BRATTLEBORO — On Friday, Sept. 6, at the Centre Congregational Church, 193 Main St., Windham World Affairs Council will launch its new fall season with a talk entitled “The Cultural Links between Judaism and China.”
The talk will set two of the world's oldest surviving cultures in a new light, exploring the historical bonds and invisible connections that link them. There will be refreshments and conversation at 7 p.m., and the talk will begin at 7:30 p.m.
WWAC Chair Eshagh Shaoul, has invited the distinguished speaker, scholar, and author Tiberiu Weisz, who will compare the rich histories of the Chinese and Jewish peoples.
Born in the central Romanian region of Transylvania, educated in Europe, Israel, the U.S., and Taiwan, Weisz is fluent in Chinese and Hebrew. He has taught both Hebrew History and Chinese Religion at the college level.
In 2006, Weisz's published his first work, The Kaifeng Stone Inscriptions: The Legacy of the Jewish Community in Ancient China. It relates the history of the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng, one of the eight ancient capitals of China.
In his 2008 book, The Covenant and the Mandate of Heaven, Weisz collapsed thousands of years of Chinese history, comparing it with the rich history of the Jewish people and pointing out parallels and differences.
In 2018, Weisz published his most recent work, A History of the Kaifeng Israelites: Encounters with Israelites in Chinese Literature.
Here, Weisz focused his research on a small group of Israelites mentioned in Chinese literature who migrated and settled in China in biblical times. He assembled and re-translated key original documents from each tradition to show a compelling complementarity between them.
WWAC invites its members and the larger Brattleboro community to this special talk.