[
    {
        "id": 212861,
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        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1992",
        "page_number": 170,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "155\n\nestablished in Shanghai, Sassoon moved his legitimate articles of trade there until 1858. Meanwhile, Jardine, Matheson and Company, which had hithertofore been the major trader in opium, had been buying through native Indian firms in India and carrying it in their own ships to China. It was partly due to Sassoon's manipulation of the opium supply and the opium market that led Jardine, Matheson to abandon the opium trade and to diversify its interests in Hong Kong and China. After 1871, Sassoon companies controlled the opium market.\n\nDavid Sassoon died in Bombay in 1864. He was married twice, and had a number of sons, who took turns managing the business in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London. After David's death, his second son, Elias David Sassoon, organized E.D. Sassoon and Company. Thereafter, there were two Sassoon companies, known by contemporaries as the Old Sassoon (David Sassoon and Company), and the New Sassoon (E.D. Sassoon and Company). A number of employees of the Old Sassoon, such as Silas Hardoon, joined E.D. Sassoon and Company as partners.\n\nOther Families\n\nShortly after the arrival of the British Consul at Shanghai in November 1843, three young employees of David Sassoon and Company began working and living in Shanghai. The three were E.J. Abraham, M.S. Moshee, and J. Reuben, the last a founder of the Jewish congregation, Sheerith Israel, in Shanghai. In quick order, other Jewish young men arrived at Shanghai to work for the Sassoons, including a number of names later distinguished on the China coast. At first, the young men returned to Baghdad or Bombay for their brides. Eventually, as more Jewish families settled in Shanghai, marriage partners were chosen locally.\n\nThe Abrahams\n\nDespite being identified by Cecil Roth in The Sassoon Dynasty as the one Jewish merchant family of Shanghai closely associated with scholarship, the Abraham men were first of all traders handling commodities typical of that time, including opium. Eleazer Abraham had come to China as a clerk in the David Sassoon and Company. In 1843 he was in Hong Kong, and in 1850 in Shanghai. In 1904 D.E.J. Abraham was recorded to have sued the Sassoon Apcar Steamship Company to recover opium which had allegedly gone astray.14 The grandson of the first Abraham in Shanghai, the noted R.D. Abraham, was elected leader",
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    {
        "id": 212863,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1992",
        "page_number": 172,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "157\n\nsurviving members of the Ezra family still enjoy a favoured position in the Jewish community in Hong Kong.\n\nNevertheless, individual members of the family (or families, since there were several separate groups of Ezras in Shanghai) attracted notoriety from time to time. In 1918, criminal proceedings were instituted against Joseph Ezra and Ellis Isaac Ezra for using the launch owned by the Standard Oil Company without authorization. The same year, Joseph Ezra was summoned to court for assaulting a Mr Gordious Nielson, a Dane, who was the proprietor of the Shanghai Gazette, which had printed something that Joseph Ezra did not like. The South China Morning Post recorded a 1933 case whereby two men named Ezra, Judah and Isaac, were brought to court in San Francisco for smuggling narcotics. By 1933, the International Convention against opium had long since been signed.\n\n16\n\nNissim Ezra Benjamin Ezra, better known as N.E.B. Ezra, founded and edited the Anglo-Jewish weekly newspaper, Israel's Messenger from 1909 to 1935. This paper became the official organ of the Shanghai Zionist Association, taking issue with Sir Victor Sassoon and other Sephardic Jews in Shanghai over the issue of Zionism. The paper supported the Jewish National Fund in China. In 1921 the fund received a donation of 21,000 pounds sterling from a single donor in Shanghai. Since it was pro-Japanese, Chinese sources speculated that the Japanese had succeeded in buying the paper's editorial policy to favour Japanese imperial ambitions in Asia.\n\nSilas Hardoon\n\nSilas Hardoon alone among the Shanghai Jewry was not spoken of as a family. To the Chinese he was the most interesting Jew in Shanghai. There is so much information on him that it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Hardoon was a colourful as well as important personality. He was also very, very wealthy. He was elected to the Municipal Council of the International Settlement as well as the Conseil Municipal of the French Concession. Chinese tradition has it that the British made this Jewish parvenu pay for the honour of being a municipal councillor by shouldering the expenses of paving Nanking Road. Hardoon married a Chinese woman reputed to be of brothel origin, by Jewish and Buddhist rites. They adopted a number of Chinese and Eurasian children, rumoured to be from a dozen to twenty. The Chinese",
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    {
        "id": 212864,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1992",
        "page_number": 173,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "158\n\nchildren took Mme Hardoon's surname-Lo-the Eurasian children the surname Hardoon. Their ostentatious life-style was particularly noted. The Aili Garden, designed to be in the style of the Da Guan Yuan of the Dream of the Red Chamber, embraced a temple and a school. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, it was said that the Hardoons assumed the life style of the court by entertaining imperial concubines and employing eunuchs as retainers.\n\nActual facts known of the Hardoons are somewhat less flamboyant. Silas Hardoon was born in Baghdad. At the age of five, in 1851, his family moved to Bombay where his father worked for the Sassoons. In 1873 he moved to Shanghai to work for Sassoon as a clerk. His parsimonious living, administrative skills, and keen business sense soon enabled him to become a rich man himself. He engaged in opium sales and real estate speculation. Instead of buying expensive land in the British settlement, he bought land for himself and for the Sassoons in the External Roads area. And, when the settlement expanded, land value rose. It was said that he made as much as 500 million taels in one single transaction. Hardoon married a Chinese woman and had little to do with Jewish religious or social life in Shanghai, despite his significant gift to the construction of the Beth Aharon synagogue for the orthodox congregation Sheerith Israel. Before and during the Revolution of 1911, Hardoon and his wife harboured revolutionaries in the Aili Garden. Whether or how much they contributed towards the revolutionary coffers is unknown.\n\nSilas Hardoon died in 1931 and was buried in the Aili Garden. This final act of disregard of religious tenets again angered the Jewish community since the garden was not consecrated ground.\n\nThe Kadoories\n\nThe first woman to drive an automobile in Shanghai was Lady Kadoorie, wife of Sir Elly Kadoorie, an Iraqi Jew who made his fortune in real estate utilities in Shanghai. Kadoorie was a part of the Sassoon establishment until he went on his own. One of their sons, Lawrence,* was to become Lord Kadoorie, the first man from Hong Kong to sit in the House of Lords at Westminster. He has remained active in finance and industry in Hong Kong. Their other son, Horace, is known for his support for education of Jews all over Asia, including Israel. Horace likes to be active in all aspects of founding a school, from curriculum planning to staff hiring, in addition to fund raising. In Shanghai in 1939,\n\n* Since deceased [Editor]",
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    {
        "id": 212865,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1992",
        "page_number": 174,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "159\n\nfor instance, he organized the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School, or the Kadoorie School, in Hongkew for refugee children. Horace Kadoorie is also active in youth affairs.\n\nReligious Life\n\nIn the 1920s there were two synagogues in Shanghai: Ohel Rachel and Beth Aharon.\n\nOhel Rachel was successor to Beth El, built by Sir Jacob Sassoon. The congregation Beth El had been in existence since 2 August, 1878, although they had used rented space for worship until 1917. Rabbi W Hirsch did not sign up for a second term reputedly because he did not like the wealthy. No other rabbi was appointed. The principal of the Shanghai Jewish School, Mendel Brown, served as rabbi unofficially.\n\n24\n\nIn 1900, a group which thought that Beth El was too relaxed about observation of orthodox traditions left Beth El and organized Sheerith Israel. The new congregation included some of the most illustrious names in Shanghai Abraham, A.E. Moses, and M.J. Isaac, for instance. It built the Beth Aharon Synagogue on Seymour Road, and which was later moved to Museum Road downtown, with funds contributed mostly by Hardoon. The synagogue included space for a Hebrew school (Talmud Torah) as well as a ritualarium (mikveh). 25\n\nA third congregation came into being when Shanghai was inundated by Jewish refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe during the late 1930s. This was Ohel Moshe in Hongkew, built in 1941, architecturally a twin of the Jewish synagogue in Hong Kong. It boasted a capacity for 1,000 worshippers at a time.\n\nThe Jewish cemetery built in 1862 on Mohawk Road was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution a century later.\n\nEducational, Social, and Charitable Institutions\n\nNewspapers\n\nA bibliography of the Jewish Press in China gives six Jewish publications in Shanghai. One of these newspapers, Israel's Messenger,",
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    {
        "id": 212867,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1992",
        "page_number": 176,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "161\n\nI have barely scratched the surface in this overview, but it gives the reader an idea of the vibrant state of the Jewish Community in Shanghai at its peak.\n\nJewish Vestiges in Shanghai in the 1980s\n\nThere were still some physical remains of the Jewish heritage in Shanghai visible during the 1980s.\n\nThe Cathay Hotel, also known as Sassoon House, at the junction of the Bund and Nanking Road, built by the Sassoon interests, still exists today (October 1991) as a hotel, but has been renamed the Peace Hotel. Its ballroom, venue of many elegant tea dances in the hotel's heyday, is now a restaurant serving Western food.\n\nThe Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Hongkew is now the isolation ward of the Shanghai Mental Hospital. A photograph taken in 1984 of the Beth Aharon Synagogue shows the dome of the house of worship intact but the Star of David covered by a coat of paint. The US government was asked to intercede to have this synagogue building preserved, but an article by Sam and Mona Kaplan in the Vancouver Bulletin reports that the building has been razed by a bulldozer.28\n\nThe Jewish Cemetery was demolished during the Cultural Revolution, but its chapel, as of September 1983, still stood, but as a tea house. Hardoon's Aili Garden became the Shanghai Agricultural Exhibition Hall. Kadoorie's Marble Hall has been transformed into the Children's Palace.\n\nNOTES\n\n2\n\nNew York Yeshiva University Press, 1976\n\nOn a recent trip to Shanghai in September 1991 Mr Bramsen found that his grandfather's home had been razed only the year before\n\nThere are still a number of former Jewish residents of Shanghai outside China, including Hong Kong. They are generous in sharing their memories, but they are advancing in years and more than a few of them are getting tired of being asked to recite the same things over and again. A PBS radio programme in Los Angeles featured a number of former residents of Shanghai recalling their life, but these were mostly German Jews who were there from the late 1930s to the early 1950s\n\nCarl T. Smith, Chinese Christians Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong Hong Kong, Oxford, New York Oxford University Press. 1985",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212868,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1992",
        "page_number": 177,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "162\n\nIt was clear when I gave the Ezekiel Abraham Memorial Lecture in 1987 that strong feelings still remained,\n\nKranzler, 745.\n\n7 The Hankow Daily News July 13, 1917,\n\n1.\n\nStatistics differ. Even the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives different numbers on different pages. Without scrutinizing temple rolls, it is difficult to ascertain the number of Jews in Shanghai at a given time, but it can be estimated to be less than 2,000 from 1920 through the early 1930s.\n\nDavid Kranzler gave the following figures: On 25 March, 1934, there were 1,671 Jewish adults and children in Shanghai (881 male and 790 female), including Sephardic Jews as well as the Ashkenazi community. A little more than ten years later, 14,245 persons (8,283 male, 5,962 female) were classified as Jewish refugees in Shanghai in November 1944. Of these, 8,114 had come from Germany, 1,248 from Poland, 3,942 from Austria, and 236 from Czechoslovakia. Between 1939 and 1946, there had been 418 births, 366 marriages, 104 divorces, and 1,726 deaths among the Jewish population in Shanghai.\n\n40 Hans and Lala Diestel, respectably bourgeois before the Japanese occupation, ground assorted grains in their living-room by hand, using a Chinese millstone, selling the meal to the Red Cross for cash. Later on, they operated a factory making shoes, employing Jewish refugees. 'There was never any problem with raw materials,” related the indefatigable Mr Diestel, who was born in Tsingtao, 'because the Japanese thought that I was German.' Betty Peh-t'i Wei, Shanghai, Crucible of Modern China, Hong Kong, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 252.\n\n\" Conversation with Ezekiel Abraham in Hong Kong. Also, see Joseph and Lynn Silverstein, 'David Marshall and Jewish Emigration from China', China Quarterly, (London 1979).\n\n12 The New York Times, 27 February, 1983.\n\n13\n\nOld Chronicle of Hong Kong November 1870.\n\n14 Hong Kong Telegram 4 May, 1904. Shanghai dispatch.\n\n15\n\nWei, 252.\n\n16 The China Mail, 24 September, 1918,\n\n17\n\nI am sorry that I have lost the date of this issue of the Hong Kong newspaper.\n\n10 His will was probated in Hong Kong in 1886.\n\n19 Left Sassoon and Company 21 January, 1891\n\n20\n\nMerchant. His will, witnessed by Hardoon, was probated in 1893.\n\n21 The obituary in the South China Morning Post. 8 August, 1979, identified Mrs Ezra as Mozelle Robinson Ezra of Shanghai. Edward Ezra and Mozelle Sopher were married in 1907\n\n22 People's Daily (Beijing), 15 October, 1991, 2.\n\n21\n\nChinese sources insist that he worked as a door keeper. At least he had control over accessibility to the boss\n\n24\n\nComplaints included members riding to services on the Sabbath and High Holy Days rather than travelling on foot",
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