Jewish Refugees in Shanghai 1933–1947: A Selection of Documents ed. by Irene Eber (review)

Irene Eber, Louis Frieberg Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently died at ninety years of age, having devoted her scholarly life to studying Jews and Chinese and Jews in China. She was born in Halle, Germany, in 1929, but in 1938, her family was expelled to Mielec in Poland. She spent the war years hiding in a chicken coop, in misery and deprivation. After the war, she came as a refugee to the U.S. and chose to study Chinese intellectual history. Landing in Israel in 1968, she joined the new Department of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University, which she made her intellectual home for the rest of her life.

One of her first books was Confucianism, the Dynamics of Tradition (1986). She gradually moved into studying Jews and Judaism in China, publishing The Jewish Bishop and the Chinese Bible: S.I.J. Schereschewsky (1831–1906) (1999), and Chinese and Jews: Encounters Between Cultures (2007). Around 2000, Eber’s focus widened outward and inward. She returned to her childhood, using her own experiences as a lens to view the Holocaust. In The Choice: Poland, 1939–1945 (2004), she transformed her survival in Mielec into a psychological analysis of coping with the constant threat of annihilation. At the same time, she began to publish extensively about Jewish refugees in Shanghai. She produced two books: an edited volume, Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (2008), and Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City (2012).

Her final book, Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, is a massive labor of love, 184 documents depicting “how participants and bystanders viewed a set of events beginning with the Jewish flight from Europe to Shanghai and ending with their departure” (p. 13). Eber illustrates a variety of perspectives on the refugees, from established Jewish residents in Shanghai, powerful Westerners who tried to prevent their arrival, German officials, staff of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint) who offered crucial aid, to the refugees themselves.

Eber made significant choices about how to transmit these documents to the public. Documents in English and German are reprinted without translation. Pieces in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Chinese are reprinted both in the original languages and in translation. Problems in transcription of damaged documents are clearly indicated. Some documents are summarized in advance by “Abstracts.” Eber’s fastidious handling of this universe of documents marks every page.

Documentary collections reflect the interests of their editors. Eber is especially concerned with the Orthodox Polish refugees who arrived in 1941, coming into conflict with the German-speaking refugees who had landed a couple of years earlier. These two groups are given nearly equal weight here, although the German speakers outnumbered the Poles about 17,000 to 1,000. She was also fascinated with the refugees’ cultural productions, which she signals in the Introduction by devoting most of her discussion of “Refugees’ Achievements” to the exile press, theater, and musical performances (pp. 21–22). A chapter each is devoted to the exile press and to entertainment. There is much less on their organizational creations, such as the highly successful so-called Kadoorie School and the ORT vocational school, and little attention is paid to the wide variety of ways that refugee families supported themselves. The most useful documents about how refugees survived are three lengthy and detailed reports on conditions in Shanghai: by Laura Margolis, the first female overseas representative of the Joint, and her colleague, Manuel Siegel; by refugee journalist Heinz Ganther on refugee daily life; and about the Heime, barracks accommodations for the poorest refugees. Eber tends to adopt the refugees’ attitudes about the Japanese as enemies, leaving out the crucial role played by Japanese authorities in preventing the representatives from Western nations from closing off Shanghai to refugee...