A minor protest rally has become manifest where local American Chinese carry signs protesting “MY ETHNICITY IS NOT A VIRUS.”

Yeah, we know. We know.

This is plain ignorance. All such viri and zone-born flus have a name attached. It isn't ethnic or racist. It's fact. The Chinese let this happen and did nothing. The virus developed or escaped from a biolab in Wuhan, Hubei Province, Red China.

A well-meaning comment from a well-meaning Jewish person notes that “Jews have a special responsibility to defend the Chinese from such…whatever 'slurs' or the like. Unintended by our president. Understood by all save the mentally impaired and the historically benighted."

If the local Chinese don't like it, talk to the millions of Germans who have a measles named after them, or the Spanish, who are forever attached to a flu from the past century. Isn't being self-quarantined and frightened enough to worry about? Must we be damned PC, too? This garbage is unnecessarily exhausting when we have more than enough to worry about. Jews do not have any special debt to society to excuse the cupidity and envy of the unscrupulous Chinese leadership.

Does anyone stand up for the Jew in the face of millennial and intensifying anti-Semitism? The answer is sadly, aside from caring Gentiles, usually Christian, no? But the Chinese rallying and carrying useless bilge signs do nothing for their cause if they fail to note the historic attachment of place-names to diseases. Usually, too, the Chinese are among the smarter people in these or similar equations.

We Jews are, of course, grateful that the Chinese nationalists (later thrown out by the communists) took in fleeing Jews from the vicious Nazi juggernaut in the mid-‘40s, after having had Jews living in their land for at least a century, and having improved the cities in which they lived and worked and built factories and businesses that lasted for decades. Kaifeng still bears the buildings and the neighborhoods, the graves and the cemeteries, of the Jews who settled there.

Jewish merchants from Persia, now Iran, settled in the Henan area. At its height, in the Middle Ages, Kaifeng's Jews numbered as many as 5,000 faithful, with rabbis, synagogues  and impedimenta intact. Kaifeng, which was one of the capitals of imperial China, was notable at the turn of the past century as being one of the most successful and flourishing of Chinese towns, thanks to the Jews investing, energy, ingenuity, architecture and philanthropy.  They did the Jews proud by featuring trade organizations, businesses, flourishing communal institutions, associations for support of the widow and the needy — like Jews in virtually every shtetl, outpost and ghetto, for at least 1,000 years.    .

That said, those Jews and their descendants are long absquatulated to the continent, to Israel or the U.S. 

Current Chinese make a clever if fetishistic showpiece for [largely Jewish] tourists in Beijing, knowing how Jews are wont to travel, and even more, how they throw ducats at the vestiges of ancient or nearby kin. The synagogues that remain in Beijing, and the cemeteries where the gates bear inscriptions in Mandarin, Hebrew, and Yiddish get their share of visitors, and the Chinese investment in refurbishing the few synagogues that were not razed in the Maoist period have been handsomely recompensed. Remnants of the Kaifeng community moved en masse to Israel in 2009.

Today, the modern Chinese have a strong respect for the husbandry and educational success of the Jew, or the Israeli who to them typifies what Jews can accomplish. When I lived there, the locals watched my every move — not so much for spying purposes (though who could really tell?) as to discern what made my ‘people’ such financial standouts. We were Yo Tai, Jews. But the Mandarin name has even now a tinge of something unclean, tainted, animal, even. I was of much more interest, certainly, than were my colleagues with atheistic, formerly Christian, backgrounds.

And true, there is still an ancient settlement of Jews so old in the living that they are virtually indistinguishable from their longtime neighbors.  In the Henan province of China, they had largely assimilated into Chinese society after untold centuries of cultural suppression and intermarriage, while preserving some Jewish traditions and customs. They look for all intents like Chinese, but for their scattered sampling of ancient Hebraic traditions that can be seen on Friday nights or the Sabbath, should you be so fortunate as to find and befriend any out of the mass of regular Han Chinese. Otherwise, all is silence.

But that was all long ago. Jews today, despite the ritual  surveillance of how we all 'got so smart' and 'so rich,' have no special responsibility to the Chinese, with little institutional memory of their forebears in China, let alone the Henan burg of Kaifeng where Jews once contributed so much to the kingdom,which few visited or knew of back then.

So are we supposed to intervene on behalf of the PC-bent Chinese, American or otherwise, objecting to the unremarkable nomenclature of a disease entity much like forebear viruses and flus?

We Jews are a microscopic people in terms of our numbers. To say we 'owe' anything to the exorbitantly multitudinous Chinese, whether in homeland Peoples Republic or the U.S. of A., is perhaps overstatement, perhaps an egg foo yung slightly too old.

Image credit: Needpix / Pixabay public domain