Wuhan University! I was a visiting scholar in the religion department of Wuhan University, China, this past May-June. Six years ago, in 2020, it was a research university that I did not expect to ever visit. There are many Western faculty members and many international students, with many courses in English. The school has 60K students and covers 3000 acres, but the campus also has 4000 acres of parks and lakes. It is a beautiful, wooded campus over many hills and ravines.
The campus is a modern campus like UCLA, MIT, or Rice, a huge secular campus amidst the skyscrapers of the modern city. They focus on ambitious science projects and count the many billionaires they have produced in the last 20 years. The campus boasts the most billionaires among their graduates. Some of the parents visit in BMW’s and Porsches. I stayed in a dormitory apartment building of visiting faculty who teach Humanities, most of them in languages such as French or Spanish.
The religion department is large, offering many courses in Christianity such as Aquinas, scholasticism, Neoplatonism, medieval Christian mystics, and the history of contemporary Christianity in China. They also teach methods in religion and Buddhism. One professor is trained at Fordham University.
Jewish Studies at Wuhan and Jewish Mysticism is of interest to the students. One of the students, whom I will call J, just graduated with a PhD in religion at Wuhan University. He wrote his dissertation on Maimonidean Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. His goal is to translate the Zohar into Chinese. To use the Pritzker edition as a base but write a commentary geared for a Chinese reader. We discussed how he should start with a book of 20 or so passages. As I discovered in Indonesia and elsewhere, many drawn to Jewish studies start with an affiliation with Protestantism. Their study of the Bible leads them to Rabbinic and medieval Judaism. He has already done the Yad Vashem foreign scholars’ program and is interested in attending other workshops abroad to increase his knowledge of Jewish Studies.
Another Graduate student, G, is a female graduate student pursuing a doctorate on the Zohar. She says she spent a fortune to acquire a full set of the Pritzker Zohar. She admires the work of Daniel C. Matt and Arthur Green. She has also already done the Yad Vashem program and is also looking for programs to apply to attend.
Their mentor is the professor of Jewish studies at Wuhan University, AI Luming, a billionaire, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He started in philosophy and went on to engineering and founded corporations in technology and pharmaceuticals. (Like USA billionaires, a web search will give you many of his business exploits- good and bad) He is of Kaifeng Jewish descent, as shown in his patrilineal surname. For a good summary of Kaifeng Jews, see the article here. He encourages these students to pursue Jewish Studies. He donated a million yuan of seforim and Jewish studies books to the library.
We went out for drinks and were joined by Prof Z, who was the former head of the religion department. The religion department is only about 20 years old and was developed within the philosophy department. He is the one who made this a niche department by focusing on Thomism, medieval Catholic thought, Christian mysticism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Judaism. They do not have courses on Taoism as a religion; hence, for a degree in Taoism or Chinese folk religions, one of the graduate students was about to journey to Europe for a PhD. Lao Tzu and Confucius are studied as political and social philosophers.
The entire Summa Theologica was translated into Chinese. Maybe the Zohar next.
Pictures of book covers. Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is in Chinese. The students say that the English version is better; the translation seems to have skipped sections. There are no available translations of the scholarship of the last forty years. Another book, A Guide to Jewish Mysticism by Prof Liu Jingzhong (Nanchang [Nanjing] University). The book, according to my students is an eclectic mix of old theosophic society translations, combined with Scholem, Aryeh Kaplan, Ashlag, Michal Laitman, as well as snippets of Idel and Wolfson, The author is a professor of Judaism and has also published in Chinese an introduction to Judaism as well as a three volume work of selections of the Zohar, seemingly part of the Soncino translated by AI. I have never met the Nanjing professor, and it seems he is a holder of an endowed chair in Jewish studies as part of an academic center funded by Jews from abroad.
Before you go OY, oh no! realize that most Taoist religious texts or Tibetan Buddhism only had this level of translation and presentation in the USA as recently as the late 1980’s.
Another center is in Shandong University, which has regular classes, translations, and visiting scholars. They focus on Mishnah, Jewish history, exegesis, and modern Jewish history. I have been told their translation of two orders of the Mishnah and Avot is very good.
Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed has been translated into Chinese from the English by Dr. Fu Youde with Guo Peng and Zhang Zhiping. Prof Fu Youde has also supervised the translations of Buber, Rosenzweig and some of the Mishnah. He is the founder and director of the Center for Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies at Shandong University. He has visited Tel Aviv University and Yeshiva University. I have not met him.
Another Professor, Dong Xiuyuan, has written on Maimonides’ Cosmogony-Prophetology Puzzle: Revisiting the Traditionalist Approach; he was scheduled to speak this week in Wuhan, but I missed him as I was on my flight home. Dong Xiuyuan is the translator of Maimonides’ Sefer Hamada into Chinese.
I did a search using a Chinese search engine to see what they can get from the web. They get the Jewish encyclopedia, Sefaria, and many public domain books from the first half of the 20th century.
Back to Wuhan, people asked me what Prof. Ai Lummi teaches in his Judaism class, it seems a sample class looks something like this: Mishnah, Bahye, Maimonides, Crescas, Zohar, Abulafia, Heschel, Hasidism, using Scholem, Idel, and Green. Some of the Mishnah was translated at Shandong, and a graduet of the Wuhan program translated some of Crescas.
They wish there were a formal Classical Hebrew class to read Rabbinic and medieval Hebrew. They asked me how many Jews in the USA can read classical Hebrew, and I just sighed, having to say fewer than we want.
Besides my formal lectures, I sat for hours in a campus version of Starbucks where they play old mid-20th century jazz in the background- Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck. It is what is in with the younger crowd here. Every coffee shop and café is playing old USA music, and many of the students love K-Pop.
They have trouble making a timeline or a clear conceptual map of Western scholarship in Jewish studies. Most of them have a VPN at this point to access everything needed for business and scholarship, but they remain conceptually separated from the Western sites. They had trouble sorting out when Scholem wrote (they did not realize how long ago it was), and where Moshe Idel fits in. Where did all these new, younger scholars of Kabbalah and Jewish Studies fit in? I took a yellow pad and kept giving them charts, genealogies of scholars, and names of books.
I outlined for them the history of kabbalah scholarship, Zohar scholarship, Kabbalah main texts, Sefer Yetzirah, and 20th-century Kabbalah. They know Ashlag material since it is online. I also walked them through the contemporary debates over Zohar authorship- Ronit Meroz vs Avishai Bar Asher, discussion of the Idrot, as well as Melilah’s Hellner-Eshed’s book on the Zohar, which they had seen but could not place in a conceptual framework.
In addition, I drew them a little map of Spain in order to identify the regions of Castile and Gerona, things we take for granted. As I did this, they told me about the Song dynasty, contemporaneous with the Kabbalists, when the capital was in this region, and they invented gunpowder and movable type, and it was a great age of the synthesis of Neo-Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism with Taoism
At one of my talks, one recent Wuhan PhD graduate wrote on commonalities between Martin Buber, Zen, and Tao. After we went outside, he confided that he is a Korean Protestant Minister. Before returning to his home country and after the submission of his thesis, he is running a pop-up Korean restaurant in town.
When I give a public lecture, I get broad questions on the comparisons to Neoplatonism, the use of images of trees and water in all traditions, and the common use of light imagery. Specific question: Did Aquinas know kabbalah? Does it have a tradition of magic and superstition? And even the old chestnut: What is mysticism?
One of the members of the department said they only teach the major world religions here: Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Notice how different this is from the Protestant World religions list in a basic survey text. They know Jews as the ethnic group that wins Nobel prizes, has success, and produced Einstein, an ethnic group not as a World Religion. They also do not include Hinduism. Confucianism is seen as a social-political philosophy of beneficence and well-ordered society, not a religion. (In contrast, in other countries, such as Indonesia or Singapore, it is listed as a religion.)
The word for religion in general is zongjiao and was developed in the 19th century for Christianity. According to the recent Pew survey, most Chinese claim to not have zongjiao even if they regularly worship Buddhism or Taoism. Hence, the very terms of discussion of religions in a religion department have a Christian influence even when speaking of Buddhism or Taoism. The faculty are writing articles on how Chinese religion does not fit the established Christian categories in the field.
Wuhan University needs a center for Jewish Studies similar to Shandong University. It would need a foreign professor to get it started. I was living in the faculty housing of foreign professors, mainly from Europe, who have all been here 3 years, 5 years, 9 years, and they love it. They offer large salaries, faculty housing, and moving expenses. But there is no Jewish life here; to attract a qualified instructor to build a center, you would need to be in a city that has a solid ex-pat Jewish community. This is not the city.
One of my talks was on AI and Kabbalah, with a background on how Leibniz turned to the Tao/I Ching as well as the Cabala to create a modern binary representational system. It also let me speak of Ashlag and communism, as well as new age versions allowing for comparisons to recent secular and materialist versions of Buddhism.
One of the professors suggested to the students to market kabbalah to wealthy Chinese businessmen and sell it like Yoga, Japanese forest bathing and Vipassana. This would fund the research.
We also discussed how to translate. If the Mishnah gets translated into social harmony terms of Confucianism, does one translate Zohar in the same Confucian terms or switch to Taoist terms? What is the goal? Prof Fu Youde compares Judaism to the Confucian Sages. But should Kabbalah be translated into Confucian or more relgious-spiritual Taoist/ Buddhist terms?
The word Li in Confucian thought is social well-being, blessing for the group, and propriety.
In contrast, in Taoism, the emphasis is on Keyi – ritual rules, Zhai -purification and repentance, and Jiao- offerings. Taoist religion is Zhai Jiao
Last week, I saw a sign at a local attraction that defined Buddhism as a stable society, living in peace, and blessing for the community. Pure land Buddhism of chanting, offerings, and appeals to the various Buddhas and bodhisattvas is the social norm expressed in Confucian terms of social stability.
Prof Shaul Stampfer, in his dissertation on Voloshin Yeshiva, compares the 19th-century yeshiva training at Voloshin Yeshiva to Confucian training. A training that created an educated leadership. It was not to produce rabbis. One spent 4 years of one’s adolescence becoming educated for leadership. For many, the most important Volozhin graduate was Kalman Zev Wissotsky who was the leading importer of tea from China to Russia and who funded Volozhin yeshiva. His company had offices not just in Harbin but even in Wuhan.
The Buddhism we think of in the USA is about meditation and wellness, which is basically Taoist (or Indian) in origin. The Pure Land Buddhism here is translated using Confucian terms, while the US wellness meditations would need to be translated using Taoist terms. This brings me back to the question of how to translate Kabbalah and Jewish spirituality into which of the two languages. Your purpose would determine it.
Taoism, is about a fall of humanity and the goal to become an immortal or to produce a messianic redemption of humanity. The transcendents get there by fasting, visualization, gymnastics, alchemy, and seeking health and wholeness. Pure Land Buddhism is about the afterlife, to be reborn in the “Pure Land” (a realm free from suffering and distractions) to achieve enlightenment more easily. This is attained through devotion, chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha (Nianfo), and cultivating faith. It is the most widely practiced tradition for both monastics and laypeople in China
Which religious language is closer to the Kabbalah? Sufism has been translated into Taoist and Buddhist terms for a millennium. There are many great books that came out recently on how medieval Islam was translated into Chinese terms.
The department treated me well and took me around to tour Wuhan in detail. I would definitely go back for a few weeks, especially since I now know the ins and outs of the university. But I would definitely need to go in a cooler month. Wuhan’s climate is like Houston’s or Baton Rouge’s in the summer.
This post was originally three posts on Facebook, which is still my first audience.
The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: 