In the Bible, Isaiah 49:12 prophesied that, at the end of days, the Jews will return to their land from four corners of the earth, "Behold these shall come from afar, and lo, and these from the north and the west, and these from the land of Sinim."

In 1650, the Chief Rabbi of Amsterdam, Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), published his masterpiece, Hope of Israel (以色列的希望). In the book, he asserts that the prophetic Sinim references China.

According to Rabbi Menasseh, the Tribe of Reuben (勒乌本) were driven out of Central Asia by the Tartars and eventually migrated towards China. Therefore, he reasoned that the Jews must have entered China between the dispersion of Israel (733–32 BCE) and the period in which Isaiah prophesied (c. 525–500 BCE). Thus, he was the earliest scholar to theorise that the Chinese Jews were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel (失踪的以色列部落).

Professor Naphtali Herz Wessely (1725–1805) was a distinguished German Jewish Hebraist. He was born in Hamburg, Germany and moved to Copenhagen at a young age, where he would spend most of his childhood. His father worked there as a purveyor to the court.

“The claims of the Gentile authors that there are Jews in the Chinese Empire,” in the Hebrew Journal, Ha-Me’asef, Professor Wessely wrote, “would seem to be justified, for the King of Assyria exiled Jews (732 CE) to the far northwest regions, which lie in the direction of the aforementioned empire. (Daniel) Fenning, the (non-Jewish) geographic writer, states that in the province of Henan … the Jews have a synagogue or assembly house. Without doubt, they spread throughout all the cities of the land. I remember that in my boyhood I used to hear ship’s captains say, on their return to Copenhagen from the city of Guangzhou, a city located at the edge of China on the South Sea, that they had seen Jews where among the merchants with whom they traded, and who are called wo-wan (倭寇?) in the language of the land.”

Professor Wessely believed these Chinese Jews stemmed from either the Ten Lost Tribes or the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. If the Chinese Jews were indeed descendants of Judah and Benjamin, he pondered whether these early ancestors left the Holy Land after the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE) or after the collapse of the Second Temple (70).

When Father Antoine Gaubil(1689–1759) visited Kaifeng in 1723, the Jews told him that their ancestors came to China roughly 1,650 years ago which dates to the Han Dynasty; however, he believed that Jewish presence in China predates Christ by at least three hundred years — and that the Jews entered China from Persia (波斯) and Khorasan (呼罗珊) as early as the Zhou Dynasty.

As there has been no historical or archaeological evidence to support Jewish entrance into China during the Zhou Dynasty, this theory is difficult to prove.

However, there is evidence that indicates possible Jewish presence on the Silk Road — a trade route that passes through Media, Mesopotamia, and Syria via the high lands of Central Asia, into Kashgar and then the oases around the Taklamakan Desert (塔克拉玛干沙漠). Chinese silk was discovered in a Celtic Grave in Central Europe that dates back to the 8th century BCE, this could mean the Jews found their way into China; but this is by no means conclusive, for the trade could easily have been conducted by non-Jewish merchants.