A small Jewish community in Kaifeng, Henan province, believes its ancestors where Persian Jews who came for trade by the Silk Road, about a thousand years ago during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). Kaifeng, where the Jews built a synagogue in 1163, was then the capital of the dynasty. It was a cosmopolitan city on a branch of the Silk Road. The existence of Jews in China was unknown to Europeans until 1605, when Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit then established in Beijing, was visited by a Jew from Kaifeng, who had come to Beijing to take examinations for a bureaucratic degree.
After a while, the community...