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.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.