[ { "id": 212855, "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": 164, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "149\n\nA PEEK BACKWARDS INTO\n\nTHE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF SHANGHAI*\n\n(This paper is dedicated to the memory of the late Mr Hans Diestel)\n\nWEI PEH TI\n\nIntroduction\n\nJewish traders were among the first foreigners to come to work and live in Shanghai when the port was first opened to foreign trade in November 1843. Despite the important role a number of these Jewish residents played in Shanghai as well as in international commerce at that time and for a century to follow, scholars are just beginning to focus their attention on this community. David Kranzler's dissertation at Yeshiva University in New York on the Jewish refugees from Europe who arrived at Shanghai after 1938, Japanese, Nazis and Jews: the Jewish Refugee Community at Shanghai, is the only generally known work that has been published in English.1 Vilhelm Meyer was a Danish Jew who started a small trading house in Shanghai importing goods from his native Denmark at the beginning of the century, and who eventually sold the company, by then a commercial and industrial conglomerate of 1,800 employees, to General Electric in 1935. His life and work is being researched by his grandson, Christopher Bo Bramsen.2 Bramsen, however, is writing a personal biography of his grandfather, emphasizing his work in Shanghai as a Dane, not a treatise on a Jewish individual in Shanghai. On the other hand, two doctoral dissertations on the Sephardic community are being undertaken at this time, one at the London School of Economics, and one at the University of London.\n\n*The suggestion for a paper on the Jewish community in Shanghai was first made in 1987 by Dr Jewish Diestel and Mrs Paula Sandfelder when the Jewish Historical Society and the Jewish Recreation Club of Hong Kong invited me to give the first Ezekiel Abraham Memorial Lecture. Subsequently, I have given similar talks to the student body of the Chapin School and at Temple Emmanuel in New York City, as well as to Jewish groups on Long Island. I am grateful to my many friends for showing interest in the subject, and am especially flattered to be consulted by otherwise intelligent scholars who wish to work on the subject of the Shanghai Jews seriously. I would like to thank the Jewish Library in Hong Kong for letting me consult their collections; my appreciation also goes to the Rev Carl Smith for generously sharing his numerous index cards and his encyclopaedic knowledge.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212856, "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": 165, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "150 \n\nIn theory, records of business and other enterprises founded and controlled by members of the Shanghai Jewish community exist somewhere, awaiting scrutiny by scholars. In reality, however, these materials are not always readily available to the scholars who are looking for them. It is hoped that individuals working on the Jewish community or on Western enterprises in Shanghai will be able to meet up with these records.' When Mr. Bramsen first started his current research, he chanced upon a series of letters written by a Danish au-pair girl in Shanghai during the early years of the 20th century. For six years this young woman wrote at regular intervals to her family in Denmark, describing in great detail each dinner party given in the house, identifying and describing every guest, the clothes they wore, the food and drinks served, and from time to time, the conversation that took place as well. Valuable historical resources indeed!\n\nThere is a unique collection of information in Hong Kong. The Rev Carl Smith, a retired American missionary who has been living in Hong Kong for almost half a century, and author of a book on Chinese Christians in Hong Kong, has gathered a fantastic amount of isolated information on individual foreigners and Chinese Christians who were active along the China coast during the 19th and 20th centuries. He has put the information on literally hundreds of thousands of 3 × 5 index cards, most of which have been categorized and filed. Mr Smith compiled the data from public and journalistic records, including jury lists, will probates, newspaper obituaries, and numerous other sources.\n\nJewish Immigration to Shanghai\n\n4\n\nWith few exceptions, the Jews in Shanghai fell into three groups: the Sephardic Jews, the Ashkenazi Jews, and the German, Central and Eastern European Jews. Throughout the decades they lived and worked in Shanghai, and although they worked together from time to time on certain projects, the three communities remained distinct.\n\nSephardic Jews\n\nThe Sephardic traders in Shanghai came during the 19th century from the Middle East by way of India under the aegis of the Sassoons. Their numbers are not discernible from census statistics, principally because the statistics recorded the nationality rather than the religious affiliation of each resident. The number of early arrivals could not be more than\n\nPage 165\n\nPage 166", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "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", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 } ]