Cinnamon, Cassia (the bark from which cinnamon is made), jade, camphor, and many other Chinese products were greatly in demand in the West. The earliest reference in any literature to the oriental products, cinnamon and cassia, occurs in Exodus 30:23: Moses is instructed to take “principal spices, of pure myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon (kinamon besem) half so much.” In 30:24 he is likewise instructed to take “of cassia (kiddah) five hundred shekels.”]

1. Herodotus (485-425 BCE) stated that Kinnamomon (Greek) came from Canaan (3.111); the word in Exodus for cassia, kiddah, appears in Greek as Kitto. Another Biblical word, kes’iah (Psalms 45.9), became the Greek ² The transcription of Aramaic words into the Greek language identifies the merchants who first brought these spices in the 5th c. BCE from the Orient to the Mediterranean.

2. Linen fabrics (Byssus) were as marketable in China as silk fabrics were in the west. One of the earliest centers of industrial weaving of fine linen fabrics was the city of Beth She’an. The Bible informs us that Beth She’an (“Scythopolis” by the Greeks), was a Canaanite town that fell to the forces of David. By the 3rd c. BCE, the Jews of Beth She’an achieved world fame as producers of fine fabrics. The Jerusalem Talmud refers to “the fine linen vestments which come from Beth She’an.”

3. Beth She’an is described as a city that supplies textiles to the world in the Latin Descriptus Orbis, 4^th The superiority of the textiles and clothes made by Jews in Beth She’an was affirmed by Roman Emperor Diocletian, in 296 CE. The edict listed Judaic glassware (by Jews of Judah) and vitri Alessandrini (by Jews of Alexandria). Hadrian also asserted that Jews were the glassmakers of Alexandria.

4. Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba, a famous sage is named in the Bible, was involved with trading goods of glassware, flax, and linen along the Silk Route into China.

5. The tradition of travel and trade expanded into a world-girdling network of Jewish trade under the Rhadanites. Ibn Khurdadhibih, an Arab chronicler of the ninth century, wrote that “these merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman, Frankish, Spanish and Slavonic. They travel from East to West, and from West to East by land as well as by sea.” They also spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. The routes radiated out from the Jewish centers of population in the agricultural and industrial heart of Babylonia to Europe, North Africa, India, and China.