Una Ragazza on Play: Of Jews and Asian Jews

Until my early 20s, my understanding of Judaism was somewhat limited to my reading of the Bible.

The Israelites who were enslaved in Egypt were called Jews. Moses, who led their exodus, was a Jew. The Jews in the desert wilderness ate manna and quail, which my Sunday school teacher once described as tasting better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. David, who killed Goliath, was a Jew.

Jesus was a Jew.

Back then, the notion of actually meeting a real-life Jew would have sounded preposterous to me. In my young and ignorant mind, Jews were a people who lived a long, long time ago.

Since moving to the United States, I have been humbly educated. Beginning with a deeper understanding of the Holocaust by way of museums and Schindler’s List, I learnt about the atrocities that befell Jews only five decades ago. I learnt about the role America played in becoming a refuge and home to what is now nearly half the Jewish population in the world. That’s right: there are possibly more Jews in America than in Israel.

Jewish memorabilia on sale in my 'hood

My adopted city of New York is Jerusalem West. Jews are believed to have populated this city since 1654, when 23 Jews arrived from Recife in Brazil, which was a thriving town with a Jewish population which had in turn come from Europe in the 1500s due to economic reasons and to seek freedom of worship from the Inquisition in Spain and its colonies.

The 1880s saw a wave of immigration from Europe because of antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe, with the number peaking around 1950s and then declining as suburban migration to states like California and Florida took place. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, Jews from the former Soviet Union also started arriving in the New York metropolitan area in the 1980s and 1990s.

In many walks of American life, the Jewish community has made major contributions. It can be largely credited with founding Hollywood and for many of my favorite stars in the entertainment industry. (Think MGM, Warner Brothers, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, the Coen brothers, Ben Stiller, Natalie Portman, Jason Schwartzman and Sean Penn.) The academic and literary fields also have their heros and Nobel Prize winners in Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman and Elie Wiesel, to name a few. In politics, a prominent example is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has been making many significant improvements to the city through efforts such as economic programs, nutrition laws (New York is one of the first cities to require fast-food establishments to include calorie information on menus), and traffic zoning changes (hello, bike lanes!). Also underway is a potential smoking ban in parks and beaches.

How many calories can a dollar buy?

Glorious bike lanes: a godsend for New York cyclists

The glow has even rubbed off on some born-and-bred New Yorkers who are not Jewish, but sometimes think they are.

“I grew up in Manhattan, so yeah, I’m an honorary Jew,” a colleague with British and Latino Catholic parents once remarked with seemingly a tinge of pride.

Having met and befriended many Jews in the city, I have had the opportunity to know the culture better. Take the holidays, for example. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year that falls on the first day of the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar. Traditional foods include gefilte fish (made from carp or pike), challah bread (very yummy braided bread made with a lot of eggs) and chopped liver. Yes, there are people in this world besides the crazy Chinese and French who eat offal.

Challah-lelujah!

Jewish weddings are a lot of fun. They involve a pretty chupah (canopy under which the bride and groom say their vows), some broken glass and plenty of dancing (some chairs required). And of course, food. (Pass the challah bread again, please.)

Jewish chair dance... plenty of fun

Wedding cuisine aside, imagine my amusement when I learnt that Jewish people love Chinese food. One year, my company threw a year-end holiday party to celebrate all the festivities from the various religions, including Christmas and Hannukah, the “festival of lights.” A friend whose team was assigned to depict Hannukah served, among other things, Chinese takeout to symbolize the importance of the food to her culture. On Christmas, it’s a lighthearted joke that Jews do two things: go to the movies (because Christians are home and so there are no queues) and eat Chinese food.

Jewish people like their Chinese food indeed. Some say that the origins of eating Chinese could be because Christianity is generally not widely practised among the Chinese and so the likelihood of a Jew encountering a benign, smiling, rotund buddha statue in a Chinese restaurant is much higher than that of a crucifix or a statue of madonna. Yet others say that it’s because the dishes do not combine dairy with meat, which is agreeable with the Hebrew teaching, “Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.”

I’d throw in another theory: Chinese is tasty. Jewish people, like the Chinese, simply enjoy eating. Indeed, food is an integral part of Jewish culture, akin to that of the Chinese.

Interestingly, food is not the only similarity I’ve observed between the Jews and Chinese. Jewish people, like the Chinese, have traditionally been known for their business acumen. In general, a strong aptitude in numbers has brought many professionals to the finance sector. Both cultures also share a reputation for being entrepreneurial, where “businessman” is a profession rather commonly held by those from both cultural backgrounds.

Now, considering the geographical distance between Israel and China, and the absence of any known major event involving both nations, did these two cultures ever cross paths historically?

I was intrigued to learn that Jews have been living in China since the Northern Song Dynasty (960 - 1127), with a small concentration in Kaifeng, the dynasty’s capital that is in the present-day Chinese province of Henan. It is believed that the ancestors of Kaifeng Jews made their way over from Central Asia. Later during the Ming Dynasty, the emperor conferred seven Chinese last names on Jews in the empire, two of which are interestingly the western equivalent of common Jewish last names: “Jin” (gold) and “Shi” (stone).

Perhaps all the above may explain that certain level of affinity I feel toward what is a “recently-rediscovered” people to me.

Once, when I was introducing my background as an overseas-born Chinese to some New York acquaintances, I even found myself drawing a comparison by coining the term, “Asian Jew.”

To me, that is a compliment in itself and a tribute to the Jewish friends I’ve made who have opened up my eyes to a whole new culture.

Mazel tov on a job well done.

Pretty menorahs (Hannukah candlesticks) and streamers

(Some pictures from the Internet)