China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Encounters

Kathryn Hellerstein,Lihong Song

• Éditeur: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110684117
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Études juives

In the past thirty years, the Sino-Jewish encounter in modern China has increasingly garnered scholarly and popular attention. This volume will be the first to focus on the transcultural exchange between Ashkenazic Jewry and China. The essays here investigate how this exchange of texts and translations, images and ideas, has enriched both Jewish and Chinese cultures and prepared for a global, inclusive world literature.
The book breaks new ground in the field, covering such new topics as the images of China in Yiddish and German Jewish letters, the intersectionality of the Jewish and Chinese literature in illuminating the implications for a truly global and inclusive world literature, the biographies of prominent figures in Chinese-Jewish connections, the Chabad engagement in contemporary China. Some of the fundamental debates in the current scholarship will also be addressed, with a special emphasis on how many Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai and how much interaction occurred between the Jewish refugees and the resident Chinese population during the wartime and its aftermath.

II Jews in Modern China

The eight essays in Part II, “Jews in Modern China,” cover a number of topics in the modern and contemporary periods. Xu Xin’s opening essay, “Jewish Communities and Modern China: Encounters of Modern Civilizations,” presents an overview of the history of the Jewish Diaspora in modern China, from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Ai Rengui’s essay, “When the Muscular Jews Came to the Far East: Jewish Sports and Physical Culture in Modern China, 1912–1949,” considers the establishment of athletic groups by Ashkenazic Jewish residents and refugees in Shanghai and other cities in China. Maisie Meyer discusses the Baghdadi Jews who established trade and commerce in Shanghai starting in the mid-nineteenth century and explores their interactions with and interventions on behalf of the Ashkenazic Jews who came later. The next four essays in Part II deal with the Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe who found shelter in Shanghai from Nazi antisemitism from 1938 through 1949. Wang Jian surveys the demographic challenges in determining the “Exact Number of Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,” Nancy Berliner presents a study of “Jewish Refugee Artists in Shanghai,” Yang Meng writes on the theater produced in “Wartime Shanghai,” and Marc B. Shapiro illuminates the survival of the students and faculty of the Mir Yeshiva in Shanghai during the war. Finally, Samuel Heilman explores the Lithuanian Hasidic Chabad movement’s current efforts to establish religious outreach programs for contemporary Jews living in the People’s Republic of China.

6 Jewish Communities and Modern China: Encounters of Modern Civilizations

Xu Xin

The Chinese and Jewish cultures are both great civilizations. Both developed in ancient times and have endured until today, keeping continuous recorded accounts of their origins. Both have had a significant impact on world history: the Jews on the West, the Chinese on the Far East. Unfortunately, before the modern era, these two major societies seldom met. As a result, little was known about Jewish culture in China. The first direct and meaningful Chinese encounters with Jews took place at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, chiefly due to the ongoing arrival of Jews in China. In time, various Jewish communities were established in modern Chinese cities.

The Jewish Diaspora in China is a unique experience for world Jewry, as China is the only country in East Asia that has had Jews living in its society for a millennium or longer. But a significant distinction exists between Jews in pre-modern China (before 1840) and those in modern China (since 1840). Those who arrived before the modern era integrated into Chinese society and consequently lost many of their distinctive features, but those who have come during the modern era have remained foreigners.

The earliest documentary evidence of Jews in China survives from the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE).¹ During that time, a dozen Jewish communities appeared in Chinese cities such as Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Yangzhou, Xi’an, Peking, Luoyang, Nanjing, and Ningxia. However, with the exception of the Kaifeng Jewish community, pre-modern Jews in China left behind very few materials for us to reconstruct their lives and histories. By the eighteenth century, they had all but vanished.² The Kaifeng Jewish community, established between 960 and 1126 CE in the capital city of the Song dynasty, survived until the mid-nineteenth century, when their last rabbi died without a successor. Without regular attendance, the synagogue gradually diminished.³ By then, one could claim, the community had virtually ceased to exist as such, although individual Jewish descendants still live in the city to this day.

But before the Jewish communities established in pre-modern China had entirely disappeared, additional Jewish immigrants settled in China, initiating a new era for Jews and Chinese alike.⁴ The new arrivals came in several waves. First, Sephardic Jews, originally based in Baghdad and Bombay, sought business opportunities in newly opened Chinese treaty cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai during the second half of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they had built up solid Jewish communities in those coastal cities. Second, during the early twentieth century, an influx of Ashkenazi Jews – mainly from Russia and other eastern European countries – initially arrived in Harbin and contiguous zones in Northeast China and later moved south. Although a few came in search of better economic opportunities, the majority were fleeing from pogroms, wars, and revolutions in Russia. The third wave consisted mainly of European Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. From 1937 through 1940, about 20,000 Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai. This wave also included some 1,000 Jews from Kobe, Japan. Among these, all the teachers and students of the Mir Yeshiva, some 400 in total, had previously escaped Poland through Vilna, obtained transit visas to Japan from Sugihara Chiune (the Japanese consul in Kovno), and finally made their way to China in the early 1940s. In Shanghai, they continued their studies in the Beth Aharon Synagogue, the only place of worship with space enough to hold the entire Yeshiva. Overall, from 1845 through 1945, more than 40,000 Jews arrived in China seeking business development or a safe haven, which at last made it possible for a significant number of Chinese to encounter them directly.⁵

The end of World War II and the surrender of Japan brought new hope for Jews in China. For the European refugees, the first positive changes were the complete resumption of communication with the outside world, the flow of much-needed money into the community, and their newfound freedom of movement. Many found opportunities to rejoin their relatives abroad and/or to live in societies to whose lifestyles and cultures they were more accustomed. It was natural for them to leave – after all, they had only come to China in the first place because they did not have any other choice. The United States, Canada, and Australia became their new destinations if visas could be obtained. However, most countries had yet to widely open their doors to Jewish refugees. The founding of the State of Israel offered a new alternative. In 1948, shortly after its establishment, Israel opened an office in Shanghai to welcome Jews to Israel. About 10,000 Jews found a new home there.

On the other hand, China had been home to the Sephardim and the Russians for a generation or more. Many considered staying. Some began to invest, while others started to rebuild their businesses. However, their hopes were short-lived. In 1946, civil war broke out between the Nationalists and the Communists. Well-established Jewish families in Shanghai, such as the Sassoons and the Kadoories, began to transfer their businesses elsewhere: the Sassoons to the Bahamas, the Kadoories to Hong Kong.

By 1949, the year of the Communists’ rise to power, most of the Jews in China had already migrated elsewhere. Only a few thousand had chosen to stay. By the end of 1950s, the Jewish Diaspora in modern China had virtually disappeared. In 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, only a few elders and revolutionaries – such as Israel Epstein and Sydney Shapiro, who were affiliated with the Chinese Communist Revolution – remained. Those who were left eventually passed away.⁶

Nevertheless, the fact that Jews resided in China does not mean that the Chinese had any great awareness of their presence before the modern era. The majority of the Chinese knew very little. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, they simply referred to Jews as Blue Hat Hui hui (‘people who came from the West to China’), or Tiao-jin-jiao (‘sect that plucks out the sinews’). Both names are based on certain customs of the Kaifeng Jews. No one, not even the most knowledgeable scholars in China, had any suspicion that the Jews in Kaifeng might represent a larger religious population who were scattered in m...

Table des matières

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I The Bible in China
• II Jews in Modern China
• III Jews and Chinese
• Personal Names
• Place Names