Abstract

This paper examines the little-studied presence of Jewish individuals and families in Kashgar from the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. While Jewish history in Central Asia has often focused on major Bukharan communities, Kashgar remains largely absent from scholarship despite its role as a major commercial and cultural crossroads. Drawing on Russian consular documentation, Hebrew sources, European travel accounts, and regional historiography, the study reconstructs fragmentary evidence of Jewish merchants, local encounters, and religious initiatives in the city.

The paper approaches Kashgar not as a peripheral extension of Central Asian Jewish networks but as a distinct urban frontier shaped by imperial rivalry, caravan trade, and a multiethnic social environment. Microhistorical cases, including merchant biographies, episodes of violence, and references to a synagogue and ritual life, reveal how Jewish actors navigated Muslim and Chinese contexts while maintaining flexible social identities. Particular attention is given to the striking absence of Jewish voices in local Uyghur narratives. This silence suggests that small diasporic groups were embedded within the plural urban fabric and became visible primarily through external observers such as consuls, missionaries, and travelers.

Unexpected sources further illuminate the cultural perception of Jewish presence. Early ethnographic descriptions of healing rituals that categorized Jewish spirits alongside Muslim and Christian ones indicate that Jews formed part of the regional religious imagination even when their demographic footprint was minimal. These materials provide insight into how minority identities were recognized, translated, or reinterpreted within local cosmologies.

Methodologically, the paper combines archival reconstruction with historical anthropology to explore questions of minority visibility, mobility, and adaptation in a frontier city. By foregrounding Kashgar itself as the central analytical lens, the study argues that Jewish history in Xinjiang reveals a form of localized connectivity in which small communities mediated commercial and cultural exchange while leaving only faint traces in regional historical memory. The case of Kashgar, therefore, contributes to broader debates on urban borderlands, intercultural contact, and the historical dynamics of Central Eurasia.