Shanghai Sanctuary
Shanghai Sanctuary

Author: Bei Gao

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-02-14

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0199840903

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This book assesses the plight of the European Jewish refugees who fled to Japanese-occupied China during the Second World War. It examines the Nationalist government's policy towards the Jewish refugee issue and the most thorough and subtle analysis of Japanese diplomacy concerning this matter. The story of the wartime "Shanghai Jews" is not merely a side-bar to the history of modern China or modern Japan. It is a story that illuminates how the "Jewish issue" complicated the relationships among China, Japan, Germany, and the United States before and during World War Two. Both the Chinese Nationalist government and the Japanese occupation authorities thought very carefully about the Shanghai Jews and how they could be used to win international financial and political support in their war against one another. Thus, the Holocaust had complicated repercussions that extended far beyond Europe. The diaspora of Jews to East Asia in the era of the Second World War is a rich and complex story that deserves our attention as well. Firmly grounded in archival sources from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Britain, and Israel, this book is comparative and transnational in scope and makes an important contribution to the international history of the period.

Shanghai Sanctuary
Shanghai Sanctuary

Author: Bei Gao

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-01-29

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0199311544

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When the world closed its borders to desperate Jews fleeing Europe during World War II, Shanghai became an unexpected last haven for the refugees. An open port that could be entered without visas, this unique city under Western and Japanese control sheltered tens of thousands of Jews. Shanghai Sanctuary is the first major study to examine the Chinese Nationalist government's policy towards the "Jewish issue" as well as the most thorough analysis of how this issue played into Japanese diplomacy. Why did Shanghai's German-allied Japanese occupiers permit this influx of Jewish refugees? Gao illuminates how the refugees' position complicated the relationships between China, Japan, Germany, and the United States before and during World War II. She thereby reveals a great deal about the Great Powers' national priorities, their international agendas, and their perceptions of the global balance of power. Drawing from both Chinese and Japanese archival sources that no Western scholar has been able to fully use before, Gao tells a rich story about the politics and personalities that brought Jewish refugees into Shanghai. This story, far from being a mere sidebar to the history of modern China and Japan, captures a critical moment when opportunistic authorities in both countries used the incoming Jewish refugees as a tool to win international financial and political support in their war against one another. Shanghai Sanctuary underlines the extent of Holocaust's global repercussions. In the process, the book sheds new light on the intricacies of wartime diplomacy and the far-reaching human consequences of the twentieth century's most documented conflict.

The Last Kings of Shanghai
The Last Kings of Shanghai

Author: Jonathan Kaufman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0735224439

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"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

The History of the Shanghai Jews
The History of the Shanghai Jews

Author: Kevin Ostoyich

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-11-28

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 3031137612

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This volume provides a historical narrative, historiographical reviews, and scholarly analyses by leading scholars throughout the world on the hitherto understudied topic of Shanghai Jewish refugees. Few among the general public know that during the Second World War, approximately 16,000 to 20,000 Jews fled the Nazis, found unexpected refuge in Shanghai, and established a vibrant community there. Though most of them left Shanghai soon after the conclusion of the war in 1945, years of sojourning among the Chinese and surviving under the Japanese occupation generated unique memories about the Second World War, lasting goodwill between the Chinese and Jews, and contested interpretations of this complex past. The volume makes two major contributions to the studies of Shanghai Jewish refugees. First, it reviews the present state of the historiography on this subject and critically assesses the ways in which the history is being researched and commemorated in China. Second, it compiles scholarship produced by renowned scholars, who aim to rescue the history from isolated perspectives and look into the interaction between Jews, Chinese, and Japanese.

China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Encounters
China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Encounters

Author: Kathryn Hellerstein

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-04-04

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 3110683946

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In the past thirty years, the Sino-Jewish encounter in modern China has increasingly garnered scholarly and popular attention. This volume will be the first to focus on the transcultural exchange between Ashkenazic Jewry and China. The essays here investigate how this exchange of texts and translations, images and ideas, has enriched both Jewish and Chinese cultures and prepared for a global, inclusive world literature. The book breaks new ground in the field, covering such new topics as the images of China in Yiddish and German Jewish letters, the intersectionality of the Jewish and Chinese literature in illuminating the implications for a truly global and inclusive world literature, the biographies of prominent figures in Chinese-Jewish connections, the Chabad engagement in contemporary China. Some of the fundamental debates in the current scholarship will also be addressed, with a special emphasis on how many Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai and how much interaction occurred between the Jewish refugees and the resident Chinese population during the wartime and its aftermath.

Jews in Japan: Presence and Perception
Jews in Japan: Presence and Perception

Author: Silvia Pin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-12-04

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 3111338150

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Jews in Japan: Presence and Perception. Antisemitism, Philosemitism and International Relations is a study on the history of real and imagined Jews in Japan, which discusses the little known cultural, political and economic ties between Jews and Japan, and follows the evolution of Jewish stereotypes in Japan in the last century and a half. The book begins with the arrival of Jews and their image in late 19th to early 20th-century Japan, when the seeds of later stereotyped visions were sown. The discussion then focuses on wartime Japan, delving into the complex and mixed attitudes of the Japanese Empire toward Jews. In postwar Japan, the partial reception of the Holocaust intertwined with earlier antisemitic and philosemitic manifestations, resulting in instances of both hatred and admiration toward Jews. Finally, the book explores the recent reframing of Japanese-Jewish historical encounters within the context of the growing ties between Japan and Israel. This study sheds new light on the little explored relations between Jews and Japan, offering thought-provoking insights into the coexistence of antisemitism and philosemitism, the political and diplomatic uses of Jewish history, and the perpetuation of Jewish stereotypes in a land devoid of a local Jewish population.

Strange Haven
Strange Haven

Author: Sigmund Tobias

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780252024535

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The author, part of the Jewish refugee community in Shanghai, tells of his experiences growing up in the ghetto under Japanese occupation.

Shanghai Remembered
Shanghai Remembered

Author: Berl Falbaum

Publisher: Momentum Books LLC

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13:

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In the 1930s, anti-Semitism was spreading like a cancer throughout the world. And even though Hitler's regime was criticized for its treatment of Jews, no one stepped forward to help them. In mid-1938, 32 countries met to discuss the Jews' dilemma. But they did not open their doors (except the Dominican Republic), citing a variety of reasons. Through words of mouth or information from travel agencies, Jews from various parts of Europe discovered that Shanghai was an open port. No visas or passports were required. About 20,000 refugees made the decision to flee from impending extermination--leaving behind their highly civilized and sophisticated culture for a haven that could not have been more unlike the life they had experienced. Shanghai Remembered... is a collection of first-person accounts telling how these refugees found themselves traumatized, stateless and penniless in a strange and inhospitable place.

Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia
Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia

Author: Joanne Miyang Cho

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 3319404393

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This volume provides new insights into gendered interactions over the past two centuries between Germany and Asia, including India, China, Japan, and previously overlooked Asian countries including Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Korea. This volume presents scholarship from academics working in the field of German-Asian Studies as it relates to gender across transnational encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gender has been a lens of analysis in isolated published chapters in previous edited volumes on German-Asian connections, but nowhere has there been a volume specifically dedicated to the analysis of gender in this field. Rejecting traditional notions of West and East as seeming polar opposites, their contributions to this volume attempts to reconstruct the ways in which German and Asian men and women have cooperated and negotiated the challenge of modernity in various fields.