Isaiah
49:12 refers to a country named סִינִים (Sinim).
It is never again mentioned but obviously was known at the time. Modern thought
believes that this is possibly a reference to China, very far to the East.
The modern English word sino
comes from the Late Latin word sinae which is a plural form which
translates as “Chinese.” The Latin word may possibly be derived from the Old
Chinese word 秦 (Qin). This word is often used in
compound-word constructions such as Sino-Russian or Sino-Japanese. It is the
root of the English language descriptive word sinitic, which means
“relating to Chinese things.”
The Jews may have traded with the Chinese as early as the 3rd Century BC/BCE, with other possible contacts in the 7th and 8th Centuries. In the 11th Century, a small Jewish trading settlement was established at Kaifeng. The Mandarin-speaking Jewish merchant’s modern descendants are now assimilated into the mainstream Chinese culture and, in 2016, numbered about 600-1000 in China and 20 in Israel.
In the 16th Century, the
Ottoman Empire established a trading relationship with China in part because of
a love of Chinese white porcelain. The Chinese are known to have had a merchant
colony in Jerusalem during this period.
Chinese porcelain
fragments have been found in the Middle East. In 2024, a broken piece of a Chinese
porcelain bowl from the Ming Dynasty was found during a dig on Mt. Zion outside
the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Chinese inscription translates as “Forever
we will guard the eternal spring.“
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