While the first written evidence of Jewish life in in China dates to the late 8th century CE, Jews may have first settled there in the centuries before the Common Era, following the Babylonian exile. In the modern era, a Chinese Jewish community once flourished, but by the 19th century it was rapidly shrinking, in part due to increasing assimilation. It was then that Christian missionaries acquired a rare local Torah scroll, now found in the British Library, as Ilana Tahan writes:

Historians concur that one of the oldest Jewish communities in China is K’ae-fung-foo (Kaifeng), on the banks of the Yellow River, in the province of Henan, which was founded by Jewish traders who settled there by the mid-10th century. Kaifeng had been the thriving capital of the emperors of the Song Dynasty, who ruled China for 166 years beginning in 960 CE.

[T]wo Chinese Christians, . . . in November 1850, were dispatched to Kaifeng on a mission of inquiry by the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among Jews. . . . The main purpose of the expedition was to establish contact with the isolated Kaifeng Jews, to learn about their community and way of life, and to retrieve Holy Books from their ancient synagogue. It was on their second visit to Kaifeng in spring 1851 that the two Chinese missionaries obtained 40 small biblical manuscripts and purchased six Torah scrolls (out of twelve Torah scrolls seen on their previous trip) paying the Jewish community 400 taels of silver, the equivalent of about $160.

On December 11th, 1852, the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews presented one of the six retrieved Torah scrolls to the British Museum. The scroll, which has been part of the British Library’s Hebrew collection since 1973, is composed of 95 strips of thick sheepskin sewn together with silk thread, rather than with the customary animal sinew. Its 239 columns of unpunctuated Hebrew text are written in black ink in a script that is similar to the square Hebrew script used by the Jews of Persia.

According to scholars, the Torah scrolls originating in Kaifeng were most probably created between 1643 and 1663.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”