ABSTRACT
An inscription on a stone tablet erected in 1489 in one of the courtyards of the synagogal compound of Kaifeng tells us that the first Jewish house of worship on that site was constructed in 1163. The Kaifeng scribes placed an identifying number on the reverse side of the last skin of each of the twelve Pentateuchal rolls they wrote and compiled following the flood of 1642. Certain Masoretic traditions for the writing of a Sefer Torah are adhered to in all the extant scrolls; others are totally ignored, presumably because the Kaifeng scribes were not aware of them; and still others are followed in some copies but not in others. All of the several dozen horizontally and vertically arranged wooden tablets that were mounted in the Kaifeng synagogue are missing, as are the courtyard archways on which, as in the case of the tablets, inscriptions had been written.
