There’s more than one myth about the invention of mah jongg. One credits Confucius, who supposedly created the game around 500 BCE. Another places it on Noah’s Ark, where it helped pass the time during the Flood. (The Ark did have eight people aboard, so they could have had two tables going!)
These are great stories, but not great history. Mah jongg developed in 19th-century China before Joseph Babcock, an American businessman, introduced it to the United States in the early 1920s. Savvy salesmen marketed the game as exotic and impossibly old. They supplied buyers with elaborate packaging and the not-so-subtle suggestion that moving tiles around a table offered access to ancient Chinese wisdom. Ancient China, it turned out, was very good for sales.
Americans were delighted. Mah jongg became a national sensation. Department stores displayed elaborate sets, newspapers taught readers how to play, and hostesses planned mah jongg parties. Celebrities played, fashionable people posed with tiles, and manufacturers sold Americans everything they might need for their new obsession. For a couple of years, the game was everywhere.
By the late 1920s, the craze was over. Most of America moved on, and mah jongg seemed likely to disappear along with the rest of the decade’s fads. But some communities, including Chinese Americans and Jewish women, kept playing. In 1937, a group of Jewish women formed the National Mah Jongg League and shared what would eventually be known as American mah jongg with friends and neighbors. They brought their tiles from city apartments to summer colonies, postwar suburban homes, and retirement communities in Florida. The tiles went wherever the women did.
Mah jongg is social, challenging, and portable. It offered both competition and companionship. Other games do too, but few became so closely associated with Jewish women. How did a game from China become such an enduring part of Jewish American life? In the turbulent postwar years when the American Jewish community was once again recreating itself, mah jongg became a point of connection. Around the table, players exchanged news, raised money for a cause, and met people they might not otherwise have known. The game also gave many young mothers a claim on their own time. A regular gathering put a few hours on the calendar when housework could wait and friendship came first. Choosing to protect that time, and deciding for themselves how to spend it, offered a modest but meaningful kind of empowerment. Confucius and Noah make entertaining legends. The real history of Jewish women and American mah jongg is messier and far more interesting. Carla Naumburg, founder of Kveller’s Jewish Mah Jongg Minyan, will explore this history at “The Game We Carried: How Jewish Women Shaped American Mah Jongg” at Mayyim Hayyim Community Mikveh on Nov. 5, 2026.
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