Boston's Academic Studies Press, a relative newcomer to the field of Asian Studies, can be congratulated for publishing its fourth volume on this subject. Tel Aviv University East Asian studies Professor Aron Shai's China and Israel: Chinese, Jews; Beijing, Jerusalem (1890–2018) follows closely on the heels of works by Israeli Asianists Meron Medzini, Shalom Wald and Vera Schwarcz (recently emerita from Wesleyan University and now living in Jerusalem). The Press is becoming a major player in a burgeoning academic discipline in Israel and can be considered an active participant in the development of Israel's four Asian studies programmes, at Tel Aviv, Haifa and the Hebrew Universities, and at Tel Hai Academic College in the Galilee.

That recent and expanding Israeli interest in China is the focus of Shai's most recent publication, which follows his other magna opera on the subject in Chinese, English and Hebrew. Shai summarizes his own contributions in building the Sino-Israeli relationship, notably his success in securing financial support for East Asian studies from the late Israeli China trader Shaul N. Eisenberg (see below), his wife Lea Nabuko-Eisenberg and their daughter Emily. Under Shai's leadership as Rector of Tel Aviv University, that school created the largest East Asian studies programme in Israel in terms of both undergraduate and graduate enrollment. With over 700 students, it is also the largest academic department in Tel Aviv's Faculty of Humanities. In 2007, Shai secured Chinese government funding for Tel Aviv University's Confucius Institute, an affiliate of similar Chinese academic initiatives worldwide.

Over and beyond describing his personal role in developing Sino-Israeli relations, Shai provides an overview of Chinese–Jewish relations from medieval Kaifeng to the present. In 239 pages of text and a ten-page quatro-lingual bibliography, he surveys the corresponding academic field now known as Sino-Judaica. Its historiographic and bibliographic antecedents date back to 1853, when Alois and Augustin de Backer published Jesuitical accounts about Chinese Jewry. The field had developed substantially by 1937, when the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilne published Rudolf Lowenthal's bibliography about Jews in traditional China. More recent contributions include Pan Guangdan's 1983 Zhongguo jingnei Youtairen de ruogan lishi wenti (Some Historical Questions about the Jews within Chinese Territory) and Academic Studies Press's forthcoming A Century of Jewish Life in Shanghai. This cornucopia of Sino-Judaic and Sino-Israeli scholarship includes the life work of Donald Leslie and Yitzhak Shichor, the late Irene Eber and David Kranzler, and many others.

Shai condenses this vast corpus of scholarship as context for what is the strength of this volume: his profiles of Sino-Judaic personalities. These include Sun Yat-sen's English bodyguard Morris Cohen (1887–1970) and Chinese Communist Fourth Army physician Jacob Rosenfeld (1903–1952), originally from Austria. Shai also offers vignettes about lesser-known individuals who are arguably of equal historical significance. Drawing upon hard-to-get interviews and the Yad Tabenkin archive of the kibbutz movement, he profiles leaders of the Israel Communist Party (ICP) and their Chinese initiatives. He explains how the Party kept cultural contact alive during the “frozen period” (1950–1992) of Sino-Israeli non-relations. It was in the pages of the Party's Hebrew language daily and its French language supplement that Israelis were introduced to the latest Chinese literary trends, as but one example.

Shai offers the first comprehensive biography of the aforementioned elusive Israeli businessman Shaul Eisenberg (1921–1997) and his United Development Company, which brokered the first clandestine Israeli arms deal with China in 1979. Eisenberg was obsessively secretive and kept most of his business records in notebooks in his jacket pocket, which Shai clearly did not have access to. But Shai was as resourceful in his Eisenberg investigation as he was in ferreting out information about the ICP, at the opposite end of the Israeli political spectrum. He interviewed Eisenberg competitor Amos Yudan, former Mossad director Efraim Halevi, and Israeli Aircraft Industries CEO Gabriel Gidor, all of whom participated in establishing Sino-Israeli commercial and military ties. Shai's persistent sleuthing about Eisenberg and the ICP is matched in Sino-Israeli historiography only by Yitzhak Shichor's startling revelations about Israeli nuclear cooperation with Taiwan. That interaction preceded, and indeed laid the groundwork for, Eisenberg's competitive overtures to Beijing.

Shai's overview can serve as adjunct reading in courses on Chinese and Israeli international relations and as an introductory survey for Chinese and Israelis interested in their historical interactions. Errors are few and far between in this synopsis, and some can be excused as coming from a scholar who is not a native speaker of English. An ox, rather than a cow, is customarily used to plough a field (p. 1). Those and other mechanical errors can easily be corrected in a second edition of this succinct monograph, as Shai and Academic Studies Press move forward from strength to strength in the field of Asian studies.