Chinese reformers recast Jewish Easternness to prove Western culture was really Asian.

Evidence

While the fascination over the Chinese Jews continued in the West, the occidental representation of the Jews as Eastern or as oriental was appropriated by and became useful to Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century in the construction of a Chinese cultural identity. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–63) and the second Opium War (1856–60) had deepened fears of and hostility toward the West among members of the conservative elite in China. For those reformers, who saw themselves as liberal-minded, and for Chinese converts to Christianity, it was necessary to portray the Western or Christian culture in a way that was acceptable to the conservative element. By postulating the “Eastern roots” of the Jewish people and their culture, Western culture, which was regarded as having been derived from the Jewish culture, was essentially Eastern. In other words, Western culture and Chinese culture were basically the same. Thus, there was no need to fear the West or Christianity. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 361

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how subordinated intellectuals weaponize a colonizer’s own Orientalist categories to declare cultural common ground with the enemy — the mirror image of how empires orientalize their subjects.
• ADDENDUM: Complements ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ and the broader Orientalism thread — this is Orientalism redeployed by the non-Western side for diplomatic ends rather than Western self-definition.