0001-6446 /2004/ $ 20.00 © 2004 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hung. Volume 57 (1), 55–70 (2004) “HOME AFAR”: THE LIFE OF CENTRAL EUROPEAN JEWISH REFUGEES IN SHANGHAI DURING WORLD WAR II * PÉTER VÁMOS ** (Budapest) Since its opening to the West in 1843, Shanghai had served as destination for four waves of Jewish immigration. The first Jews to settle in China were Sephardim from Baghdad, who migrated east- ward in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Sassoons, Kadoories, Hardoons, Ezras, and Abrahams became wealthy merchants, and soon acquired British citizenship. The second group con- sisted of Russian Ashkenazim who escaped the pogroms and the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution. They were considered as the ‘middle class’ of the Jewish community in Shanghai. The third group of German and Austrian (and in smaller numbers Hungarian, Czechoslovakian and Ro- manian) Jews, numbering over 15,000, barely escaped the Nazi terror in the late 1930s. The fourth group consisted of about 1000 Polish Jews, including the only complete European Jewish religious school to be saved from Nazi destruction, the Mirrer Yeshiva. The International Settlement of Shanghai seemed a viable option for the desperate refugees; this in spite of the fact that the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, and the Japanese, allies of Nazi Germany, occupied parts of the city. Nevertheless, in contrast to the German plan of Entju- dung, the Japanese wanted to make use of alleged Jewish wealth and influence for the benefit of Ja- pan’s New Order. The official Japanese policy towards Jews stated that although Japan should avoid actively embracing Jews who had been expelled by her allies denying Jews entry would not be in the spirit of the empire’s long-standing advocacy of racial equality. As a result of this policy, be- tween the fall of 1938 and the winter of 1941, about 20,000 refugees travelled to Shanghai, their temporary home afar. During the three-year period between 1938 and December 1941 most newcomers managed more or less to integrate into Shanghai’s economy, despite the fact that they had come to Shanghai out of political necessity, and not for the economic prospects. Following the outbreak of the War in the Pacific and the Japanese occupation of all sections of Shanghai, the economic situation of the * This is a revised version of the lecture “Home Afar: The Life of Central European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai During World War II” sponsored by the Ricci Institute of the University of San Francisco (USF), and presented at the university in April 2001. It was published in the Pacific Rim Report, a newsletter put out by the USF Center for the Pacific Rim and the Ricci Institute in November 2001. Research for this article was supported by the Visiting Fellows Program of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and The Tokyo Foundation. ** Péter Vámos, Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, H-1250 Buda- pest, Úri u. 53, Hungary, e-mail: pvamos@dpg.hu