MEET LIHONG SONG

"Jews are invisible in China." If Lihong song''s assertion is true, why would this historian choose to specialize in Judaic Studies? The answer lies in his remarkable intellectual autobiography. To read his words is to take heart that the future of the Glazer Institute for Judaic Studies is assured and will rest in very good hands.

 Intellectual Autobiography

 How did I start my interest in Jewish subjects and eventually turn out a Jewish studies scholar in China? As you can imagine, I have been asked this question countless times. It always evokes a sense of hesitation—even an anxiety—in me. Part of the reason is that I try to piece together many of my fragmented experience into a meaningful whole. Which episode should I choose? Is this experience more meaningful or more fitting to recount in the current situation than that?

To select this or that, that is the question. Ultimately, I have accumulated many different answers over years. This assertion seems to put my intellectual integrity into question, but that is more apparent than real. Cecil Roth once explained that he became a historian “frankly for the pleasure of the thing.” Yet Lucy Dawidowicz was not convinced—for her, “no historian works only for the fun of it, no matter how much fun he gets out of it.” Obviously, the search for multifarious relevance, rather than an immutable and essential truth, which seems particularly problematic in light of the master narrative of post-modernism, is at least more instinctive.

I was trained a historian. Historians are also instinctive to contextualize, which makes me more hesitant. In this respect, I am aware that there is a profound chasm stretching between my Jewish inquirer and me. That is, Jews are invisible in China. Of course, there are descendants of Kaifeng Jews, but they physically are indistinguishable from other Chinese and are not halakhaklly sanctioned. True, there is organized Jewish life in big cities of Beijing and Shanghai, but it is accessible only to Jewish sojourners in China. For ordinary Chinese, the only way to learn the Jewish people is by reading books.
Alas, there are numerous books on this topic. The shelves of Chinese bookstores have been lined with bestsellers on Jewish subjects, with such eye-catching titles as Talmud: The Greatest Jewish Bible for Making Money, Unveiling the Secrets of Jewish Success in World Economy… In my opinion, this voyeuristic interest in the Jewish success reflects that most Chinese are not so much interested in real Jews as the Jew as tropes. The most prevalent trope of this kind in China is that the Jew is anyone who is smart, wealthy and successful. As a matter of fact, some non-Jewish celebrities are widely regarded as Jewish in China, for example, Rockefeller.

In retrospect, I myself was not impervious to this trope. In my college years, I was a student in the department of history, majoring in the history of the West in general and the Roman Empire in particular. It’s natural for a Chinese to be attracted to the Roman Empire. The parallels are self-evident: the geographical expansion, the relations between a central government and numerous local communities, the tensions between individual political freedom and the totalizing momentum of an empire, the multi-ethnic society and the consequent negotiation of cultural and religious identities. My concern with these issues brought my attention to the works of Fergus Millar, then the Camden Professor of Ancient History of Oxford University and a towering figure in today’s Roman studies. I took notice that his The Emperor in the Roman World, the work that had earned him international reputation, was inspired by his reading in Josephus.

This was a new name for me. I had read Tacitus, Suetonius, Appian and some Livy. But who was Josephus? A Jewish renegade—this fact impressed me most, because it completely subverted another “fact” I gathered from the popular Chinese fantasies about the Jewish success. It goes like this: “Why Jewish people have survived so many persecutions while those persecutors themselves disappeared in historical dustbin? The secret lies in the fact that you cannot find a single Jewish traitor throughout whole Jewish history.”

To Chinese sensibilities, the overtone of this assertion is “Why has Modern China declined? Because there were so many Chinese renegades who sold our national interests to western and Japanese colonial powers.” I was struck not by Josephus’ magnum opus on Jewish ancient history and Jewish War against the Romans, but by his slim books: firstly Against Apion, in which he refuted with eloquence and great skill various anti-Jewish slanders by pagan authors; and secondly his Vita, in which several creative tensions—between Eretz Israel and diaspora, between Talmud Torah and secular learning, between "tradition" and "modernity"—can be sensed. I think I was attracted by a fundamental tension in Josephus: he was a traitor, yet he had a burning feeling for the tradition inherent in him. Anyway, Josephus was the first Jewish traitor I discovered, hence the commencement of my credentials as a Jewish studies scholar.