Ai Tian

Origins and early life

Ai Tian was born around 1545 in Kaifeng, in Henan, into the ancient Jewish community of the city — a community that had lived Chinese lives and kept its Torah for centuries, unknown to the rest of the Jewish world.

Work and career

A scholar of the Chinese classics, he obtained his licentiate degree in 1573 and served as a teacher. In 1605, traveling to Beijing in search of office, he heard of foreigners who worshipped one God and, assuming they were his own people, called on the Jesuit Matteo Ricci. The conversation that followed — Ai describing his community, its synagogue, its Torah scrolls and his two brothers who were rabbis, while each man mistook the other's religion for his own — became, in Ricci's letter of 26 July 1605 to Rome, the first report ever to reach the West of the existence of Jews in China.

One honest note belongs here: Ricci recorded that Ai's own religious practice was imperfect — but his birth and his self-identification as a Jew of Kaifeng are not in dispute, and it is through him that his community entered world history. He died after 1605.