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The Jewish Families Who Helped Shape Modern China

In his book The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman tells the story of two Jewish families who helped open China to international trade, making fortunes in the process. Sarah Abrevaya Stein sums up their rise in her review:

They dealt in silks, spices, cotton, jewels, carpets, opium, metals, and horses; they built buildings, docks, and railways. Their reach extended from their home, Ottoman Baghdad, across the British empire and Qing dynasty, throughout South and East Asia and beyond. They built company towns with schools, stores, and hospitals, where they trained young men to join their mercantile ranks. They commanded their own ships and forged relations with other merchants as well as with representatives of states. Over centuries, the Sassoon family crafted a global empire, which was navigated for generations in the family’s native tongue, Judeo-Arabic.

The Kadoorie family would come to exceed the Sassoons in wealth, but their mercantile roots grew in soil tilled by the Sassoons. Four Kadoorie sons joined the migratory flow of young men who journeyed from Baghdad to Bombay, Shanghai, and Hong Kong (and well beyond) in the employ of the Sassoons. Most of these entrepreneurial merchants would never command more than middling wealth, but the Kadoories broke from the norm. Through investments in rubber, real estate, stocks, and electricity, the Kadoories built an empire of their own, which—whether through shrewdness or chance—proved more durable than the one that spawned it.

Stein finds Kaufman’s account filled with color, but sometimes lacking in accuracy and historical context. And while both the Sassoons and the Kadoories produced their share of playboys and bon vivants, they also produced some heroic figures, who, when Shanghai was flooded with European Jewish refugees, rose to the occasion:

Some 18,000 of these displaced souls reached Shanghai, and the brothers Kadoorie (along with an initially reluctant Victor Sassoon, whom they pressured into helping) were their greatest benefactors.

Horace Kadoorie, the youngest of the brothers, was indefatigable in helping his fellow Jews. He sponsored a youth association that offered refugee children recreational opportunities, vocational courses, and job placements. He supported a summer camp, built a school in the family’s name, and converted the family’s Rolls-Royce into a school bus. Even when wartime food shortages became severe, Horace still managed to serve refugee children one meal a day. (Later, when the family had resettled in Hong Kong, he repeated his generosity with hundreds of thousands of Chinese women, men, and children who had sought refuge in the then British-controlled city.)

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: China, Refugees, Sephardim

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic