A missionary’s 1843 book shaped Western understanding of the Kaifeng Jews

Evidence

It was James Finn’s The Jews in China (published in 1843) and his second work on the subject, The Orphan Colony of the Jews in China (published in the 1870s) that made the greatest impression and became the most authoritative history of the Jews in China produced for a Western audience. A diplomat, scholar, and active member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, Finn (1806–72) studied theology and Judaism, was proficient in Hebrew, and wrote a history of the Jews in Spain and Portugal. During his research at the British Library he came across the books about the Kaifeng Jews written by the Jesuits two centuries earlier. With new information available to him along with his own scholarship, Finn managed to clarify many of the Jesuits’ muddled and sometimes obscure accounts, and produced the most readable history of the Chinese Jews in the West. It was republished in 1945 in Chinese Repository, a well-known English-language missionary periodical in Canton. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 354