From “Jews in China” to “Jews and China”

When Kathryn Hellerstein of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that we launch a joint research project on China and Ashkenazi Jewry two years ago, I gladly accepted the idea, as I saw in it a potential opportunity to open up new vistas on a seemingly well-trodden field. As is well-known, China is the only country in the Far East in which Jews have continuously lived for approximately a millennium. From the end of the nineteenth century on, the Jewish Diaspora in China has attracted sustained academic endeavours globally. What is pertinent to our project is the topic of Jews in Modern China, particularly in Shanghai and Harbin. In the past two decades, an outpouring of Chinese scholarship on the Ashkenazi Jewish presence in the two metropolises not only has significantly advanced our understanding of Sino-Jewish relations and laid a solid foundation for further investigation, but also constitutes a highlight of Chinese Jewish studies. Now that major works outlining the history of the two communities and collecting the documents have come out, I cannot help but think perhaps it is time to ponder the next move. What else can be done? Is it still possible to break new ground and bring new perspectives to the field, and how? Although we are living in the so-called “global village,” Chinese and Western scholars of Ashkenazi Jewry in modern China remain, I believe, more or less unconnected, or at least not to the extent that we might expect. If we look at the latest Western monographs on the subject, we rarely if ever encounter recent research by Chinese scholars. In fact, such an ongoing debate as the exact number of the Jewish refugees in wartime Shanghai might benefit from a better familiarity with the substantial discussion in Chinese scholarship (for instance, Wang Jian in Pan 2017, 24–38). On the other hand, Chinese scholars have translated into Chinese not a few memoirs and oral testimonies by Jewish refugees and expatriates, and they do cite the works of Western scholars. However, closer examination reveals that they seem more interested in citing the primary sources, often in German and Yiddish, to supplement or substantiate their own narrative, while seldom engaging with the argument and overarching theses of Western scholars. Indeed, the concerns and ethos of the two bodies of scholarship could be strikingly different. In the case of the story of Shanghai, much has been written on the Mir Yeshiva, the only Yeshiva that was saved whole from the Holocaust. For the Jewish religious mindset, the sojourn and thriving of the Yeshiva during the war years of China miraculously testified to the religious truth articulated in the Jerusalem Talmud – “Words of Torah are impoverished on native ground and grow enriched in a strange place.” Some