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From the Rivers of Babylon to the Whangpoo: A Century of Sephardi Jewish Life in Shanghai

Maisie J. Meyer. From the Rivers of Babylon to the Whangpoo: A Century of Sephardi Jewish Life in Shanghai. Lanham, Maryland, New York and Oxford: University Press of America, 2003. xviii, 331 pp. Paperback $68.00, ISBN 0-7618-2489-8.

reviewed by Jonathan Goldstein
reprinted from China Review International with permission

Maisie J. Meyer and University Press of America are to be congratulated for bringing out a new book on the Baghdadi Jewish community of Shanghai which provides an overall history of the community from its founding in the mid-nineteenth century until its dissolution after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The book's particular strength is that it deals head-on with three controversial issues: the question of whether Baghdadis should be classified as Sephardim [Hebrew: "Spaniards"], technically Jews who left the Iberian peninsula in 1492/3 and retained medieval Spanish or Portuguese as their household tongue in varied places of exile; the role of Jews in the importation of Indian opium, a severely debilitating narcotic drug, into China; and the hotly-debated question of whether Shanghai's Baghdadis "did enough" to help the German and Austrian refugees from Hitler who poured into Shanghai beginning in 1938.

Meyer states that the ancestors of most Baghdadi Jews did not transit through the Iberian peninsula and that their household language was Judeo-Arabic, not Spanish or Portuguese. She cites a history of unbroken Jewish residence in Mesopotamia as far back as 598 B.C. "when Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, conquered the kingdom of Judah and transported Jews from Jerusalem to Babylon." [pp. 29-30] She points out that when the Spanish consul in Shanghai published Spanish King Alfonso XIII's decree of December 1924 permitting Sephardi Jews to become Spanish subjects once again, only four Shanghai Baghdadi Jews with their families, out of a population of nearly 1,000, claimed such lineage and took advantage of this protection. She notes that David Sassoon was erroneously referred to as a descendant of the Ibn Shoshan family, which emigrated from Toledo to Baghdad in the twelfth century. [p.37]. As the title of her book suggests, she nevertheless categorizes the Shanghai Baghdadi community as Sephardi, arguing that they shared some theological similarities, and a variety of Hebrew pronunciation, with the Jews of medieval Iberia. She also argues that usage determines correctness, noting that the term Sephardi has become a widespread if inaccurate description of Baghdadis and many other Oriental Jewish communities. On this point Meyer differs from Rabbi Ezekiel Musleah of Calcutta/Philadelphia as well as this author, who continue to see the terms "Baghdadi" and "Babylonian" as more accurate references for Jews who emanated from Mesopotamia/Iraq.

With respect to the opium question, the late John K. Fairbank maintained in his
book China Watch [1987] that "the opium trade from India to China was the longest-continued systematic international crime of modern times." While vast fortunes were made in that trade in the nineteenth century, including the bases of the first four million dollar American fortunes [of John Jacob Astor, Elias Hasket Derby, Stephen Girard, and Joseph Peabody], there always was a small minority of China traders who vigorously denounced it. William Wood and Peter Dobell described the commerce as "pernicious." Nathan Dunn called it "illicit" and refrained from the business on moral grounds. [See my Philadelphia and the China Trade (1978), pp. 50-51]. Most vocal among the abstainers was New York's D. W. C. Olyphant, who characterized the opium trade as "an evil of the deepest dye" and was nicknamed "holy Joe" by the pushers. In a classic defense of a dishonorable profession, John Murray Forbes, of Russell and Co., wrote of Olyphant: "Protect me from all the hallowing influence of holy Joe-his ships are commanded by J-C-officered by Angels & manned by Saints…Happy thrice happy is the ship even consigned to them." [Forbes to Augustine Heard, August 28, 1832, Heard Papers, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.] Opium merchant and U.S. Guangzhou Consul Benjamin Wilcocks castigated a ship captain who refused an offer of employment with the words "When a Captain stipulates for the particular articles which he will take on my ship, why let him go you know where for a cargo." [Wilcocks to John Latimer, April 26, 1829, Latimer Papers, Library of Congress].

Intense contemporaneous criticism forced the moral issue on opium dealers. They could not plead ignorance about the drug's baneful character. Indeed, participation in the opium business was arguably the central moral issue facing American, British, and other foreigners trading in South China between 1784 and 1844. It remained a major issue of conscience for decades thereafter. Some scholars have found major diplomatic, not to mention sociological, consequences of mercantile participation in the opium trade, notably Jacques M. Downs in The Golden Ghetto: The American Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy [1997] and the aforementioned John Fairbank. On the other hand, it is unclear, from two recent studies by Thomas N. Layton, if the author is even aware of the heated contemporaneous debate about the propriety of the trade [Voyage of the 'Frolic': New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (1997) and Gifts from the Celestial Kingdom: A Shipwrecked Cargo for God Rush California (2002)].

Meyer's study of Baghdadi Jewish merchants who made the basis of their fortunes in the opium trade is welcome in that she confronts the moral issue head-on and advances the discourse pioneered by Fairbank and Downs. She builds on the scholarship of Joan Roland, Chiara Betta, Stanley Jackson, and others to delineate the Baghdadis' involvement in the exportation of Indian opium to China, beginning with David Sassoon's arrival in Bombay in 1833. Sassoon's second son Elias opened branches of the family firm in Guangzhou in 1844 and in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1845. Meyer delineates how other Baghdadi families followed the Sassoon example and, from a base in Shanghai, won fortunes in the trade: Abraham, Benjamin, Elias, Ezra, Hardoon, Kadoorie, Raphael, Silas, Solomon, and Toeg. According to Meyer, these merchants "justified and continued this business despite growing adverse public opinion" from the time of the legalization of the trade in 1858 up through the Sino-British Ten Years Agreement of 1907, which provided for the gradual prohibition of imported opium by 1917 [pp. 58, 67]. Meyer concludes that "there is no evidence of any dispute" among Shanghai Baghdadis on the opium issue, sentiment consistent with that of most other foreign traders, with the notable exception of the small dissenting minority mentioned above [p. 67]. She makes an important contribution by documenting the unanimity of the Baghdadi community in support of the opium trade.

Meyer, who is herself from the Baghdadi community of Calcutta, takes the side of her brethren in the ongoing debate over whether they contributed 'enough' to ease the plight of approximately 18,000 largely penniless Jewish refugees from Hitler who thronged into Shanghai between 1938 and 1941. In this respect she differs from Shanghai refugee and historian Ernest Heppner, originally from Breslau, who asks provocatively "whether more could have been done by some of the resident Jews and their leaders." If financial aid had not come from "a few individuals" as well as from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, "would the Jewish residents who were not interned in Japanese POW camps and not living in the ghetto have considered themselves their brothers' keepers and helped to feed all their hungry brethren?" [Quotations are from this author's The Jews of China: A Sourcebook and Research Guide (2000)]. Meyer concedes, citing Joan Roland, that by 1938 many Shanghai Baghdadis had become the "Rothschilds of the East" [p. 32]. She then cites numerous examples of Baghdadi charity toward German and Austrian immigrants, concluding "whether or not the Shanghai Sephardim could have done more for the refugees is a moot point…In their own estimation, at that time, they believed they had acquitted themselves creditably." [pp. 216-17]. The debate over aid in Shanghai is a microcosm of the broader debate over who could have done what to stop Hitler, the ultimate cause of the refugees' misery. These arguments will doubtless continue as long as there are survivors of refugees and of those who tried to help them. Meyer has made a valuable contribution in recording the viewpoint of Shanghai Baghdadis on this issue.

Over and beyond Meyer's willingness to tackle controversial issues head-on, other commendable features of her book are the vignettes about the efforts of the Shanghai Baghdadis to reach out to the indigenous Chinese Jews of Kaifeng; occupational histories of the doctors, lawyers, and rabbis of the community; and descriptions of Hebrew and secular schools, charities, clubs, cemeteries, real estate transactions, lawsuits, kidnappings, publications, entertainment facilities, synagogues, women's associations, sports teams, and cadets in the British-organized Shanghai Volunteer Corps.

There are a few points which Meyer and University Press of America might wish
to consider revising in a second edition of this monograph. She writes that "the philanthropy of the opium merchants was legendary. In Canton, for example, the American firm Olyphant and Co. financed virtually an entire mission." [p. 63]. Olyphant, as noted above, was perhaps the most significant foreign trading company on the China coast that scrupulously abstained from the opium trade, on moral grounds. While at an early stage in the book Meyer mentions Baghdad's long-serving [1859-1909] ecclesiastical authority Hacham Yoseph Hayim, she does not involve him in her discussion of Shanghai Zionism [pp. 171-90]. She sees that phenomenon as largely the creation of N.E.B. Ezra between 1903 and 1936, when Ezra led the Shanghai Zionist Association [SZA] and edited Israel's Messenger. However, prior to Ezra, Hayyim was a powerful force inculcating pre-Herzlian Zionism among Baghdadis in India, Burma, the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere. He urged his brethren to visit and settle the Land of Israel long before Herzl's establishment of the World Zionist Organization [WZO] in 1896, with which the SZA affiliated, and even before the founding of the WZO's predecessor organizations, Hovevei Zion and BILU. [See David Sassoon, History of the Jews in Baghdad (1949)]. In attempting to explain the Chinese Government's removal of Shanghai Jewish graves to new locations, Meyer writes: "At the time of the Cultural Revolution's Great Leap Forward, urban development in Shanghai obligated the Chinese authorities to consider the transfer of all foreign cemeteries outside the city limits." [p. 230]. The generally accepted beginning date for the Great Leap Forward is 1958. It lasted perhaps until 1960. The generally accepted dates for the Cultural Revolution are l966-76. [Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer, China (1989), pp.506-09, 519; Graham Hutchings, Modern China (2001), pp. 90-93, 164-66]. It is unclear what Meyer means by "the Cultural Revolution's Great Leap Forward." Finally, citing Israel's Messenger as her source, Meyer states that "Hardoon was probably the only Westerner interested in promoting Chinese technology and preserving China's rich cultural heritage." [p. 22]. There are ten foreign members of China's National People's Consultative Congress, five of them of Jewish origin, who might dispute that generalization.

While Meyer is generally consistent in her use of pinyin romanization of Chinese, which is fast becoming universal, the title of her book uses "Whangpoo" rather than the pinyin "Huangpu." Her use of the romanization "Szechuen," p. 176, is puzzling. She is also inconsistent in her use of "The Israel Messenger," p. 25, and "Israel's Messenger," p. 26. Historian Jacques Downs is misspelled "Downes" on p. 263. Israel Cohen was not "general secretary the Jewish Agency" but of the Jewish Agency [p. 26].

Apart from these mechanical matters, which can be corrected in a second edition, Meyer and University Press of America can be praised for producing a stimulating and informative monograph on Shanghai's Baghdadis.