Jesuit missionaries’ contradictory reports obscured rather than clarified the Kaifeng Jews’ true history.

Evidence

Gaubil’s report, however, was full of contradictions. For instance, on the one hand, he described these Jews in Kaifeng as very ignorant of the Bible and their religion; on the other hand, he claimed they began to learn Hebrew as children and were knowledgeable enough to ask certain intelligent grammatical questions regarding the Bible. … He also concluded that these Chinese Jews had originally entered China three hundred years before the birth of Christ, and at the same time noted that they habitually observed Purim. But Purim was first observed by Yeshiva students in Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages, at a point in time later than when the Jews supposedly entered China. Excited at being told by these Jews that their oldest Scripture was deposited in a Buddhist temple in the imperial capital Beijing, Gaubil was disappointed to find that it was in fact a manuscript of the Koran. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 349

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how Western observers project Western frameworks onto unfamiliar non-Western Jewish communities, echoing Orientalism’s distortion-of-the-East thesis.