The Sorkin and Golab Theses and their Applicability to South, Southeast, and East Asian Port Jewry

NOTES

• 1999 . Journal of Jewish Studies , 50.1 : 87 – 97 . Arabic-speaking Jews from Baghdad who are also referred to as Levantine Jews, should not, strictly speaking, be characterised as ‘Sephardim’, or Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492–93 and retained medieval Spanish or Portuguese as their mother tongue in varied places of exile. David Sorkin, The Port Jew: Notes Toward a Social Typt, (Spring)
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• Sorkin . 1968 . “ ‘The Port Jew’ (see note 1), p.89. This Sephardi and Italian infrastructure was similar to the trade nexus which bound early American merchants from a particular city with each other and with their overseas financiers and agents. Economic historian Thomas C. Cochran observed that ‘in spite of intercolonial trade in some items, each major (early American) port was a separate business community remote from its neighbors. The personal ties that bound the business world together were more often between American merchants and the houses of Liverpool or London than between men on this side of the Atlantic. Businessmen of Charleston were more at home in London than in Boston.’ Thomas C. Cochran ” . In Basic History of American Business 28 – 13 . Princeton : Van Nostrand . On Philadelphia Quakers as a case in point, see Richard Wain, Jr., Walnford Mill Accounts, 1772 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia); Stephen Winslow, Biographies of Successful Philadelphia Merchants (Philadelphia: James K. Simon, 1864), pp.129–32; Jonathan Goldstein, Philadelphia And The China Trade 1682–1846: Commercial, Cultural And Attitudinal Effects (University Park and London: Penn State University Press, 1978), pp.11–12 and passim; and Jonathan Goldstein, ‘America's First Sinologist: Philadelphia's Robert Wain, Jr. (1794–1825)’, Asian Culture Quarterly (Taipei) 27.1 (Spring 1999), 1. A second case in point in colonial and early national America are the Huguenots.
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• Sorkin . ‘The Port Jew’ (see note 1), p.90.
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• 1956 . “ The Jewish Quarterly Review ” . In Ibid. 92 – 57 . Philadelphia With respect to South, Southeast, and East Asia, although the Inquisition existed in Portugal's colonies until the institution was abolished by King Joao VI in 1812, there is no record of converted Jews in the Far East returning to their original faith. Walter J. Fischel, ‘Leading Jews in the Service of Portuguese India’, 47 (July), 37
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• Sorkin , David . 2000 . The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought 1 – 3 . London and Portland , OR : Valentine Mitchell . pp.131–32, fns.1, 2; Lois C. Dubin, ‘Trieste and Berlin: The Italian Role in the Cultural Politics of the Haskalah’, in Toward Modernization ed. by Jacob Katz (New Brunswick, NJ and Oxford, UK: Transaction Books, 1987). In Trieste, for example, according to both Sorkin and Dubin, many Jews ‘accepted the premise that secular and sacred studies were complementary’. Dubin, The Port Jews of Hahshurg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Sorkin, ‘The Port Jew’ (see note 1), pp.92–4. There were many totally secularised free-thinkers among the Jews of South, Southeast and East Asia. Like their European counterparts, they espoused atheism, agnosticism, Second International Menshevism, Third International Socialism, and, in a few cases Maoism. Journalist Vincent Sheean wrote that the secular Jews he knew in China in the 1920s and 30s ‘had risen so far above the prison walls of race, nation, and tradition that their Jewishness was altogether lost in their humanity; and their special passion, the purity and intensity in which the best of the Jewish heritage was expressed, burned itself out in a cause from which no human creature was excused. Only in such freedom could the Jewish genius give all it had to the developing conscious of mankind.’ Vincent Sheean, Personal History (New York: Literary Guild, 1934), 391
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• 1976 . Israel's Messenger As will be shown in this article, ‘Enlightened’ Jewish nationalists in the Far East included Anglophile Baghdadi Jews like Shanghai's Nissim Elias Benjamin Ezra who published and edited the Zionist monthy from 1904 to 1936, and Harbin General Zionist leader and hospital director Dr Avraham Iosifovitch Kaufmann. The ideologies of these Zionists were much akin to those of eighteenth-to-twentieth-century American, Irish, Italian and Scottish nationalists who took Enlightened world views but simultaneously and proudly affirmed their national identities. On Zionism and other nineteenth century nationalisms, especially Italian, as expressions of Enlightenment thinking, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Jewish and Other Nationalisms’, Commentary 35.1 (January 1963), pp. 19–20. He writes that Zionist leaders were ‘Europeans of the Enlightenment (who) were not content with distant memories or merely religious traditions. If they revived the Hebrew language it was not merely to study the Scriptures or the Law. If they remembered their history it was not merely their ancient, sacred history. It was a Jew of the Emancipation, Heinrich Graetz, who wrote the first continuous history of the Jewish nation, carrying it through the destruction of the Second Temple, over the intervening centuries, to his own time. It was a Jew of the Emancipation, Moses Hess, who first urged escape from Europe to Jerusalem, and he urged it explicitly as a nationalist, secular movement, in imitation of the nationalist, secular Italian risorgimento. If Zionism was the age-old hankering of Jews for the Holy Land, it was that hankering secularised: a return to Israel without waiting for the Messiah, or led by a secular Messiah—one, moreover, who was half-assimilated into Europe…If [Zionism's] faithful masses came out of the Russian Pale, [their movement] was headed by half-assimilated men whom strict Jews might regard as little better than Gentiles and whose life was led in the Western Cosmopolitan cities of Paris and Vienna.’ On the connection between Enlightenment thought and American, Irish, and Scottish nationalism, see David Dickson, ‘Paine in Ireland’, in Daire Keogh Dickson and Kevin Whelan (ed.) The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, And Rebellion (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), pp. 134–50 and John Burns, ‘Scottish Radicalism and the United Irishmen’, in Dickson et al., The United Irishmen, pp. 151–66. Biographer Eric Foner notes that, in spite of all his propagandising for an Enlightened internationalism, Tom Paine both ‘called himself a “citizen of the world” and was an early advocate of a strong central government for America.’ Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (London: Oxford University Press,), p.xix.
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• Sorkin . ‘The Port Jew’ (see note 1), pp.95–6.
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• Golab , Caroline . 1977 . Immigrant Destinations 77 Philadelphia : Temple University Press . In her immigration history class at the University of Pennsylvania Golab gave, as a case-in-point of a rootless migrant, the nineteenth century Polish-American Leon F. Czolgosz. He spent one year in Pittsburgh, one year in Cleveland, and one year in Chicago where, at the age of 28, he heard Emma Goldman and latched onto anarcho-syndicalism. In 1901 he assassinated U.S. President William McKinley. McKinley's biographer concluded that Czolgosz was ‘possessed of the idea that every king, emperor, president, or head of government was a tyrant and should be put out of the way’. Charles S. Olcott, Life of William Mckinley, II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 385
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• Golab . (see note 8), p.49.
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• 1986 . The Jews Of China 161 – 76 . Seminal scholarship on the Cochinim includes Barbara C. Johnson, ‘Cochin Jews and Kaifeng Jews: Reflections on Caste, Surname, ‘Community’, and Conversion’ in Jonathan Goldstein, I (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 104–19; Nathan Katz, ‘The Judaisms of Kaifeng and Cochin: Parallels and Divergences’ in Jonathan Goldstein, The Jews of China, I, pp. 120–38; Barbara C. Johnson, ‘“Our Community” in Two Worlds: The Cochin Paradesi Jews in India and Israel’ (Ph.D. diss., anthropology, University of Massachusetts, 1985); Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg, The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); Nathan Katz (ed.), Studies of Indian Jewish Identity (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies Monograph Series; New Delhi: Manohar, 1994); and Thomas A. Timberg (ed.), The Jews of India (New Delhi: Vikas,)
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• Johnson . ‘Cochin Jews and Kaifeng Jews’ (see note 10), p. 107.
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• Musleah , Ezekiel . 1975 . On the Banks of the Ganga 426 North Quincy , MA : Christopher . Joan G. Roland, Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era (Hanover, NH and London: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1989), pp.129, 167, 233, and passim; and Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 14, p. 1294.
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• Isenberg , Shirley Berry . 1988 . India's Bene Israel Berkeley , CA : Judah L. Magnes Museum . (Bombay: Popular Prakashan,); Isenberg, ‘The Kaifeng Jews and India's Bene Israel: Different Paths’ in Goldstein, The Jews Of China, I (see note 10), pp.87–103; Benjamin J. Israel, The Bene Israel of India (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1984); Walter J. Fischel et al., ‘Bene Israel’, Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol.1, pp.493–8.
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• Fischel . 1989 . (see note 13) pp.493–8; Interview, Jonathan Goldstein with Israeli Consul General Giora Becher, Bombay, August
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• Roland , Joan . 1974 . “ ‘Baghdadi Jews in India and China in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparison of Economic Roles’ in Goldstein ” . In The Jews Of China 50 – 65 . Major sources on Far Eastern Baghdadi Jews include I (see note 10), pp. 141–56; ‘Silas Aaron Hardoon and Cross-Cultural Adaptation in Shanghai’ in Goldstein, The Jews Of China, I (see note 10), pp.216–29; Maruyama Naoki, ‘The Shanghai Zionist Association and the International Politics of East Asia Until 1936’ in Goldstein, The Jews Of China, I (see note 10), pp.251–66; Cecil Roth, The Sassoon Dynasty (London: Robert Hale, 1941); Maisie J. Meyer, ‘The Sephardi Jewish Community of Shanghai 1845–1939 and the Question of Identity’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, London School of Economics, 1994); Moshe Yegar, Le-Toldot Ha-Kehillah Ha-Yehudit Be-Singapoor, (Hebrew: On the History of the Jewish Community in Singapore), Gesher 1.78 Musleah (see note 12), passim; and Roland, Jews in British India (see note 12), passim.
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• 1994 . Washington Post , 13 On the career of David Saul Marshall, see his obituary in the December 1995, p.5; Denis D. Gray, Jewish Lawyer is Singapore's Crusading Conscience, Jerusalem Post, 1 May p.3; and Encyclopedia Judaica Vol. 7, p.1059.
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• 1990 . The Jews Of China On the Baghdadi Jews of Hong Kong see Dennis A. Leventhal, ‘Environmental Interactions of the Jews of Hong Kong’, in Goldstein, I (see note 10), pp. 171–86; Dennis Leventhal, The Jewish Community of Hong Kong: An Introduction (Hong Kong: Jewish Historical Society of Hong Kong, 1985, rev. ed. 1988); and Dennis Leventhal and Mary W. Leventhal (eds.), Faces of the Jewish Experience in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Jewish Chronicle,).
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• The Jews Of China On the Baghdadi Jews of Shanghai, see Chiara Betta, ‘Silas Aaron Hardoon and Cross-Cultural Adaptation’ in Goldstein, I (note 10), pp.216–29; Maisie J. Meyer, ‘The Sephardi Jewish Community’ (note 15); Roland, ‘Baghdadi Jews in India and China’ (note 15), and Roth, The Sassoon Dynasty (note 15).
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• Betta . 1986 . “ (see note 18), p.216; ” . In Passage Through China: The Jewish Communities Of Harbin, Tientsin and Shanghai (Derekh Erets Sin: Ha-Kehillot Ha-Yehudiot Be-Harbin, Tiyengtsin Ve-Shanghai) 38 – 54 . Tel Aviv : Beth Hatefutsoth, Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora . (exhibition catgalogue), pp.v-vi. Chiara Betta, ‘Marginal Westerners in Shanghai: The Bagdadi Jewish Community, 1845–1931’ in Robert Bickers et al., New Frontiers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
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• Ezra , N. E. B. Shanghai to the Actions Committee of the International Zionist Organization, Berlin, 16 July 1914 Jerusalem : Yad Vashem Archives . Letter: file 078/54.
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• Armbruester , Georg . 1997 . “ ‘15,000 Appellieren an die Welt’, (German: 15,000 appeal to the world) in ” . In Leben Im Wartesaal: Exil In Shanghai 1938–47 [Life In The Waiting Room: Exile In Shanghai, 1938–47] 74 – 77 . Berlin : Jüdisches Museum im Stadtmuseum Berlin . For a general history of the exodus of Central and Eastern European Jews to Shanghai, see David Kranzler, Japanese Nazis & Jews (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1988); Ernest G. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), translated into German by Roberto de Hollanda as Fluchtort Shanghai: Erinnerungen 1938–1948 (Bonn: Weidle Verlag, 1998); Yaakov Liberman, My China (Jerusalem and New York: Gefen, 1997); Isaac Lewin, Remembering the Days of Old (New York: Research Institute of Religious Jewry, 1994); Zorach Warhaftig, Refugee and Survivor (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988); Avraham Altman and Irene Eber, ‘Flight to Shanghai, 1938–1940: The Larger Setting’, Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem) 28 (2000), pp.51–86 and Jonathan Goldstein, ‘Answered and Unanswered Questions About Motivation in Holocaust Rescue: The Case of Jan Zwartendijk in Lithuania, 1940’ in Lessons And Legacies VI: The Presence of the Holocaust ed. by Jeffery M. Diefendorf (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2002).
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• Heppner . (see note 21), p.40. The absence of passport controls in Shanghai has often mistakenly been described as the ‘non-requirement of visas’. The absence of controls was due to the absence of authority in Shanghai of both the Chungking [Chongqing]- based Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nanjing-based Japanese puppet government of Wang Jingwei. Altman and Eber (see note 21) pp.51–86.
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• Kranzler , David . “ ‘Shanghai’, in ” . In Encyclopedia of The Holocaust ed. by Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp.1346; Yeshivat Mir ed. by A. Bronshteyn et al., 2 vols (Bene Berak, Israel: Sifrei Kodesh Mishor, 1990); Lewin, Remembering the Days of Old (note 21), passim; Warhaftig (note 21), passim; Kranzler, Japanese Nazis & Jews (note 21), passim; Goldstein, The Jews of China, I (note 10), passim.
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• Lewin , Ossie , ed. 1947 . m Almanac Shanghai 1946/47 81 Shanghai : Shanghai Echo . Telegram: Jointco, Shanghai, to Jointdisco, New York, 24 July 1947, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, New York; ‘Association of Refugees from Germany’ ed. by Sonja Muehlberger, ‘From Shanghai to Berlin’, Points East (Menlo Park, CA), 13.2 (July 1998), pp.1, 10–11; Georg Armbrezuster, ‘Exil in Shanghai’ in 1945: Jetzt Wohin? Exil und Rückkehr [German: ‘Exile in Shanghai’ in ‘1945: Now whereto? Exile and return’] (Berlin: Verein Aktives Museum, 1995); Armbruester, ‘15,000 Appellieren an die Welt’ (note 21); Genia and Guenther Nobel, ‘Als politische Emigranten in Schanghai’, Beitraege Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 21. [German: ‘As Political Immigrants in Shanghai' in Contributions to the History of the German Workers’ Movement 21] (Berlin/DDR: n.p. 1979); Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus (Hanover, NH and London: Brandeis University Press, 2001), pp. 183–4.
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• Magid , Isador A. 1999 . “ ‘“I Was There”: The Viewpoint of an Honorary Israeli Consul in Shanghai, 1949–1951’, in ” . In China And Israel, 1948–1998: A Fifty Year Retrospective Edited by: Goldstein , Jonathan . 41 – 5 . Westport, CT and London : Praeger . pp.; Liberman (see note 21), pp.57, 95–7, 151, 158–65.
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• Liberman . (see note 21), pp.159–60; Heppner (see note 21) pp.172–74.
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• Kranzler . “ ‘Shanghai’ (see note 23), p. 1347. The major part of the exodus ended in 1950 with the departure of a hospital ship from Tientsin that carried over 700 sick and disabled people to Israel. Irene Eber, ‘Introduction’, in ” . In Passage Through China (see note 19), p.xii.
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• 1999 . The Jews of China, II On the origin and development of the Harbin Jewish community, see Alexander Menquez (pseud.), ‘Growing Up Jewish in Manchuria in the 1930s: Personal Vignettes’, in Jonathan Goldstein, pp.70–84; Israel Epstein, ‘On Being a Jew in China: A Personal Memoir’, in Goldstein, The Jews of China Jews, II, pp.85–97; Yosef Tekoah, ‘My Developmental Years in China’, in Goldstein, The Jews of China, II, pp.98–109; Boris Bresler, ‘Harbin's Jewish Community, 1898–1958: Politics, Prosperity, and Adversity’ in Goldstein, The Jews of China, I, pp.200–15; Zvia Shickman-Bowman, ‘The Construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the Origins of the Harbin Jewish Community, 1898–1931’ in Goldstein, The Jews of China (note 10), pp. 187–99; Joshua A. Fogel ‘The Japanese and the Jews in Harbin, 1898–1930’, in Robert Bickers et al., New Frontiers (note 19), pp.88–108; Herman Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East (New York: Twayne, 1962); Soren Clausen and Stig Thogerson, The Making of a Chinese City: History and Historiography in Harbin (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1995); David Wolff, To The Harbin Station (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,); Liberman, My China (see note 21), passim; Magid (see note 25), passim.
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• Bu , Mantetsu Chosa . “ [Japanese: South Manchuria Railway Company, Research Department] ” . In Zai-Man Yudaya Jin No Keizai-Teki Kako Oyobi Genzai [The Economic Past and Present of Jews in Manchuria ] (November 1940), Yudaya Mondai Chosa Shiryo Dai 27 Shu (No. 27 in The Jewish Problem Investigation Materials Series), marked ‘Gokuhi’ [Top Secret], pp.20–1, 44–6, in Menquez (see note 28) p.70.
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• Kisilev , Aharon Mosheh . 1991 . Mishbere Yam: Sheelot U-Teshuvot Be-Arbaah Helke Shulkan Arukh [Hebrew: The Waves of the Sea: Responsa on the Four Parts of ‘The Set Table’] (Harbin: Defus M. Levitin, 5686 [1925 or 1926], reprinted Brooklyn, NY: Katz Bookbinding,); Kisilev, Natsionalizm I Evreistvo: Stat'i, Lektsii, I Doklady [Russian: Nationalism and the Jews: Articles, Lectures and Reports] (Harbin: Evreiskaia Zhizn’, 1941); Kisilev, Imre Shefer [Hebrew: ‘Good Words’ or ‘Beautiful Sayings’] (Tel Aviv: Betsalel-Levitsky, 1951); Evreiskaya Zhizn' [Jewish Life] (Harbin) 47 (2 November 1938), pp.14–16, 23–25; no. 48 (25 November 1938), pp.7–10, 24–25; Interview, Jonathan Goldstein with Teddy Kaufman, Tel Aviv, 2 January 2002; Violet Gilboa, comp., China and the Jews (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Library, 1992), pp.40, 43; Dicker (see note 28), pp.21–60.
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• Passage Through China (see note 19), pp.vii-xii; Dicker (see note 28), pp.21–60; Liberman (see note 21), passim.
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• 2000 . American Journal of Sociology , 33.6 : 152 – 63 . According to sociologist Robert E. Park, the emancipated Jew's ‘pre-eminence as a trader, his keen intellectual interest, his sophistication, his idealism and his lack of historical sense, are the characteristics of a city man, the man who ranges widely,.who, emerging from the ghetto in which he lived. is seeking to find a place in the freer, more complex and cosmopolitan life of [the] city.’ Robert E. Park, ‘Human Migration and the Marginal Man’, (May 1928), p.892. See George Mosse's comments on the Turner frontier thesis in Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison, WL: University of Wisconsin Press,)
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• 1986 . Jewish Chronicle London On the Baghdadi Jews of Rangoon, Burma, see Lindsey Shanson, ‘Twilight in Burma’, 23 May Sue Fishkoff, ‘Burmese Jews Hang on Despite Dire Predictions’, Jerusalem Post, 18 August, 1993, p.7; obituary for David Meyer Sofaer in Washington Jewish Week, 10 March 1994, p.40; and Robert Horn, ‘Burma's Jewish Remnant’, Jerusalem Post, 28 December 1995, p.7.
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• Collections in the Hartley Library include massive clipping files, in English, French, and German, on the Jews of Burma, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, the Philippines, and Thailand. The collection also holds unpublished World Jewish Congress reports, including Isi J. Liebler's on his 1981 meeting with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
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• Eber , Irene . “ ‘Introduction’, in ” . In Passage Through China (see note 19), p. 12.
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