Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia

Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya

Jonathan Goldstein

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9783110350692
• eBook ISBN: 9783110395464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The Jewish communities of East and Southeast Asia display an impressive diversity. Jonathan Goldstein's book covers the period from 1750 and focuses on seven of the area's largest cities and trading emporia: Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya. The book isolates five factors which contributed to the formation of transnational, multiethnic, and multicultural identity: memory, colonialism, regional nationalism, socialism, and Zionism. It emphasizes those factors which preserved specifically Judaic aspects of identity.
Drawing extensively on interviews conducted in all seven cities as well as governmental, institutional, commercial, and personal archives, censuses, and cemetery data, the book provides overviews of communal life and intimate portraits of leading individuals and families. Jews were engaged in everything from business and finance to revolutionary activity. Some collaborated with the Japanese while others confronted them on the battlefield. The book attempts to treat fully and fairly the wide spectrum of Jewish experience ranging from that of the ultra-Orthodox to the completely secular.

1Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia: Common Denominators and Dissimilarities

One can not speak of a “typical” or “standard” Jew or Jewish community within East or Southeast Asia any more than one can about Jews elsewhere in the world. The Jewish communities of East and Southeast Asia display an impressive religious, linguistic, and nationalistic diversity. Like all other Jews, they derive from biblical Israel. These Jews transited across the trans-Asiatic silk route into and out of Song dynasty China (AD 960-1289). They reached Southeast Asia by 1290, when a Jewish merchant from Fustat, in Egypt, is recorded as having died and been buried in the port of Barus in northwest Sumatra. Over and beyond the enduring Jewish presence in the Song dynasty capital, Kaifeng, the earliest recorded Jewish residence of any significant length is that of Solomon Gabirol, a Bene Israel from the Bombay region of northern India. Gabirol reached Burma in 1752. Since then there has been much internal migration, especially from Harbin to Shanghai, Shanghai to Manila, Penang to Surabaya, and Surabaya to Singapore. As American Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna has observed: “there are rises; there are falls, there are movements out, there are movements in … our history is much more dynamic than we realize.”1

As Jews have migrated into, out of, and within East and Southeast Asia, they have taken on, and shed, multiple religious, linguistic, and national characteristics. As the European Jewish historians Simon Graetz, Simon Dubnow, and Salo Baron observed long ago, and as Thomas Bender has recently emphasized for American history, identity is almost always compounded by linkages that cross political borders.2 The end result of this mixture is Jewish communities which are, in James Clifford's terminology, examples of “the wider global world of intercultural import-export.”3

This book is an attempt to define Jewish religious, linguistic, and national identities in seven East and Southeast Asian cities. It is neither a gazetteer nor a travel guide. Such literature does appear periodically, e.g. Australian Zionist leader Isi Leibler's 1988 Asia-Pacific Survival Guide. Nor does it attempt to be a comprehensive history of Jewish identities across East and Southeast Asia. It is a selective analysis with a special emphasis on three communal characteristics: multiculturalism, and particularly religious identity; multiethnicity, with an emphasis on language; and multi- or transnationalism, with a special consideration of politics and territory.4

This book is more of a compass with reference points for Asian Jewish identities. It focusses from a Jewish perspective on seven distinct communities. First and foremost, the book focusses on Singapore, which, in terms of long-term institutional development and enduring religiosity, sets the standard for East or Southeast Asian Jewish identity. By way of contrast, the volume also considers the Jewish experiences of Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya. It provides overviews of their communal lives and intimate portraits of leading individuals and families. Jews were engaged in everything from business and finance to revolutionary activity. Some collaborated with the Japanese while others confronted them on the battlefield. I have attempted to treat fully and fairly the wide spectrum of Jewish experience in these seven communities, ranging from that of the ultra-Orthodox to the completely secular. The chapters differ greatly in terms of length and degree of detail precisely because of differences in communal nature, size, duration, and availability of source material.

This book is, therefore, an empirical study which draws its evidence widely. I have conducted interviews in all seven cities; consulted governmental, institutional, commercial, and personal archives; and examined primary and secondary published materials as well as electronic websites. Where available, I have utilized the occasional census, such as the 1930 Dutch census of Surabaya. I have also checked inscriptions in Jewish graveyards in six of the seven cities under examination here. Taiwan does not have its own Jewish cemetery.

This book does not spend much time on theoretical approaches or methodological issues, which I see as its strength and not at all as a shortcoming. Given the great differences of scale and varied durations and identities of the communities under consideration here, it would have been a mistake to strap them all onto a Procrustean theoretical or methodological bed. Bearing in mind the overall considerations of multiculturalism, multiethnicity, and transnationalism, this book examines five factors which have contributed to the formation of identity in some of the largest cities and trading emporia in the world: colonialism/imperialism, memory, regional nationalism, socialism, and Zionism.

The first factor is the commercial and political context within which all seven communities were situated, what historian Fernand Braudel characterizes as “capitalism outside Europe” and “the miracles of long-distance trade.”5 These same phenomena may be more simply characterized as “colonialism” and “imperialism.” The empires of an old monarchical Europe, a reinvigorated Japan, and a “Johnny-come-lately” United States all expanded and collapsed in twentieth-century East and Southeast Asia. New nationalisms as well as a variety of socialisms took their places. While influenced by all of these phenomena, the Jewish communities under consideration here were far from flotsam and jetsam tossed about by impersonal historical forces. Each set down its own roots, developed its own internal dynamic, and took on an identity which can be viewed from the perspective of Jewish history. In similar fashion, Leonard Blussé has situated East and Southeast Asian expatriate trading communities within worldwide political and economic contexts but emphasized their individuality. The foreign residents of Blussé's Canton, Batavia (Jacatra/Djajakarta/Jakarta/Djakarta), and Nagasaki closely resemble the Jews under examination here in that most were dedicated to the advancement of a marine-based form of capitalism and adopted distinct multicultural, multiethnic, and transnational characteristics.6

Each of the Jewish trading communities discussed here, like Blussé's entrepots, were located in the broadest sense around the China Sea basin. The Jews of East and Southeast Asia all became involved in what historians David Sorkin and Lois Dubin call “the commerce of seaport cities.” I would broaden Sorkin's and Dubin's definition to include entrepôts of riverine, railroad-borne, and overland commerce. After 1842 Shanghai, just inland on the Whangpoo (Huangpu) River and Soochow Creek (Suchou/Suzhou/Wusong Jiang), came to replace Canton as China's major international seaport. Harbin (Kharbin/Haerbin/ Ha-erh-pin), a railroad hub located some 1,500 miles inland on the Songhua, or Sungari, River, a tributary of the Heilongjiang or Amur River, was a major riverine and railroad trans-shipment point. Smaller Manchurian railroad centers at Changchun (Ch'ang-ch'un, Hsinking), Hailar (Hailaer/Hai-la-erh), Manzhouli (Manchouli), Qiqihar (Qiqihaer/Tsitsihar/Ch'i-ch'i-haerh), and Shenyang (Mukden/ Fengtian), as well as the Russian railroad termini of Chita, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, and Omsk, also functioned as “port” cities, i.e. as transit and trading hubs. All had residential Jewish communities which were involved in regional and longhaul commerce and were exposed to indigenous cultural influences.7

Each of the Jewish trading communities discussed here were affected by American, Austro-Hungarian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Ottoman, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish imperial politics, which fanned the flames of political turmoil within China. Japan occupied all seven cities. The Jews of Singapore and Rangoon were mostly evacuated to India and thereby escaped the vicissitudes of Japanese occupation, and there was no prewar Jewish community in Taiwan. But the Jews of Harbin, Manila, Shanghai, and Surabaya were affected, experiencing varying forms of occupation. Their treatment and responses are contrasted here.

A second major factor contributing to the formulation of multicultural, multiethnic, and transnational Jewish identity in East and Southeast Asia is the role of memory or remembrance, encapsulated in the Hebrew term “zikaron.” Jews are commanded at least six times in the Torah “to remember” [zakhor!],most prominently on the occasion of Passover, when the exodus from Egyptian bondage to freedom in the Land of Israel is encapsulated in the phrase “we were once slaves in Egypt” [”ovdim haeinu be-Mizraim”]. An identification with the former homeland of Eretz Israel was purely theoretical until the advent of political Zionism in the nineteenth century, when Jewish settlement recommenced in a major way in the then-Ottoman district of Palestine. However, long before significant settlement recommenced, devout Jews remembered ancient Israel as their moledet (Hebrew = ancestral homeland) and reinforced that association in thrice-daily prayers, much in the way tradition-minded Chinese and Czechs recall theirs. Overseas Chinese revere the mainland as their zuguo, which translates literally as 'ancestral homeland.' They also use the terms xiangyi, xiangqing, or ziyi - Chinese expressions for the sentiment that binds people from the same native place to the dead and the living, to the burial places of ancestors, and to whatever else might remain of an ancestral community, including relics and other cultural objects they transported to new places of residence. Czech nationalists recall Má vlast (= my fatherland) in their national anthem, especially of periods when their ancestral home was under foreign domination. Rabbinical students from a variety of Central European countries found refuge in wartime Shanghai, lived within a protected environment, and retained a vast historical and religious memory. Their remembrance of Eastern European ritual, lifestyle, and residence helped maintain a unique multicultural, multiethnic, and transnational identity. Their closest personal affiliation was not with the Jews or non- Jews outside of their immediate circle in Shanghai but rather with their European relatives, many of whom perished in the Holocaust. After World War II they associated closely with the she'erit ha-pleta (Hebrew = the surviving remnant) who, miraculously according to their interpretation, managed to survive, many in a reborn State of Israel.8

Isaac Shapiro, a twentieth-century Jewish resident of Harbin and Tokyo, argues that remembrance, often communicated by parents or grandparents, was an essential component of identity even for non-observant Jews. He reiterates psychoanalyst Carl Jung's observation that “the [nineteenth- and twentieth-century - ed.] Jew already has the culture of the ancient world in his psyche” and “on top of that he takes over the culture of the people” he lives amongst. “He has in him more than one culture, paradoxical as that may sound.”9 Shapiro personifies such a multicultural and multiethnic mix, with significant Hebraic, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese elements.

Expatriate survivors of East and Southeast Asian Jewish communities have created elaborate memorializations of their experiences. They compose genealogies and necrologies, construct websites, perform “Roots” trips, sponsor reunions, publish multilingual periodicals, organize historical seminars, refurbish monuments, cemeteries, and synagogues and, in a specifically Judaic fashion, plant groves of trees in the Land of Israel in honor or memory of their former homelands. They provide charitable assistance to Jews and non-Jews from their former places of residence who are in distress and subsidize Jews and non- Jews from their former communities who wish to study in Israel.

With respect to regional nationalism, hundreds of Singapore Jews, and a handful of European and American-Jewish immigrants to China and the Philippines, took out full citizenship in their countries. Many did so for ideological reasons and out of a genuine sense of identification with their place of residence. Others, such as disenfranchised German Jews and stateless Russians, did so because of employment considerations and residential requirements.

It should be emphasized that, outside of Singapore, those who took on regional citizenships were a tiny minority in terms of East and Southeast Asian Jewry as a whole. Most did not do so. A plurality of the Jews of Rangoon and Surabaya were of Baghdadi origin but, unlike their Singapore brethren, had bitter memories of the anti-colonial struggle in Burma and Indonesia. They fled Southeast Asia shortly after Burmese and Indonesian independence and took along their painful reminiscences. In Shanghai, Harbin, and Manila many Jewish migrants fleeing anti-Semitism were simply indifferent to regional nationalism. Their primary need was for a “port in a storm” which could be quickly evacuated when better prospects emerged. Many refugees arrived with next to nothing, never learned the languages of the places where they temporarily resided, and only briefly (or never) involved themselves in local politics. Some literally sat on their suitcases as wards of local or international charities or of their more affluent Jewish brethren. Most had alternate destinations (and nationalisms) in mind from their instant of arrival: often the United States, but also Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Japan, Panama, and a future State of Israel. As will be shown especially in the case of the Olmert family, a migrant's choice of future destination was often influenced by ideological alternatives to which he or she were exposed during an East or Southeast Asian residence.

Some Jewish migrants to East and Southeast Asia unquestionably had in the backs of their minds remigration to embryonic socialist states, including former European homelands which could hopefully be purged of Fascism and anti-Semitism. Still others saw socialism on both European and Asian soil as the proper response to nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism and imperialism. Socialism had many Asian variants. Second International Menshevism originated in Russia in the nineteenth century. The followers of this moderately democratic form of socialism, like all other Marxists, considered theirs to be the correct interpretation and application of the original universalistic thought of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. Mensheviks saw their movement as the logical outgrowth of Marx's and Engel's short-lived First Communist International. Originally in Russian Poland and Lithuania, and subsequently in Harbin, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Kobe, Meir Birman, Lazer Epstein, Josef Fiszman, and Yosl Mlotek favored the Judaic spinoff of Second International Menshevism known as Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland (Yiddish = The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia). The movement was customarily abbreviated as “The Bund.” Along with its well-known social welfare branch, Der Arbeter Ring (Yiddish = The Workmen's Circle), the Bund emphasized Yiddish language and culture rather than religious observance or a Hebrew-language centered nationalism (Zionism). Theoretically, a Bundist could be content in Asian cities if Yiddish periodicals, theater, and other communal institutions abounded, and if the local political system shifted to a moderate form of socialism. Over and beyond the Bund, a handful of Asian Jews became devotees of the Leninist, and later Stalinist, Third International. The membership of this democratically-centralist and USSR-affiliated variant of Marxism included Ruth Lava in the Philippines, Hans Shippe and David Crook in Shanghai, Joseph Shapiro in Harbin and later in the USSR, and Israel Epstein in Harbin and later Tianjin, Hong Kong, Chongqing, and Ya'nan, where he began to veer towards Maoism. In Shanghai in the 1930s, Harold Isaacs and Frank Glass championed yet another socialist variant, Leon Trotsky's Fourth International, which favored a militant form of world revolution and opposed Second International Menshevism, Bundism, Zionism, and Third International Stalinism. Beginning in the mid-1940s, with the establishment of Mao Zedong's socialist enclaves in Yan'an (Yenan) and in other parts of northern China, some Jews chose to “advance” from Third Internationalism to Maoism. In addition to Israel Epstein, this contingent included Solomon Adler, David Crook, Richard Frey, Gerald Trachtenberg, Sidney Rittenberg, Sidney Shapiro, and Ruth Weiss.10

Because of the explicitly universalistic claims of all of the aforementioned socialisms, including to some extent the Bund, who foresaw the eventual withering away of all national and religious identity, we are better off referring to the adherents of these ideologies as individuals of Jewish descent rather than of Jewish identity. The one notable exception is Israel Epstein, who emphasized his Jewish heritage as a major if not primary source for his social consciousness. Despite the opportunity of an entire lifetime, he never contemplated changing his obviously Jewish name nor in any way minimized or trivialized the profundity of his Jewish roots.

Zionism was a final East and Southeast Asian response to the colonialisms/ imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was also an alternative to regional nationalisms, Bundism, Second-, Third-, and Fourth Internationalisms, and Maoism. Zionism can be defined as the movement of Jews and non- Jews for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in the Ottoman Turkish, and later British-mandated, territory of Palestine, a region from which many Jews were expelled by the Romans in AD 70. Theodor Herzl founded “mainstream” or “General” Zionism in the late nineteenth century as an alternative to living in the Diaspora. Its informal byword was a phrase which long precedes the Holocaust: “Europe is an unsafe place for a Je...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• A Note on Romanization and Spelling
• 1 Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia: Common Denominators and Dissimilarities
• 2 Setting a Standard for Jewish Identity in East and Southeast Asia: Singapore’s Baghdadi Community from 1795 to 2015
• 3 Between Spain, the United States, Japan, and Israel: Manila’s Multicultural “Bagel Boys” in Historical Perspective
• 4 Taipei: An Oasis of Tranquility for Americans, Europeans, and Israelis
• 5 Between Russia, China, Japan, and Israel: The Transnational Identity of Harbin’s Jews, 1899–2015, with Special Reference to the Ehud Olmert Family
• 6 Shanghai as Microcosm and Mosaic of Eurasian Jewish Identities, 1850–1960
• 7 Empire, Nationalism, and Dissolution: Rangoon and Surabaya, 1752–2015
• 8 Enduring Jewish Identities and Legacies Across the Landscape of East and Southeast Asia
• Abbreviations and Definitions
• Bibliography
• Index
• Short Biography of the Author
• Endnote