Christina Cheng

Nelee Langmuir Award for best seminar paper in Holocaust Studies

"Closing The Last Safe Haven: The Shanghai Jewish Community’s Responses to European Jewish Emigration in World War II Shanghai"

Majors: History and Computer Science

Minor: East Asian Studies

Drawing from various collections at the Hoover Archives, I researched the responses of Shanghai's two disparate prewar Jewish communities (the British Sephardic Jews, who came to China for banking and finance opportunities, and the Russian Ashkenazi Jews, who fled the Bolshevik Revolution and antisemitic pogroms) to the arrival of Central European Jewish refugees in Shanghai's foreign concessions from 1937 to 1939. Because of the complex political dynamics of the concessions, Shanghai served as one of the few havens in the world for European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, taking in around 18,000-25,000 refugees in total, with local Jewish communities spearheading their assimilation. However, in 1939, concession authorities decided to close its doors to Jewish refugees, restrictions that the local Jewish communities supported. I argue that this change in attitude was motivated by their inability to form enduring bonds with the refugees due to differences in class, nationality and religious practice. This led to the Jewish communities seeking to placate the foreign concessions' influential powers and to affirm their elite positionality as foreigners living in colonial Shanghai.