The Ming state and neo-confucian thinking behind Kaifeng Jewry’s biculturalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on a fresh reading of the 1489 and 1512 kehillah stelae, this article contextualizes Kaifeng Jewry’s acculturation in the political agendas and intellectual climate of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China. It argues that the Ming court, Neo-Confucian discourses of beliefs and Ming administration of religions and ethnic minorities drove Kaifeng Jewry towards biculturalism – adopting Confucian cultural norms while maintaining their sectarian identity. With the religious tolerance led by Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, the Ming state administered Judaists, Muslims and other religious practitioners not as religious groups but as ethnic groups who needed to settle down in a highly secular and centralized sociopolitical order dominated by the Confucian elite. Without the state’s intervention in their beliefs, Kaifeng Jewry’s religious integrity and survival had heavily relied on Jewish elite reproduction; when the Jewish elite declined, the kehillah began to disintegrate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".