The Jews Of Shanghai

Julian Gewirtz and James McAuley explore the history of the city’s Jewish community:

As early as 1845, when Shanghai was forcibly opened to foreign trade under the unequal treaties that concluded the Opium Wars, a network of prominent Sephardic Jewish merchant families—the Kadoories, the Hardoons, the Ezras, the Nissims, the Abrahams, the Gubbays, and, most prominently, the Sassoons—took root in the city and eventually joined the ranks of its Western occupying elite.

Small but powerful, this Sephardic merchant class financed many of the Beaux Arts mansions along the stately Bund, Shanghai’s version of Vienna’s Ringstrasse. Completed in 1929, Victor Sassoon’s Cathay Hotel—today the Peace Hotel—was the Bund’s crown jewel, the center of their cosmopolitan social world. In that sense, much of what survives today from prewar, European Shanghai is an artifact of Jewish Shanghai. When Nazi refugees arrived in the mid-’30s, Shanghai’s existing Jewish community became even more visible, swelling in size to nearly 30,000.

It was in this period of traumatic conflict—in Europe and in Asia—that Chinese leaders across the ideological spectrum, relying on stereotype but not necessarily on a Western anti-Semitic vocabulary, began to discuss the Jews as a people worthy of special attention.

The association between Jews and prosperity survives in China today:

Whether this association is philo-Semitic in its enthusiasm or anti-Semitic in its reliance on caricature is difficult to say, perhaps because the Chinese popular imagination seems to have imbued a historically negative Western stereotype with a decidedly positive meaning. At the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, which commemorates the city’s hospitality during World War II, an elderly Shanghai native working as a security guard recalled to us that he had known what Jews were as he was growing up because “Jews lived in Shanghai” and “Jews built the Peace Hotel.” He grinned broadly. “We say that a person who is very shrewd is ‘like a Jew.’” A compliment? At least in Shanghai.

(Photo: The Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Amar (C) prays with a group of Orthodox Jews on June 12, 2006 during a tour of the historic Ohel Rachel synagogue which was built in 1920 during the period of the first wave of Jewish migration to Shanghai. The Chief Rabbi is in China to meet government leaders in Shanghai and Beijing and toured the synagogue which is only open to the Jewish community during special religious occassions and used to house up to 700 devotee’s in the period 1920 – 1949 when many Jews sought refuge in Shanghai. By Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)