Jews on the Silk Road

Lena Cansdale’s “Jews on the Silk Road” is a very interesting examination of the evidence which shows Jewish activity on the Silk Road. Many examples were given, from small personal prayer letters to a burial ground with twenty tombstones and memorial tablets that were inscribed in Judeo-Persian. All this evidence collecting is fascinating to me, because this connection of Jews on the Silk Road was something I previously had taken for granted, and naturally assumed that this would have been the case. In my Mediterranean History course, the relation of Jews with Middle Eastern, Chinese and Indian people was briefly discussed in the context of Jews playing a very prominent role as the intermediary commerce role between people of the East (usually Muslims or what was described to the class as ‘Pagans’) and the Christian West. In this Mediterranean History course, I learned of the Jews mainly in the context of the Mediterranean, but knew that they travelled and were used specifically for intermediaries for commerce. Now, after reading Cansdale, I feel that I have a greater picture of how the Jews could have possibly travelled from the parts of the Roman Empire through to the Silk Road. This is noted with Jewish settlements in India as early as the 10^th century, and the letter Cansdale first introduces, that describes a Jewish settlement in China. This was clearly made possible because Jews were reported as being present on the Silk Road engaged in trading over great distances... clearly, since they travelled all the way from Europe! I now have this moving dotted line (like the kind at the beginning of Casablanca or Indiana Jones) image in my head of the Jews travelling from the far west of the map of Europe, to the far east on our Silk Road map.