Memories and Musings – On Mahjong, Chinese Food, and Kaifeng Jews

Alexandria, VA – My sister-in-law lives in Temple Hills, MD, and drives to nearby Virginia to play Mahjong (also spelled Mah-jongg) with friends. Sometimes she drives to Columbia, MD, an hour or more away depending on traffic, to play with other dear, old friends. Mahjong is a tile-based table game that originated in 19^th century China and has spread throughout the world, currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity.

I’ve never played but the name conjures up the sound of ivory tiles clinking as my mother and her friends gathered weekly around a card table in the living room. I remember the oriental designs on the tiles being lovely to look at.

I wondered about the connection between Jewish women and Mahjong and found this under myjewishlearning.com/article/mah-jongg – Is Mah-Jongg a Jewish Game? By Meredith Lewis:

“To the uninitiated, the process is foreign. To those familiar with the game, this is just a typical evening with the girls, evenings that have been happening in America for nearly 100 years. From the tenements of New York City to the bungalows of the Catskills and the vast American suburbs, Jewish women have kept alive a game that otherwise fell out of fashion in the 1920s.”

I found the article interesting and I especially relate to the friend aspect. “In the documentary Mah-Jongg: The Tiles that Bind, seasoned players say that Mah-Jongg is their life. As women play for years and decades with the same people, they share life events–marriage and divorce, the birth of children and then grandchildren, work and retirement. It’s even said that when the last woman of a Mah-Jongg groups dies, it’s her job to ‘bring’ the Mah-Jongg set with her to the World to Come.”

Jewish People and Chinese Food

For the first time ever my family and I celebrated Thanksgiving at a Chinese restaurant. Gathering family and friends to my table is one of my very favorite things. But having undergone two Kyphoplasty procedures for compression fractures in my lower vertebrae in the preceding few months, I couldn’t deal with setting up my home and cleaning up afterwards even with the help of family. I knew that Jewish families sometimes got together at Chinese restaurants on Christmas. It seemed a logical choice since they were likely open on Christmas Day but I wondered about the connection.

From Wikipedia, “The Jewish-American patronage of Chinese restaurants became prominent in the 20th century, especially among Jewish New Yorkers. This cultural phenomenon has been seen as a paradoxical form of assimilation, where Jewish immigrants embraced Chinese cuisine, which though unfamiliar shared certain dietary similarities with Jewish food traditions.”

I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, in the 1940s. Kosher dietary rules were followed at home but when we ate out, we mostly ate in non-kosher restaurants. My mom diligently removed the pork from the dishes she ordered at Chinese restaurants. Pork is not kosher.

The first mention of American Jews eating Chinese food was in 1899 in The American Hebrew where an article criticized the Jewish community for eating at non-kosher restaurants, particularly singling out Chinese food.

My mom likely didn’t read that magazine.

Kaifeng Jews

But the story of Jews and China goes deeper than games and food, longer and deeper. From The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng (and what I’ve learned from them) by Rabbi Anson Laytner in The Interfaith Observer:

“For more than a thousand years, there has been a Jewish community in Kaifeng, China, making it one of the most long-lived continuous Jewish communities in the world. Never more than a few thousand souls – and currently numbering a thousand at best – the Kaifeng Jewish community has excited interest far beyond what its population warrants. Much has been written about this tiny community, no doubt because of its ‘exotic’ locale, its isolation from the rest of the Jewish world, and its inspiring story of perseverance.

Their really remarkable achievement was in developing a new kind of culture, fully literate interreligiously, that simultaneously allowed them to retain their own cultural identify for more than a millennium. Without a rabbi since the early 1800s and lacking a synagogue since the mid-1800s, the Kaifeng Jews managed to survive floods, wars, dynastic changes, rebellions, and revolutions to make it to the present day when, sadly, it is suffering the first suppression in its long history.” See the online story at thezebra.org for a link to this Interfaith Observer article.

Read more at The Chinese Jews of Kaifeng (and what I’ve learned from them) — The Interfaith Observer

I am grateful to The Zebra and the Memories and Musings platform that encourages me to research the history of things.

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Mosaic Artist/Photographer Nina Tisara is the founder of Living Legends of Alexandria