[ { "id": 212861, "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": 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", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "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 }, { "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", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "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]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 } ]