[
    {
        "id": 212014,
        "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-1989",
        "page_number": 429,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "Metzger's approach is essentially Western in identifying values promoting Western forms of modernity (as in the writings of the Hong Kong historian, Lau Siu-guang p. 289), while overlooking some other important alternatives—a point made by Andrew Nathan (p. 310).\n\nTwo outstanding articles extend further the methodological issues in evaluating modern China, suggesting an important lacuna in reflecting on Schwartz's academic achievements. Germaine Hoston's tour de force, a comparative study of Chinese, Japanese, South American, and African Marxisms, rests not only in the cultural pluralities she has in her grasp but also in her reassessment of the spiritual dimensions of Marxist, and specifically Chinese and Japanese Marxist, theories (pp. 169-220). Asian Marxists uncovered a wealth of sympathy for certain spiritual dimensions, much like Liberation theologians, including the full absorption by Japanese Marxists of elements of kokutai ('national polity', pp. 193-195). A similarly admirable essay by Andrew Nathan untangles the conflict between cultural relativism and ‘evaluative universalism’, that is, forming judgements in cross-cultural studies on the basis of values the investigator believes to be valid (p. 295). The arguments against imposing 'foreign' values on China are dismantled with great precision and insightful thoroughness, covering issues raised over the last thirty years in sinological circles. Although one laments the failure of Nathan to explicitly respond to the tainting of values by ideologically-laden choices—an issue of which he, as a political scientist, is certainly aware—perceptive readers should be able to extrapolate the arguments presented to include this dimension. Both Hoston and Nathan suggest a logical and/or spiritual dimension which is not explicitly located in Schwartz's thought (except in passing by the editors, p. 3).\n\nThe relation of Schwartz's Jewish faith to his Chinese interests as a historian and political scientist is worthy of reflection because this is a somewhat unusual junction of ideas in itself and because it may provide a key to at least one aspect of Schwartz's restlessness with any unquestioned scholarly assumption. Schwartz's critical awareness of the connections between Mao and Confucianism may find some parallel in his confrontative effort in locating a connection between Hannah Arendt's Marxism and her Jewishness (see Dissent 17:2 (March/April 1970), pp. 144-161). Ideological commitments may overshadow traditional inheritances, but they cannot by that means necessarily avoid all influences and misjudgements. Schwartz's sensitivity to the distortion of Judaism evident in Arendt's 'religion of politics' may well reflect a",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "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",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]