Chinese Jewish genealogy presents an unusual problem even within the wider history of the Jewish diaspora, because the term “Chinese Jews” can refer to several populations whose histories, migrations and documentary environments differ substantially from one another. The most distinctive is the long-established Jewish community of Kaifeng, whose members lived in China for centuries, adopted Chinese language, names and social structures, and nevertheless retained a recognisable Jewish communal...

Ethiopian Jewish genealogy presents a problem that is both familiar and remarkably different from those encountered elsewhere in Jewish family history. The familiar problem is one of evidence: families remember origins, relationships and migrations that must somehow be reconciled with the surviving documentary record. The difference lies in the nature of that record. Beta Israel developed for centuries within the Ethiopian highlands, geographically distant from the principal centres of...

Yemenite Jewish genealogy begins with an unusual combination of historical depth and documentary difficulty. The Jewish community of Yemen was one of the oldest Jewish communities of the Arabian Peninsula and developed distinctive religious, linguistic and manuscript traditions over many centuries. Yet the antiquity of the community should not be confused with the ability to reconstruct individual families continuously into the distant past. As elsewhere in Jewish genealogy, the history of a...