The road east did not advertise itself as the road to the edge of the world. It began, for most Jewish merchants of the ninth century, in Persia or Iraq - in the trading cities of the Abbasid caliphate where Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Persian were all languages of commerce. A man packed his balance weights and his bills of lading. His wife packed dried figs and a small hand for measuring fabric. Someone, somewhere in the household, wrapped a Torah scroll in oilcloth and nestled it inside the bundle. Then they walked east.
The Radhanites are the name we give them now - a network of Jewish long-distance traders whose routes ran from Francia in the west to China in the east, crossing the caliphate, Persia, Central Asia and the Tarim Basin in a series of relays. They were not a guild or a corporation; they were a diaspora in miniature, linked by credit, by family and by a shared legal framework that made a contract signed in Baghdad enforceable, in principle, in Samarkand. They moved silk westward and silver eastward. They moved musk, swords and furs. And they moved people - which is how, eventually, a small Jewish community came to exist in the Song dynasty's capital at Kaifeng, deep inside China proper.
The record
The earliest and most detailed account of the Radhanite routes is Ibn Khordadbeh's Kitab al-Masalik wa'l-Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms), compiled around 870 CE in Baghdad when its author served as a postal official of the Abbasid caliphate. He lists four distinct Radhanite itineraries - two overland, two maritime - and notes that the merchants spoke Arabic, Persian, Greek, Frankish, Andalusian and Slavonic. The overland eastern route ran from France through Egypt or Persia, on to Sind (modern Pakistan), then to India and China. Ibn Khordadbeh names the Jewish merchants by their own term: ar-Rādhāniyya. The text survives in a manuscript held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS arabe 5765).
What made the Radhanites possible was not bravery alone but infrastructure - the particular infrastructure of a people scattered across three civilisations simultaneously. A Jewish merchant travelling from Reims to Guangzhou passed through at least five polities: the Carolingian Empire, the Abbasid caliphate, various Central Asian kingdoms, the Uyghur realm and Tang or Song China. In each zone he needed letters of introduction, trusted contacts who would store his goods, advance him credit and let him know which passes were currently held by bandits. He found all of these through the synagogue. The diaspora was his network, and the network was older than any of the states he crossed. It's a remarkable thing: a people with no territory of their own had built, through sheer commercial necessity, the most geographically extensive trade web in the medieval world.
The record
The presence of Jewish merchants in Tang-dynasty China is confirmed by a remarkable document from the Dunhuang cave library - a cache of manuscripts sealed around 1000 CE in Cave 17 at the Mogao Grottoes and rediscovered in 1900 by the monk Wang Yuanlu. Among tens of thousands of manuscripts in Chinese, Tibetan and Uyghur, scholars have identified documents in Hebrew script, including a letter and what appears to be a liturgical fragment. The Dunhuang manuscripts are now divided between the British Library (Stein collection), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Pelliot collection) and the National Library of China. The Hebrew items are discussed in detail by Haim Zafrani and by Irene Garbell in their studies of the Judeo-Persian materials from the same cache.
The journey east was not one-way. The Radhanites returned - with silks, spices, contracts fulfilled and contracts deferred. But some did not return, or returned only to fetch their families. The community that eventually settled at Kaifeng carried with them a memory of themselves as travellers who had stopped - people who had found, in the middle of the world's largest empire, a city worth staying in. Their descendants would describe their ancestors as having "come from the West" and having presented cloth to the Song emperor. The cloth is the merchants' self-portrait: not soldiers, not refugees, not missionaries. Merchants. People who had something the world wanted, and who moved through it accordingly.
The record
The 1489 CE stele at Kaifeng - one of three steles erected by the Kaifeng Jewish community between 1489 and 1679, now held at the Henan Provincial Museum - states that the community's ancestors arrived during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127 CE), which would place the founding migration no later than the early twelfth century and possibly a century earlier. The stele records that the original settlers "came from Tianzhu" - a Chinese term used for the Indian subcontinent - consistent with the sea and overland routes documented by Ibn Khordadbeh two centuries before. Rubbings of the steles are held at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.
The Silk Road was not silk all the way down. It was dust, altitude, dysentery and extraordinary commercial ingenuity. The Jewish merchants who travelled it did not think of themselves as pioneers of the diaspora - they thought of themselves as doing business. The diaspora happened anyway, because the road east kept going, and some people kept following it, and at the far end there was a city where a Torah scroll could be unrolled on a Shabbat morning and the words would be the same as the words in Babylonia, in Alexandria, in Rome. That was the point. That was always the point.
