THE JEWS OF SHANGHAI

From the 1930s until the end of the 1940s, the Chinese city of Shanghai welcomed around 20,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe. These refugees came from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and went on a real journey to the other side of the world to escape anti-Semitism. The situation took on a wider dimension than simple immigration.

 

With the presence of the British, American, French, Chinese, and Japanese governments in the same territory, Shanghai became one of the only ports still opened to Jewish refugees, who took advantage of administrative loopholes. Sephardic Jews, Russian Jews, and refugees were considered a single group. However, their cultures and traditions were distinct and these divisions sometimes created tensions between the different groups.