterminate for lack of development, except the basic notion that
we are no different than many underdeveloped people.
1. The Middle East (ME) is backward; the coded terminologies used in the modern States should be understood differently in that region; three pages;
A recent article on the website, Seforim Blog, compares the phonetics of biblical Hebrew and Arabic. In the post, the author, Rabbi Avi Grossman, remarks that he “cannot fathom” why the letter ayin (ע) in Yiddish became a vowel roughly equivalent to the Latin letter E and asks his readers if anyone can explain how this spelling convention came about.
The article provoked a lively discussion on Facebook among Yiddish writers and linguists but none of them were able to answer the query.
If you think about it, though, one could just as easily ask: how did the letter hey (ה) evolve into the Latin E and why did ayin (ע) turn into the letter O? The Greek alphabet was created about 2,800 years ago and modeled on the Phoenician alphabet, the ancestor of the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. Most Greek dialects of the time had no H sound, let alone the Semitic guttural consonant represented by ayin (ע), so the ancient Greeks turned these two consonants into vowels. The Latin alphabet the
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kuf interchanges with
kashahâ is related to â
yeshâ (which means is or exists). From manâs perspective, the more tangible â the more concrete or hard something is â the more real it seems.
Second, Rabbi Hirsch notes that because
kuf can be interchanged with
gimmel, â
gishahâ/â
gashashâ (approaching, impacting). Most people only consider solid objects substantial enough to approach or cause an impact.
The Torah refers to the
menorah in the
mishkan as made of a â
mikshahâ (Exodus 25:31 and 37:22 and Numbers 8:4). G-d commanded that it be fashioned from a single hunk of gold; hence, it was harder than it would have been had it been made by pouring molten metal into a mold. Rashi writes that the