Matthew Davis

Questions

What available oral histories are there of the Shanghai experience? What do the interviews in the Shanghai Jewish Oral History Collection say about life as a Jew living in Shanghai? Why did the Jewish people come to Shanghai and why did they stay? What was life in the Shanghai Ghetto like? What was the Jewish impact on Shanghai?

Discussion

Whether it was the Iraqi Jews fleeing the Mamluks of Baghdad, Sephardic Jews escaping the Ottoman Empire, or Russian Jews leaving the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule, Jewish people immigrated to Shanghai over the last few centuries, particularly since the mid-1800s, to escape persecution and find community. Although a Chinese city thousands of miles from Europe seems an unlikely place to build a Jewish home, Shanghai has a rich history of cultural merging and the lived experience of Jews in the city epitomizes Shanghai’s identity as a meeting place of the East and the West.

Throughout history, Jews have traveled to and traded with China, famously settling in the ancient capital of Kaifeng during the Song Dynasty, creating an isolated community that has persisted for centuries, as described by Michael Pollak in the “Detailed History of Kaifeng Jews” (Pollak 2018). In modern history, Jews have come to China because of trade opportunities and to escape persecution. In particular, Jewish people have played an influential role even though they have always been a fraction of the city’s population. After the Treaty of Nanking ended the First Opium War in 1842, the city was opened up to western populations, and merchants, including many prominent Jewish families, traveled to Shanghai for its rich business potential. The  Sassoons were one of the most prominent Baghdadi Jewish families to settle in Shanghai. Stephanie Po-yin Chung writes in her article “Floating in Mud to Reach the Skies: Victor Sassoon and the Real Estate Boom in Shanghai, 1920s–1930s” about how Victor Sassoon wielded his wealth and influence from his family’s opium and textile trading to indelibly shape the landscape of Shanghai (Chung 2019: 1). Up until this time, Shanghai buildings rarely exceeded a single storey because the high water content in the city’s soil made tall and heavy structures unstable. When Victor Sassoon “arrived in Shanghai in the mid-1920s, it was a horizontal city . . . but Sassoon envisioned Shanghai as the Manhattan of the East” (Chung 10). After its completion in 1929, Sassoon’s art deco Cathay Hotel “became an icon on the Bund” as the “tallest building in Shanghai” standing at twelve storeys (Chung 12).

A 1929 photograph of the Cathay Hotel in Shanghai, built by the wealthy Sassoon family. At the time, it was the tallest building in Shanghai. “The Cathay Hotel/Sassoon House,” Virtual Shanghai, 1929. https://www.virtualshanghai.net/ Photos/Images?ID=1134.

However, the experience of Jews in Shanghai was not categorically positive, for a majority of them immigrated because they were fleeing persecution of Nazi Germany during World War II. Steve Hochstadt, a former professor of history at Bates College, vividly captured the experience of the surviving Jews in Shanghai by establishing the Shanghai Jewish Community Oral History Project in the late 1980s. As explained on the project’s homepage at Bates College, Hochstadt interviewed surviving Shanghai Jews to create an oral history that “showed not only how they survived, but also how they created a community of synagogues, cafes, theaters, schools, and newspapers” (“Shanghai Jewish Oral History Collection”). His interviews began in 1989 when he traveled to China. He later conducted interviews across the world, including in the U.S., Germany, and Austria. Through ninety-nine interviews of over a hundred Jewish people, Hochstadt explores a symbiotic relationship: the ways Jews shaped Shanghai’s development and the impact the city had on their lives.

By the time of the war, there were up to 18,000 Jews from Eastern Europe living in Shanghai (“Shanghai Jewish Oral History Collection”). Groups of families took trains and boats through Africa and the Middle East to reach safety in Shanghai, leaving behind their lives. The Polish Jews’ escape to China provides important evidence of what it meant to leave one’s homeland, as reviewed by Andrew Jakubowicz in “Transnationalism in the Analysis of Global Refugee Movements: The Case of the Second World War Polish Jews in Shanghai” (Jakubowicz 2017: 1). Polish Jews fled Poland because it was one of the first countries to be invaded and fully occupied by Nazi Germany. The establishment of Nazi control and the creation of concentration and death camps quickly changed Poland from a multicultural place to one that was unsafe for anyone who was not Aryan. This shift effectively destroyed the Poland that they knew, and this homeless sentiment was further compounded after they arrived in Shanghai (Jakubowicz 9). After 1943, recently-immigrated Jews, primarily the German and Polish Jews who were not a part of the established Jewish families of Shanghai, were forced to live in the Shanghai Ghetto, the only Jewish ghetto outside of Europe during WWII (“Shanghai Jewish Oral History Collection”).

Peter Finkelgruen reflects on his childhood growing up in the “Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees” in his piece “Memories of a Shanghai Baby,” which is one of the selected stories shared by the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and Shanghai International Studies University for this project that “commemorates the history of Jews in Shanghai” (Finkelgruen 2016). Notably, he wonders whether the Shanghai ghetto could even be called a ghetto in the Holocaust-era connotation, for even though “over 1,581 Jewish refugees died . . . did the Ghetto in Shanghai, which is thousands of miles away from Europe, serve the same purpose?” (Finkelgruen). As he recounts, the people who grew up in Shanghai at this time were profoundly impacted by this experience of being classified as a stateless person, and Finkelgruen looks to the artwork of David Ludwig Bloch to see “a deeper understanding of the influence of Shanghai on

Jews in exile” (Finkelgruen). Bloch was a Jewish artist whose art was deeply impacted by his time as a stateless refugee in Shanghai after being interned at Dachau concentration camp. The pieces he made from his time in Shanghai are currently displayed in the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture (“David Ludwig Bloch”). His medium of woodcuts and watercolors “showcased the underprivileged (peddlers, rickshaw pullers, and beggars), as well as documenting the harsh living conditions of Jewish stateless refugees,”  further highlighting Finkelgruen’s sentiment that even though the Shanghai ghetto was different from the experiences of Jews in Europe, Shanghai Jews were experiencing serious psychological harm due to their displacement (“David Ludwig Bloch”). As explained by Jakubowicz, because “no state had defended them in effect during the War,” the Jewish community in Shanghai experienced a significant “growth of Zionism” since, “in their imaginations,” the Jews “required an exclusive state to defend them” (Jakubowicz 10).

A 1943-45 woodcut titled “Shanghai Ghetto,” which shows the thoughts Bloch had as a stateless refugee in Shanghai ghetto.Citation: “David Ludwig Bloch,” LBI Art & Objects Collection, Accessed: May 12, 2021. https://www.lbi.org/collections/david-ludwig-bloch/.

Through personal historical accounts and oral history, one gains a rich understanding of the specific historical events because one not only learns facts but also hears them through the lens of emotion and experience. These informalities and anecdotes construct an experience one can properly delve into, something a scholarly paper may miss. Two oral histories conducted by Hochstadt weave together this mix of historiography and personal narrative well. In Beijing, Hochstadt interviewed both Sasson Jacoby and Sidney Shapiro in April 1989. Jacoby comes  from an established Baghdadi Jewish family and was born in 1918 (“Sasson Jacoby” 1989: 1). Recalling his work as a newspaper reporter, Jacoby explains how freedom of speech changed as the politics of Shanghai changed. Before the war, there was “a very thriving English-language press. There were, in fact, let me see, one, two, three, four, there were four English-language newspapers”

with different outlets run by the Chinese, the Americans, and the British (“Sasson Jacoby” 9). As Japan invaded the city, “automatically, the entire English-language press was closed down,” and “the Japanese concentrated on producing one newspaper,” which was where Jacoby worked (“Sasson Jacoby” 10). His job at the Japanese newspaper was to edit translations, and while the Japanese were interning the Shanghai Jews, Jacoby viewed it simply as work, stating that “it was a job and I was doing very well over there” (“Sasson Jacoby” 11). The Japanese had full control of Shanghai, and Jacoby experienced the perks of being associated with them once German officers began to travel to Shanghai. Discussing times when he would go out to German clubs for dinner, he remembers that “there’s nothing they could do about my being Jewish. I was (laughs) in the Japanese news agency. And I was a stateless person, and I was on excellent terms with the Japanese” (“Sasson Jacoby” 12). Throughout the course of the interview, the listener develops a sense of Jacoby’s personality and sense of humor, from discussing beer flavors with Hochstadt to speculating about Yuan Shi-Kai’s death, saying, “I don’t know whether he was poisoned or (laughs) whatever, but he died” (“Sasson Jacoby” 17, 16). By injecting personal lived experience into the historical events unfolding during the time of Japanese occupation, Jacoby succeeds at showing how a Jew truly lived, hearing facets of life which could not be captured through other research mediums.

A 1949 watercolor painting by David Ludwig Bloch depicting the street activity of Shanghai during the WWII era. Citation: “David Ludwig Bloch,” LBI Art & Objects Collection, Accessed: May 12, 2021. https://www.lbi.org/collections/david-ludwig-bloch/.

Sidney Shapiro’s interview provides a contrasting experience to Jacoby’s, primarily because he was born in New York and arrived in Shanghai in 1947 as a U.S. army lawyer (“Sidney Shapiro” 1989: 1). Working on behalf of the American consulate, he was tasked by the government to go to the ghetto and relay the news that it was unlikely all of them would gain  visas to the U.S., explaining that as “an American and as a Jew and as a lawyer,” he was the best person “to just talk informally and explain to them that chances were not terribly good” (“Sidney Shapiro” 1). During his trips to the ghetto, Shapiro remarked on the “absurdity of it and the pity of” the situation, for “here you had this wonderful group of very talented people just vegetating and going to waste” (“Sidney Shapiro” 1). The time he spent in the ghetto talking to the interned Jews impacted him, for he realized that “they were really not an amorphous group, but different, quite different” (“Sidney Shapiro” 1). Given his position working for the U.S. government, he experienced the corruption of the Chinese government first-hand, talking about the lack of “legitimate business” in Shanghai (“Sidney Shapiro” 4). In great contrast to present-day Shanghai, in the 1940s, “the economy was at a standstill . . . the only thing that was really moving were bills of lading and letters of credit” (“Sidney Shapiro” 4). As he spent more time in Shanghai, Shapiro realized that while the city had its flaws and Chinese society was not perfect, he “wouldn’t want to live any place else but in China” (“Sidney Shapiro” 12-13). Shapiro’s experience, so positive it led him to publish the book An American in China, articulates the power placeness has, highlighting inherent qualities urban centers have that beckon people, not only because of who they are but also in spite of it.

A photograph of the Jewish living quarters in the Shanghai ghetto, located in the Hongkew district of the city. Citation: “Shanghai,” Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center. Accessed: May 12, 2021. https://holocaustcenter.jfcs.org/ oral-histories/shanghai-2/.

Oral history provides researchers many benefits, but it is constrained by the interviewer, the interviewee, and the context of the time. By looking at one person’s experience, oral history is able to approach a time or event in a narrow scope, a scope that is inherently limited. It is because of this capacity that oral histories should be vivid additions to larger historical approaches. Sasson Jacoby’s and Sidney Shapiro’s lives do not define the lives of Jews in Shanghai, instead accentuating them by showing two crisp examples of what it meant to be Jewish in Shanghai during the twentieth century. When taken together with a broader lens, one can fully digest the experiences of the Jewish people in Shanghai.

Sources

1. Chung, Stephanie Po-yin. “Floating in Mud to Reach the Skies: Victor Sassoon and the Real Estate Boom in Shanghai, 1920s–1930s,” International Journal of Asian Studies, 2019.

2. “David Ludwig Bloch,” Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture, https://www.lbi.org/collections/david-ludwig-bloch/.

3. Finkelgruen, Peter. “Jews in Shanghai: Memories of a Shanghai Baby,” Shanghai International Studies University, 25 Sept., 2016, http://en.shisu.edu.cn/resources/ features/jews-in-shanghai-8.

4. Jakubowicz, Andrew. “Transnationalism in the Analysis of Global Refugee Movements: The Case of the Second World War Polish Jews in Shanghai,” Australian Humanities Review, November 2017, https://www-proquest-com.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/docview/ 2003305190?accountid=11091&pq-origsite=primo.
5. Pollak, Michael. “Detailed History of Kaifeng Jews.” The Sino-Judaic Institute, 2018. http://www.sino-judaic.org/index.php?page=kaifeng_jews_history.
6. “Shanghai Jewish Oral History Collection.” Scholarly Communication and Research at Bates. Bates College. Accessed April 21, 2021. https://scarab.bates.edu/shanghai_oh/.
7. Sasson Jacoby, interview by Steve Hochstadt, Beijing, China, April 24, 1989, Shanghai Jewish Oral History Collection, https://scarab.bates.edu/shanghai_oh/.
8. Sidney Shapiro, interview by Steve Hochstadt, Beijing, China, April 26, 1989, Shanghai Jewish Oral History Collection, https://scarab.bates.edu/shanghai_oh/.