The famous book 'The Travels of Marco Polo' has long been one of those works that seems to be on everyone's literary bucket list to read at some point. First published circa 1300 A.D.; it was actually written by Rustichello de Pisa - a professional writer of Arthurian romances - with a debatable amount of input from Marco Polo while they were both imprisoned in Genoa.
One of the odd things about 'The Travels of Marco Polo' is that it is one of the first mentions we have of jews being resident in China and more specifically of the jewish community at Kaifeng, which had been the capital of the Song dynasty before it was moved to Hangzhou and then, with the Mongol conquest, to Beijing.
The jewish community in China probably descends from the jewish 'Radhanite' merchants of the silk road; (1) who were incidentally a big part of the early White slave trade (2) as recorded by Ibn-Kordadhbeh among others. (3) The first known synagogue in China was built circa 1163 A.D., (4) but it is likely this is just the first place of worship we know about rather than the first one actually built.
It is worth noting that, as early as the ninth century, there were sizable jewish communities in the cities of Beijing, Canton, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Kaifeng and Ningbo. (5) The commonality between these cities is that they are either important port cities (Canton, Guangzhou and Ningbo) or capital cities (Kaifeng [early Song Dynasty], Hangzhou [later Song Dynasty] and Beijing [Yuan Dynasty (the Mongols)]), which suggests that jews were engaging in the infiltration of governmental power structures that has so marked them out historically (6) and was achieved to a significant extent by the time of the Ming Dynasty in the sixteenth century. (7)
Marco Polo obviously couldn't have seen this in the future. However he, and Rustichello de Pisa (as we cannot separate the two authorial voices), could comment that, when the (Nestorian) Christians lost a battle against the Great Khan, the jews taunted them about their idolatry and worship of a 'false God'. (8) Meanwhile Pisa and Polo also refer (correctly) to the jews as being some of the principle opponents of the Prophet Mohammed. (9)
These two circumspect mentions of the jews nevertheless inform us that Marco Polo and Rustichello de Pisa both viewed the jews as a principle opponent of both Christianity and Islam, which therefore suggests that they held, what by a modern colloquial definition would be called, anti-Semitic views.
References
(1) Dennis Leventhal, 1985, 'Sino-Judaic Studies: Whence and Whiter', 1st Edition, Hong Kong Jewish Chronicle: Hong Kong, p. 91
(2) Moshe Gil, 1974, 'The Radhanite Merchants and the Land of Radhan', Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 17, pp. 299-328
(3) David Ayalon, 1979, 'On the Eunuchs in Islam', Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. I, pp. 104-105
(4) Leventhal, Op. Cit., pp. 10-11
(5) Ibid, p. 10
(6) Cf. Benjamin Ginsburg, 1993, 'The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State', 1st Edition, University of Chicago Press: Chicago
(7) Leventhal, Op. Cit., pp. 12-13
(8) The Travels of Marco Polo, 2:5
(9) Ibid., 1:4