things in common

Stereotypes ahoy:

SHANGHAI -- Showcased in bookstores between biographies of Andrew Carnegie and the newest treatise by China's president are stacks of works built on a stereotype.

One promises "The Eight Most Valuable Business Secrets of the Jewish."

Another title teases readers with "The Legend of Jewish Wealth." A third provides a look at "Jewish People and Business: The Bible of How to Live Their Lives."

In the United States, where making broad generalizations about races, cultures or religions has become unacceptable in most circles, the titles of some of these books might make people cringe. Throughout history and around the world, even outwardly innocuous and broadly accepted characterizations of Jews have sometimes formed the basis for eventual campaigns of violent anti-Semitism.

The fact that Shanghai provided a haven for Jewish refugees from Nazism long after everywhere else had slammed the door is still a significant part of public memory and the official history of the city, which is why the dateline for the report is significant. What tends to be concealed was the fact that this was at the insistence of the Japanese, and in particular of Captain Koreshiga Inuzuka, the Japanese armed forces’ official “Jewish expert”. Commenting on the WaPo report at Frog in a Well, Jonathan Dresner says:

This kind of stuff has been common currency in Japan for years, where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are still sold in bookstores…. as a model for Japanese admiration and emulation, usually.

And the translator of the Protocols into Japanese was none other than Captain Koreshiga Inuzuka. The back story to this is the Russo-Japanese war. According to Harriet Sergeant’s history of Shanghai:

The turn of the century saw Japan anxious to prove itself a modern nation in its war against Russia. Every banker in the West scoffed at the country’s request for money, except one, Jacob H Schiff a German Jew, was president of the New York banking company Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Disgusted at Russia’s pogrom against Jews he decided to back Russia’s enemies.

Half the Japanese navy was built with loans floated by a consortium headed by Schiff. The battle of Tsushima turned out to be an elegant revenge for the depredations of the Black Hundreds, Schiff was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, and many Japanese came to believe that their existence as a modern nation owed itself to Jewish faith in their capabilities.

This belief didn’t change as Japan grew more exposed to anti-semitic sentiment, both as a product of its general westernization and of its specific alliance with European fascism. Ah, powerful Jewish bankers. Yeah, we know those guys. Powerful Jewish bankers are our friends. They believed in us when all the rest of you occidentals thought we were buck toothed comedy goons. And they control the media, you say? Wonderful news!

Inuzuku had two purposes in mind when he encouraged the migration of Jewish refugees to Shanghai. The city had been devastated by fighting between the Japanese and Kuomintang forces and he wanted to import what he believed was a portable entrepreneurial class to revive the local economy, a policy he had previously advocated in Japanese occupied Manchuria. In so doing, he would also earn the favourable attention of the Jewish financial and media complex which he assumed controlled American policy, and who would then turn it in a pro-Japanese direction. This became known as the Fugu Plan. It was a cynical, deluded and brutally utilitarian interpretation of pure evil and as things went it probably saved thousands of lives, amongst them the parents of Israeli PM Ehud Olmert.

The Japanese role in Jewish settlement in Shanghai has mainly gone down the memory hole within China, but its historical presence in the city is taken as evidence of a particular affinity between Jews and Chinese. The Iraqi-Jewish commercial dynasties of the early decades of the 20th century – the Sassoons, the Kadoories, the Hardoons – in particular have contributed to Shanghai’s sense of itself as a cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial place. And if the Japanese implicitly believed in anti-semitic stereotypes but sought to use then for their own purposes, in popular Chinese culture these stereotypes are often understood as unambiguous virtues or even moral obligations. Strip them of their culturally specific implications and you have in the Jews a people devoted to peace, trade, prosperity, education and mutual support in the face of a hostile world. You have the lost tribe of China. The Jewish self help craze in China is horribly crass, but it goes quite a way deeper than business. Part of what people think they are learning here is, effectively, how to be more Chinese, the Jewish way.

Here's an illustration. The middle book in the photo below is a "how to be a Jewish parent" guide for Chinese families (via).

Comments

[Chris Williams]

For those interested in the politics of interwar Shanghai, Robert Bickers' _Empire Made Me_ is a damn fine book, and worth a read.

[jamie]

It is, isn't it? D'you remember the bit at the end where a young Enoch Powell writes and ode in the dead colonial copper's memory?

[Feeder of Felines]

It is sometimes said that the Chinese are the ``jews of the orient''. It would appear from jamie's post that some Chinese take the appelation seriously :-)