Disclosure: Compensated affiliate of some genetic testing companies and bookstores.
in POINTS EAST, newsletter of the Sino-Judaic Institute,
volume 39, number 2 (July 2024)
on pages 1 and 5
Richard Gussow launched a genetic testing project for the Jews of Kaifeng, China in 2008 at Family Tree DNA, starting with a sample size of 12 descendants of Kaifeng Jews he and his son met in Kaifeng. The tests examined their Y-chromosomal DNA (Y-DNA), which is inherited from fathers to sons, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited from mothers to their children. At the time, only a limited number of Y-DNA genetic markers (12 STRs) were tested. Five additional testers joined the project in 2012-2013. The Avotaynu DNA Project, founded in 2015 and administered by Adam Brown, recently provided funds to upgrade several of the men to the "Big Y" test.
Over the years, Gussow and Brown dropped hints as to the results. Writing to Facebook's "Tracing the Tribe" group in 2019, Gussow said, "What we can say is that their Y-DNA was NOT Chinese. It was unclear at the time what it was, but a couple of years after the tests, with the DNA database growing, it became clear that it was most likely Persian. This supports their oral history that their ancestors were Jewish traders from Persia who came to China on the Silk Road." Brown presented several informative and tantalizing lectures on Y-DNA discoveries made possible by the Avotaynu DNA Project. In his JewishGen video presentation "The Genetic Origins of the Jewish People" on December 2, 2020, Brown briefly mentioned that his team has studied a few Kaifeng Jews and determined where their Jewish ancestors had come from. The map on the screen at that moment showed an arrow leading from the asterisked city of Bukhara to Kaifeng. During Wim Penninx's YouTube presentation "Y-DNA and the Jews" on March 5, 2023, Brown said, "Yes, they [Kaifeng Jews] have [done Y-DNA testing]. We think they [have] come on the Silk Road." He also said that "there's no question that they are of Jewish origin."
Haplogroups are names given to particular genetic lineages. They are identified by their mutations that occur randomly and then get passed down through the generations. All of the project's haplogroup results remained a secret until the early 2020s when its results pages on Family Tree DNA's website became viewable by the general public.
Shí, meaning "stone", was one of the Chinese clan surnames that Kaifeng's Jews were allowed to adopt in the 15th century. The Kaifeng Jewish lineage with the surname Shí has been identified to belong to the Y-DNA haplogroup R-FT14557 because the fourth tested member of this family had high-resolution "Big Y" SNP testing performed on his sample. R-FT14557 is shared with a Bukharian Jew from Uzbekistan on public phylogenetic trees. As of April 2024, Family Tree DNA estimates that the most recent common male ancestor of the Kaifeng Jew and the Bukharian Jew lived in approximately the year 700 CE, but with a 95% confidence interval enabling a theoretical range from 74 BCE to 1237 [page 5 begins here] CE, while YFull, which gives the haplogroup the alternate name R-Y168245, believes the common ancestor lived around 1000 CE with a 95% confidence interval from 350 CE to 1450 CE. Leo Cooper, a co-administrator of the Kaifeng Jewish project, informed us that their haplogroup is also shared with a Jew from Baghdad, Iraq and a Jew from Iraqi Kurdistan.
Historians have known that some Kaifeng Jews converted to Islam several centuries ago and that some of them assimilated into the Hui ethnic group which practices Islam. The Dungan people of Central Asia descend from the Hui. A particular Dungan Muslim who had a patrilineal ancestor from Hebei province in northeastern China similarly belongs to this Jewish haplogroup according to his genetic test by the Chinese company 23mofang; his assignment of R-Y168245 is visible on YFull.
R-FT14557 is part of the R1b cluster and of West Eurasian origin. Two levels up from their haplogroup is R-Y99503, also called R-FT18731, which was found in a Palestinian Arab from the Muslim village of Beit Iksa (northwest of Jerusalem) and in Armenians and has a descendant subclade called R-FT388189 that was found in an Ashkenazi Jewish patriline from Khotyn, Ukraine who tested with Family Tree DNA. Cooper also informed me of a R-FT388189 carrier whose patriline is Sephardic Jewish from Greece. There is also a Kabyle Berber from Algeria in R-FT388189 who tested with the German company YSEQ. Cooper observes that the ancestors of these lineages lived in West Asia during the Bronze Age.
The other Kaifeng Jewish Y-DNA lineage of West Eurasian origin that has been found and confirmed through "Big Y" testing is called haplogroup J-FTF9916. Family Tree DNA lists a Kurdish Jewish carrier of the same haplogroup as having an origin in Iraqi Kurdistan. Their most recent common male ancestor is estimated to have lived around 550 CE with a 95% confidence interval from 269 BCE to 1122 CE. It is part of the J-ZS1737 cluster within haplogroup J1 which also includes an Iraqi Arab man and a man from Qatar, among others, and has a Lebanese match in its ancestral clade J-FT41076.
The genetic results above confirm that the Kaifeng Jewish community was founded by Mizrahi Jewish traders in medieval times, which had long been what historians posited. The first of them arrived no later than the 12th century. A stele dating from 1489 stated that Jews built their first synagogue in Kaifeng in 1163. According to Elkan Adler, Jews from Bukhara remembered through the centuries that some members of their community had moved to China and subsequently lost contact with them. Speaking of Kaifeng Jews in particular, Adler mentioned that "the Persian rubrics in their liturgies" were "in the Bokharan dialect". A Jewish community had been established in Bukhara by the 13th century when Ibn al-Fati mentioned them and may have had a continuous presence in Bukhara from the 14th century.
Over the centuries, the Kaifeng Jews had heavily intermarried with Han Chinese women and men and thus acquired Chinese haplogroups, such as the Y-DNA haplogroup O-M175. It is currently unknown whether the Ashkenazi Jewish mtDNA haplogroup M33c, which is shared with Chinese people, had any connection to the Kaifeng Jewish community, but it too appears to have traveled along the Silk Road, just in the opposite direction.
Bibliography: |
Kevin Brook is the author of the book The Maternal Genetic Lineages of Ashkenazic Jews. His previous article, "The Chinese Lady Who Joined the Ashkenazic People", appeared in the November 2016 issue of Points East. |
Addenda:
Kaifeng is a city in Henan province in east-central China. The original submitted manuscript specified that.
The Kaifeng Jewish Y-DNA samples that had been upgraded to Big Y were removed from public view within the Kaifeng Jewish project on July 14, 2024.
We later learned that a brother clade of R-FT14557 called R-FTE12665 is found in a customer of Family Tree DNA with Sephardic Jewish patrilineal ancestry from Portugal that later migrated in the Netherlands. R-FTE12665 is shared by a Haitian customer.
"The Genetic Origins of the Jews of Kaifeng, China: Preliminary Findings" by Adam Brown, Michael Waas, Harold Rhode, Bennett Greenspan, Wim Penninx, Myrna Gabbay, Danil Shimonov, and Aron Pinkhasov was posted on the Avotaynu DNA Project's website on July 15, 2024.
Disclosure: Compensated affiliate of some genetic testing companies and bookstores.