ABSTRACT
From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, travel to the West provided opportunities for Chinese intellectuals to encounter Jews in person. However, as one of the first Chinese who went abroad and one of the first Chinese who had met European Jews, Wang Tao in his entire Travel Diaries mentioned only one Jew, Stanislas Julien (1796–1873). Julien was a leading European scholar in Chinese studies in the 19th century. 1 For Wang Tao, the thrilling fact was that Julien was not any Jew, but a Jew who highly admired and appreciated Chinese classics and culture. 2 Julien’s Jewish origin was vital to Wang Tao: although a Jew, Julien, with his ‘glorious historical cultural roots’ – from which the dominant Western culture was derived – devoted his life to Sinology instead of Judaica. For Wang Tao, this clearly indicated that Chinese culture and history were of higher value than those of the West. The Jew Julien thus served as a living testimony for Wang Tao’s chauvinism.
