Jewish Shanghai — communities, refuge and memory
A journey through Shanghai’s Jewish communities, from Iraqi Jewish business families to European refugees and life in wartime Hongkou.
Jewish Shanghai has several distinct chapters, connecting trade, migration and refuge. Its story began in the mid-nineteenth century, when Jewish merchants from Baghdad and Bombay arrived as the port and international trade expanded. Families such as the Sassoons and Kadoories played important roles in Shanghai’s economy, property development and philanthropy, and established community institutions and synagogues.
In the early twentieth century they were joined by Jews from Russia, many fleeing revolution and political upheaval. They settled mainly in Hongkou and built an active community of synagogues, schools, clubs, shops and newspapers.
The best-known and most moving chapter began in the late 1930s, when around 20,000 European Jews escaping Nazi persecution reached Shanghai, one of the few places they could enter without a visa. In 1943, the Japanese occupation authorities ordered many stateless refugees into the ‘Designated Area’ in Hongkou. Despite overcrowding, poverty and wartime conditions, they created places of worship, schools, cafés, businesses and cultural institutions, living alongside the neighbourhood’s Chinese residents until the war ended.
Many traces of Jewish Shanghai can still be found across the city today, from synagogues and buildings used by the communities to the grand properties built by Jewish business families. It is an extraordinary story of community, survival and the meeting of Jewish history with one of the most turbulent periods in Shanghai’s past.
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