The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
- Jul 27, 2020
- 1 min read
From Jewish Book Council
If a Jewish historian were to advance a claim for the diversity of the experience of the diaspora, the case would rest with the saga of the Sassoons and the Kadoories. Once based in Baghdad, these two clans (and, yes, they were distantly related) relocated to China in the mid-nineteenth century. Instead of the material struggles that, until the last century, marked the millennia of exile for nearly all of Jewry, these two families became fabulously, preposterously rich. Instead of the credo of the shtetl that “life is with people,” the Sassoons and the Kadoories lived largely in isolation from other Jews. Even when doing business over the span of generations in Shanghai, no members of these two remote families ever bothered to learn Chinese. Modern Ashkenazic Jewry has often tilted left, but the Sassoons and the Kadoories appreciated the advantages of British imperialism, and helped secure its power over the Chinese economy, until the communists captured Beijing in 1949. That some Iraqi Jews exercised such influence for so long, over a historic civilization to which they were largely alien, is so strange a tale that novelists might be excused for envying Jonathan Kaufman, who teaches journalism at Northeastern University and had earlier covered China for several American media.
