For as long as two millennia, perhaps even longer, there have been Jewish communities scattered throughout South, East, central, and Southeast Asia. Most have lived in port cities, such as Surat, Kochi (formerly Cochin), Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Kolakata (formerly Calcutta), Yangon (formerly Rangoon), Singapore, Bangkok, Kobe, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Other Jewish communities were found at major trading centers along the Spice Route, which meandered westward from South India through Kabul, Herat, and thence Iran and Turkey. Jewish communities also thrived along the Silk Route at Bukhara, Tashkent, and Samarkand in central Asia and at Dunhuang, a cosmopolitan Gobi Desert oasis, but the best known was at the route's eastern terminus, Kaifeng.

Some of these Jewish communities are old, dating from at least the early medieval period if not ancient times, whereas some of them emerged when merchant houses in India established branches eastward...