Jews and silkroad

23Mar10

As Wood mentions in her book-length study of the Silk Road, Jewish scroll texts were found among the possessions of the Abbott Wang at the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang (Wood: 90). However, the literature documenting a Jewish presence in either China or along the Silk Road route itself, which traversed many kingdoms, is scanty. It was not until the 20th century that archaeologists and historians even became aware that Jews were living and working in China and that they also lived in settlements along the Silk Route. Cansdale examines the historical documents from a number of dig sites as well as the uncovering of evidence during dam construction in mid 20th century. Her evidence is based on the small number of written materials and artifacts from locations that reveal a Jewish presence, either in the form of traveling through or in fixed settlements. Much of this has to be reconstructed using a general knowledge of Jewish peoples lives in the first centuries after the destruction of their temple and the forced out-migration from Egypt and ancient Palestine.
Was there truly a Jewish Khan who ruled an empire that stretched from the Sea of Azov to the Caspian Sea? (Cansdale: 25) Did Jewish merchants practice their religion in Cathay? What was the status of the Jewish people living in what is now Afganistan? How did they travel, overland or by sea-routes or both? Islamic rule over the Byzantine East brought Christians and Jews under Islamic rule. While they had to pay higher taxes and were faced with some restrictions on their lives, the Islamic rulers generally allowed Jews to live openly and to travel as merchants in any lands, including Christian, Muslim and to Buddhist-Confucian China (Cansdale:24-27). Jews settled in India, to a large extent in Persia, and as evidence shows, along areas of the Silk Route. They traveled both by land, from Persia and India and by sea, ending up in port cities of China where they engaged as traders and merchants bring exotic goods back to their points of origin.
As Cansdale notes the Jews were called Radhanites in one area, importing “male and female slaves, brocade, furs and swords” from the West and “musk aloe wood, camphor and cinnamon besides a variety of other unnamed goods” from the East (Cansdale: 29) Cansdale believes that the origin point for these Jewish merchants was Bagdad, not France as some scholars have speculated. Her reasoning has to do with the way that people traveled, and the kind of dangers and hardships associated with passage along the Silk Road overland over the sea-routes to the East (Cansdale: 28-29).
It would be valuable to understand Jewish experience in these territories and cultures from Jewish texts themselves. It is also interesting to ponder why there is, if these texts do not exist, so little information on Jewish life during these centuries in the vast areas stretching from India to China. How did their culture and religious ideas impact or influence Chinese, Indian, Persian people? Was Islam affected in any way by Jewish cultural traditions? These are the kinds of questions that seem to be discussed when looking at Buddhism, Islam and Christian syncretic trends in a variety of times and locations? Why is this subject area so voiceless?

Bibliography

Cansdale, Lena “Jews on the Silk Roads”

Wood, Frances, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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