A Jew in China

There’s a famous joke. A Jewish man walks into a Chinese restaurant and asks the waiter, “Do you have any Chinese Jews?” The waiter goes into the kitchen, comes back out, and says, “No. We have orange, tomato, and apple juice. No Chinese juice.”

In America, I grew up with two half-truths about Jews and China. The first was that China loved the Jews. Many in China, I was told, held fond, appreciative attitudes towards Jews thanks to a shared cultural affinity for education and commerce. The second half-truth was embedded in the joke's punchline: Chinese Jews did not exist. I began studying Mandarin in middle school. It did not take long for me to learn that, depending on what we mean by “Chinese,” there have been some Chinese Jews, albeit few.¹

After graduating from college, I decided to spend a year continuing to study Chinese language, politics, and economics in Beijing. By the time I went into my year, I had heard much about the Holocaust refugees who found safety in the Shanghai ghetto and Chinese “philosemitism.” Knowing of these stories of goodwill and how few Jews currently live in China, I did not expect to spend much time thinking about Judaism in contemporary China.

Once I became a Jew in China, I found Jews as often the subjects of scorn and erasure as admiration and praise. I had to examine whether and why a shift in Chinese perceptions of Jews had occurred, and how it manifested.

I discovered that, in the aftermath of October 7th, the war in Gaza, and the Third Gulf War, discussions of Jews, Israel, and Palestine are highly restricted. Over my year, I came to see that what makes the story of Jews in contemporary China distinctive is that discussions of past and present Jewish life are shaped and constrained by the state. A year in China sharpened my appreciation for the culture of free expression that allows American Jews to contest how they are described and to produce competing accounts.

A year in China sharpened my appreciation for the culture of free expression that allows American Jews to contest how they are described and to produce competing accounts.

Within my first month in China, I had the chance to meet the editor of the English-language edition of an official government newspaper. Despite spending her days writing about global politics in English, she had never been to the United States. To her, I was a rare specimen: a real, living, breathing American. She bounced on the chance to interrogate me about politics. The first thing she wanted to know was: “Why does the US support Israel?”

When I asked what she thought, her theory was simple. People who give money to elect American politicians support Israel, so America supports Israel. She saw Israel’s war as a moral aberration. Then, she attributed U.S. support to “the” Jews who control American politics. It was classically antisemitic — Jews controlling the world through money — and classically Chinese—a narrative of an American democracy rife with corruption.

It was strange to discover someone who believed so matter-of-factly that Jews exercised totalizing control over American politics, not because there is anything novel about this narrative but rather because it shattered my anticipation that Jews in China were the subject of an exuberant and peculiar affinity.

During WWII, Shanghai took in tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, and that episode has since anchored a particular account of Chinese tolerance toward Jews.² The intellectual roots of Chinese philosemitism run further back, to the late nineteenth century, when Chinese thinkers began drawing parallels between Chinese and Jewish experiences with European powers.³ Jews who had survived inquisitions, pogroms, and centuries of stateless persecution seemed, to those intellectuals, like natural comrades to a China reeling from the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Sino-Japanese Wars. Chinese intellectuals identified with Jews as fellow members of a small and subjugated people. Prominent reformers, including Sun Yat-Sen, studied Jewish nationalism as a model for how a dispersed population might reconstitute itself as a nation.⁴ Jewish history and contemporary political organization offered a usable precedent.

In that same era, Chinese diplomats, elites, and students visiting America learned from antisemitic stereotypes and, as Jordyn Haime describes, “flipped them on their heads.”⁵ They heard that Jews had become the most powerful and influential immigrant community in America and wanted the same for the Chinese community.

In much of the Western moral tradition, conspicuous wealth and the pursuit of power carry ambivalence at best. Chinese cultural attitudes toward wealth and power have not always carried the same moral charge. To be prosperous, educated, and well-positioned has more often been a straightforward good. Even if Chinese visitors recognized the negative valence of Jewish stereotypes in the American context, they nonetheless saw Jews as a model of economic and sociopolitical success.

The intensity of this interest in Jews as a subject of study and emulation has tracked China's political and economic transformations. The moral status of wealth and the merchant class shifted dramatically across the second half of the 20th century and first decades of the 21st. Mao sent the bourgeoisie to reeducation camps and then Deng Xiaoping declared that “to get rich is glorious.” In 1992, with China’s reform and opening period underway, the PRC and Israel established diplomatic relations, which was followed by the establishment of Jewish studies at various Chinese universities.⁶ Then, in the early 2000s, a genre of popular literature emerged that turned Jewish history and texts into guides for commercial success. Books like Jewish Wisdom and Family Education: the Cultural Code of the Most Intelligent and Wealthy Nation in the World (2005) and Secrets of Jewish Success: The Golden Rule of a Miraculous Nation (2004) became best-sellers and propagated the myth that Jews learned their supposed business acumen from the Talmud.⁷

Underlying much of this is an imagination of Jews—intelligent, wealthy, and collectively powerful. Whether that image produces admiration or hostility depends less on the image itself than on the political context in which it circulates. As scholar Mary Ainslie explains, “in contemporary China, these stereotypes provide[d] an important model of imagined modernization during a period of rapid economic and technical advancement.”⁸ The same stereotype that generated bestselling self-help books in the 2000s feeds, today, into something closer to conspiracy. If the 1980s through early 2000s were the golden eras of Chinese philosemitism, the last half decade has seen the same basic assumptions bend in a different direction as the Chinese state’s main anxiety ebbs from economic development to geopolitical competition and war in the Middle East dominates news feeds.⁹

Whether that image produces admiration or hostility depends less on the image itself than on the political context in which it circulates.

At one of my first Shabbat dinners in China, I met a Jewish woman married to a Chinese celebrity who had quit social media entirely after October 7th. The comments had become intolerable. “The Jews are stealing our actors,” people wrote. She told me to search for the word “Jew” on Chinese social media apps. I typed in “youtai” (Jew) to the Chinese Instagram equivalent (Red Note). The content was mostly conspiracy theories about Jewish power and money. One video explained how the Jews were responsible for the opium trade that had weakened and devastated China's power and humiliates the nation to this day.¹⁰ Another asked, “how terrifying is the power of the Jews.”¹¹ Others were downright ridiculous, identifying Bill Gates, Pablo Picasso, and Charlie Chaplin as Jews (none of them are).¹²

Conspiracy theories about Jews from Chinese influencers do not only stay in China. In December 2025, a Chinese educator who calls himself Prof. Jiang (despite not having a PhD) filmed a 99-minute lecture on “Pax Judaica,” where he predicts that the world will be controlled from Jerusalem.¹³ It has garnered over 1.1 million views on YouTube.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Beijing, my conversation partner dabbled in classic antisemitic tropes without any sense that I might respond with shock or critique. On Chinese state media, an announcer confidently discussed Jewish control of international capital without fear of consequences.¹⁴ A Beijing high school teacher posturing as a professor employed the discredited Khazar hypothesis to convince his Beijing classroom and netizens everywhere of why "Pax Judaica” would rule.

I had spent so long thinking of the word “antisemitism” as a nuclear bomb—a term so loaded I would only want to use it with total certainty. In America, contemporary talk about antisemitism is often wrapped up in long debates about what criticism of Israel qualified as antisemitism. In China, none of that weight seemed to apply. Thanks to social media, antisemitism was not just easy to find; it was easy to name. It was just explicit, classical antisemitism, the kind you could point to without much argument about interpretation.

I did not know what to make of these discoveries: how had a place known for appreciation and goodwill towards Jews also become one of free-flowing conspiracy theories, ones that were reaching both Chinese citizens and spreading globally online?

In visiting Harbin, a city in Northern China that had once been home to a Jewish community, I began to understand that something had changed more recently—most acutely in the wake of October 7th.

Harbin is the coldest city I have ever visited. The snowfall in -20 degrees Celsius air left me with icicled hair and allowed ice cream bars to be kept lying out in the open on sidewalks. Harbin sits not far from the Russian border. Its Jewish history began in the late nineteenth century when the Qing government permitted Russians to build the Trans-Manchurian railroad. Russians moved East for the construction, and Jewish families joined. Some were fleeing pogroms. Others sought opportunity in a land where they would be guaranteed ownership rights. By 1908, eight thousand Jews lived in Harbin, and, when the Bolsheviks won in 1917, more fled to this eastern city. By the 1920s, the twenty thousand Jews of Harbin had built institutions necessary to sustain a community: two synagogues, a middle school, a hospital, a prominent hotel, and twenty newspapers.¹⁵

Physical infrastructure did little to protect the community. The most immediate threat came from the large population of White Russian emigres, many of whom blamed Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution. Japanese rule, beginning in 1932, left the violent antisemitism of the White Russian community unchecked. The violence reached its most visible point in 1933, when Simon Kaspe, the son of a prominent Jewish merchant, was kidnapped and murdered.¹⁶ When Kaspe was buried, large numbers of Chinese citizens attended the funeral, mourning alongside the Jewish community and demanding that the killers be brought to justice.¹⁷ However, Chinese institutions had their own record of discrimination. In 1911, the Harbin Chamber of Commerce lobbied Beijing to explicitly exclude Jews from trade privileges.¹⁸ In 1922, local authorities banned the use of Yiddish in public spaces and refused to ratify the legal standing of the Jewish community. Jews began leaving the city. By 1939, only five thousand remained. When the USSR took control of Harbin after its victory over Japan in 1945, Soviet authorities sent the community's leaders to the gulag.¹⁹

As I learned the history of Jews in Harbin, I became skeptical of the extent to which it mattered that a quasi-philosemitic view of Jews as economically productive and cognitively talented had ever existed. For much of China’s history, there were few Jews, and its rulers were remarkably tolerant. But the early 20th century Jewish community in Harbin had also seen restrictions, dispossession, and murder. This Jewish community had lived in China at a time of immense political tumult: Japanese imperialism, the fall of Republican China, and civil war. Their history, like that of the other Jewish communities (those of Kaifeng and Shanghai predominantly), was much more complex than a simple narrative of unique safety and affinity could account for.²⁰

More importantly, Harbin’s Jewish history today is difficult to access, and geopolitics have only made it more so.²¹ When I visited Harbin in December 2025, I was struck by how thoroughly the Jewish past had been preserved in the architecture and how completely it had been erased from public consciousness. At the sites I visited, there seemed to be a reluctance to name their Jewish character openly, and this nervousness had only deepened since October 2023 and the beginning of the Gaza War. The streets bore the same structure as in 1925. I could stop at nearly any building on the main tourist street and, with a map, connect it to Jewish history. But the many neon lights and glass storefronts had replaced whatever historical legibility the buildings might have offered.

The main site that announced itself as a historical and Jewish building was the old synagogue. After the building was gutted and used as a hospital, the local government restored it to something like its original form.²² In the early 2000s, the provincial government invested $30 million to restore Jewish sites, partly in an attempt to “attract business investments.”²³ They imagined that Jews were wealthy, educated, and global and would come in hordes as tourists and investors allured by the preserved Jewish history.²⁴ These attitudes had led Chinese officials to believe that Jews would contribute to the economic revitalization of a declining Northern Chinese coal-area.

However, when I arrived in Harbin, the area purposely rebuilt remained reluctant to acknowledge that Jews had once used these buildings for religious purposes. If you know what you are looking for, the building reads as Jewish. Inside, there are Stars of David in the window and Ten Commandment plaques hanging over a bimah. However, to a Chinese tourist with little familiarity with Jewish synagogues, I imagined that the building’s design would read primarily as European, especially because there is no explicit mention of the building’s Jewishness.

The process of naming the building revealed deeper anxieties around the renovation’s purpose. Chinese officials had declined to name the complex after Abraham Kaufman, the Jewish community's long-serving president, and had initially favored calling it the Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov Concert Hall, after a Russian musician with no Jewish connection and no particular tie to Harbin.²⁵ Neither name prevailed in the end, and it is officially called the Laohuitang Concert Hall. Its name is redundant. Lao Hui Tang (老会堂) means Old Meeting Hall. The name may be a Chinese translation from Hebrew. The Hebrew for synagogue (Beit Knesset) literally means meeting house. But a look at a Chinese-English dictionary shows two options for synagogue (犹太教堂 and 犹太会堂), both of which include the word Jew (犹太/you tai). Neither of these is employed in the Old Synagogue’s new title. It is just an old meeting and concert hall.

The synagogue’s name may mask its past but does not lie about its present use. Attending a concert is the way to gain entry to the restored synagogue. So, on a Friday night, where generations past might have sung L'Cha Dodi, I sat through a strange medley of classical Chinese opera and nineteenth-century European music.

My two friends and I were the only foreign tourists and certainly the only Jews in attendance that evening. The government’s hopes for mass Jewish tourism seemed far removed. After all, only around 90,000 Israeli tourists come to China every year.²⁶ More importantly, I do not know of many Jews who would think of China, and much less Harbin, as a destination for Jewish tourism.

I also wondered whether the tourists — seemingly mostly Chinese — that did end up in Harbin’s refurbished synagogue knew they were participating in Jewish tourism. As I sat listening to an eclectic compilation of modern and classical music, my mind wandered. I imagined life as a Harbin Jew trudging through the snow to attend services. I scanned the room several times. The building had the makings of a synagogue: the Magen David in the window, the tablets above the bimah, and swinging black light fixtures resemblant of those in European great synagogues. But it had all the wrong accoutrements. The seats were too large and too velvety; the stage lights were too bright.

I pondered what my Chinese co-attendees were thinking about. Did it have anything to do with Judaism? Did they know why there was a cabinet behind the performers? They probably had never heard of a Torah, and none of the people around me would learn anything about Judaism from the experience.

I pondered what my Chinese co-attendees were thinking about. Did it have anything to do with Judaism? Did they know why there was a cabinet behind the performers?

A single small placard addressed the synagogue's history and its ties to Harbin's Jewish community. Outside the building was a small plaque with the name of the community’s former president, Abraham Kaufman. Inside, a few photographs hung on the second floor, seemingly taken in the 1920s. Nothing identified the subjects or explained why images of Western-looking faces were mounted on the wall outside a bathroom in a concert venue. The space offered very little to someone trying to understand what had happened here.

But there was a Jewish museum in Harbin. Harbin's New Synagogue — the one built in 1918 when the community outgrew the first — had been converted into a Jewish museum. I had learned about the museum from past travelers to Harbin. In 2019, Dara Horn visited this ice city, which she documented in People Love Dead Jews.²⁷ Horn describes wandering through the new synagogue-turned-museum and leaving struck with two observations. First, the museum presented Harbin’s Jews exclusively as wealthy, despite the thousands of poor Jews who relied on the Harbin Jewish Free Kitchen. Second, the museum failed to explain why the community no longer existed.

In 2019, the presentation of Harbin’s Jewish history did not address the causes of the community’s demise: the murders and property seizures. In 2023, Harbin’s Jewish history existed only in architecture for a period. The government had closed the Jewish Museum following October 7th without indication of the reason for the closure.²⁸ By 2025, it was reopened for scheduled, private visits. All the while, the concerts would continue playing beneath the Magen David in the so-called Old Concert Hall. I came away with a different eerie feeling from Dara Horn. It was as if the State regretted trying to bring back any evidence that Harbin Jews had existed. The government had created a Jewish Museum and shut it down when war in the Middle East made Jews a “sensitive topic.” They had restored the Old Synagogue only to make it a Concert Hall.

The thing about the suppression of Jewish history or the propagation of antisemitic tropes in China is that it is like anything in China: it only happens at the will of the government. A thing quietly ceases, no stir made, nor is anyone publicly responsible. These stealth crackdowns, much like algorithmic social media feeds, bear few explicit traces of government intervention.

But the timing of museum closures or rising antisemitism in online discourse is not coincidental. What Deborah Lipstadt has called a “flip” from philosemitism to antisemitism is geopolitical.²⁹

As scholar of antisemitism in China, Tuvia Gering, has described, China is following the Soviet Union by allowing open animosity towards Jews, not just Israel, to thrive to benefit its geopolitical standing against the US-led West.³⁰ The United States is the primary power that has continued to back Israel since October 7th. For China, American support for Israel is evidence of Washington's moral bankruptcy and an opportunity to win credibility across the Muslim and Arab world. Most people in China will only encounter Judaism as filtered by state censors, whether online or in print, which means it arrives as praise when that serves the government or as silence or conspiracy when that does instead. The Harbin Synagogue was restored and opened to the public during a period when the government was promoting the history of Jewish life in China. It was later closed when that history became politically sensitive.

The Chinese case makes visible what American Jews tend to take for granted: the ability to be known on one's own terms. American Jews have spent three centuries writing novels, staging plays, and more recently filling social media with accounts of their own lives. They study and contest their own history. Philip Roth's or Jerry Seinfeld's version of Jewish life exists in the same culture as the antisemitic tropes of Nick Fuentes and Sneako. Americans might well encounter both. Some of this reaches China via VPN; a friend met a Chinese student whose understanding of Jewish life came from watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

American Jews have spent three centuries writing novels, staging plays, and more recently filling social media with accounts of their own lives.

Being known does not guarantee safety. Jews have been known and killed. But being made known and unknown presents its own kind of danger.

The precarity of Jews in China is structural. In authoritarian regimes especially, Jews, dead or alive, can be narrativized following the government's interests. In China, local governments can shut down Jewish museums, government censors can encourage conspiracy theories on social media, and state news can portray Jewish control over geopolitics.

The deeper issue is the absence of recourse. When an authoritarian government wishes to spread narratives about a minority, that minority has no institutional mechanism to fight back. Jews in the United States at least can organize openly, produce culture, contest false narratives, and participate in political life as their own representatives. That capacity is dependent on free society: the political freedoms to express, debate, publish, sue, and organize.

Whether Jewish art, academia, and advocacy produce measurable enough political effects to counteract antisemitism is debatable, but the agency to attempt it exists. There are few Jews living in China (3500, according to a 2024 survey), and they do not have the equivalent opportunity to contest antisemitism.³¹ They are subject to the narratives that the state finds appropriate. This lack is a reminder to all American Jews that they must not take for granted their ability to push back—to write, create culture, organize, and engage in the realm of politics.

Today, life in China for expat Jews is comparatively safe. Authoritarian states impose a kind of order that suppresses violence from below, so the risk of street-level attacks on Jewish communities in China is low. It is much lower, in fact, than in many open societies. But physical safety in the short term is a poor measure of long-term vulnerability. While the state will not tolerate violence on its streets, it has no issue in demonizing Jews and using its algorithms to do the same across the world. When state-controlled narratives shape a population’s knowledge of the Jewish people and there is no free expression to present a different image of Jews, a state could move towards mass hostility against Jews. In the long run, having the world's most populous country cultivate resentment toward Jews and Israel and deploy antisemitic conspiracy theories as instruments of foreign policy is a danger, regardless of whether individual Jews, like me, feel safe on Beijing streets today.

Living in China is a reminder that the conditions enabling Jewish life in America — the ability to organize openly, to produce culture, to contest narratives, to be known interpersonally — are created by and dependent on free society. Antisemitism is rising in the United States, but the ability to organize, publish, litigate, and respond is something we have and must exercise.

the conditions enabling Jewish life in America — the ability to organize openly, to produce culture, to contest narratives, to be known interpersonally — are created by and dependent on free society.