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Ohel Leah Synagogue, Hong Kong, China

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BACKGROUND

The first Jews to make their way to China settled in Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, in the tenth century. [1] Scholars believe that these Jews were merchants from Persia or India who followed the Silk Roads all the way east. They set up a Jewish community in Kaifeng that at one point reached 5,000 souls. They built a synagogue, praying in both Hebrew and Chinese. During the Ming dynasty, they were given one of eight Chinese surnames by the emperor: Ai, Shi, Gao, Gan, Jin, Li, Zhang, and Zhao. [2] The Jews of Kaifeng were discovered by Marco Polo during his travels eastward in the 13th century [3] and by other missionaries from Europe who attempted to convert them to Christianity. [4] 

Today, the Jewish community of Kaifeng has almost fully assimilated. Scholars estimate that around 1,000 Kaifeng Jews remain. [5]

Baghdadi Jews did not arrive in China until the mid to late 19th century. Elias Sasoon, the second son of prominent Baghdadi Jewish merchant David Sassoon, might be called the leader of the first-wave of Jewish immigration to modern China. He was sent by his father to China to run the Chinese front of the Sassoon trading company. Elias would set up shop in Shanghai, which had just opened as one of four trading ports to the west with the Treaty of Nanking of August 29, 1842, which ended the First Opium War. [6]

In his new book The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China, Jonathan Kaufman writes about the process by which Elias was chosen to move to Shanghai. “When it was time to set his global efforts in motion,” writes Kaufman, “David chose his second-oldest son, twenty-four-year-old Elias, to go to China. Elias was more withdrawn and reserved than his brothers. Unlike his siblings who embraced Western styles, Elias continued to wear his traditional Baghdad clothes, the only modern touch being a pair of eyeglasses to correct his nearsightedness. The glasses gave him the look of an aloof and studious academic. David reckoned that quiet and sensitive Elias, a bit of a loner, would be best suited to the rigors and loneliness of living far from family in an unfamiliar country.” [7] Thus, Elias, a quintessential and unassimilated Baghdadi Jew, paradoxically became the key player in David’s efforts to globalize, and eventually modernize, his business. After spending about a year in Canton and Hong Kong, Elias set up the Sassoon headquarters in Shanghai since it was closer to northern Chinese cities that were in need of yarn and textiles that the Sassoons could import from India. [8]

At the time, living conditions in Shanghai were very poor. “It was 1850,” writes Kaufman, “seven years since the first British arrivals had landed in Shanghai, and about a hundred more had joined them in the swampy settlement the daotai had allocated to them. Conditions were grim. A British doctor urged his fellow new arrivals to ‘seek elevated sites’ to avoid yellow fever, plague, cholera, and typhus. Located at the same latitude as New Orleans and Cairo, Shanghai became a steam bath in the summer. Newcomers battled prickly heat, ringworm, and other skin rashes.” [9] 

Lucky for Elias, he, along with other Brits, lived comfortably in the International Settlement, along with some Chinese fleeing civil wars in the more rural parts of the country. Elias, however, along with the vast majority of Brits in China, made no effort to learn Chinese and rarely associated with the Chinese except to negotiate trade with wealthy entrepreneurs or hire lowly “pigtailed” servants in his home near the river. [10]

Trading prolifically in opium, Indian spices, Indian wool, silk, tea, and hides, Elias’s “impact on Shanghai was profound,” according to Kaufman. Aside from the wealth and business connections he brought to the city and his father’s company, Elias also built houses for Chinese refugees fleeing the Taiping Rebellion and seeking a safe haven in Shanghai. This influx of thousands of immigrants “swelled Shanghai’s population and added to the immigrant energy and ambition of the city” (31). [11]

After the death of David Sassoon in 1864, Elias began to butt heads with his oldest brother Abdullah. Abdullah had become the new chairman of the family business and Elias his second-in-command. Elias felt that Abdullah did not appreciate his business acumen, relegating Elias to a joint post with his son Jacob overseeing business in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the Persian Gulf. After failing to take the reins from Abdullah, Elias seceded from the company and established his own business E.D. Sassoon & Co. [12]. Elias quickly became estranged from the family, corresponding with his brothers only during funerals and birthdays. [13]

Elias Sassoon died in 1880 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. [14] His son Jacob took over the business, continuing to build the company’s branches in Shanghai, Bombay, Yangon, Singapore, Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Kobe. Jacob eventually moved back to Bombay, where he would die in 1924. But he never severed his connections with the various cities in East Asia where he had previously lived and conducted business. Indeed, Jacob had built two synagogues in honor of his mother and wife in East Asia. In 1883, he built the Ohel Leah Synagogue in Hong Kong in honor of his mother and in 1920 he built the Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai in honor of his wife. In many ways he was eternally connected to East Asia, or Hong Kong and Shanghai at the very least, through these synagogues. 

After Jacob’s death, his younger brother Edward and Meyer Harry began investing in real estate in Shanghai. In March of 1930, Edward’s son Victor—Jacob’s nephew—would take control of the Sassoon family business, moving its headquarters from Bombay to the palatial Cathay Hotel in Shanghai. [15]

Born in Naples, Victor grew up in England, attending Harrow boarding school and Cambridge. He was everything the quintessential posh, high-class Brit. That he would come to take the reins of E.D. Sassoon & Co. in earnest, as opposed to becoming a “dilettante figurehead,” was to everyone’s surprise. [16] Jonathan Kaufman describes well Victor’s rare combination of charm and intelligence, despite being paralyzed from the waist down:

“His piercing eyes and quick wit drew attention away from the two crutches that kept him prigth and propelled him across the floor of his office, his hotel, and his dance club. Below the waist he was a crippled man. He had injured his hip in a plane crash while serving during World War I when he was thirty-five. His private diaries reflected his struggles—sleepless nights, quests for cures, the pursuit of doctors who could make him walk normally again. Like Franklin Roosevelt, he projected a confidence and virility that defied his handicap. A relentless host of extravagant parties he would leave suddenly for an upstairs private room when a stab of pain shot through his body. The circle of friends left behind would occasionally hear a thump in the ceiling above them when he fell.” [17]

Victor also had a terrific mind for finance, argues Kaufman. “He cross-examined the managers of the different Sassoon offices across Asia about industrial plants, insurance, and real-estate. He showed a special talent for finance. With factories, assets, and investments in India, China, and Britain, Victor recognized that moving money could be as profitable as exporting cotton or importing spices. He expanded the network of Sassoon-controlled banks, giving him access to different currencies in different countries to take advantage of fluctuating exchange rates. If Parliament was raising taxes in Britain, he could funnel profits through subsidiaries and trusts in Hong Kong to avoid them. If political uncertainty in India and China was making their currency less stable, he could shift his money into pounds sterling. The currency transactions protected his assets and increased his profits and sent a rich stream of dividends to his London relatives to fund their shooting parties and art collections.” [18] 

While Victor and his company prospered in Shanghai for many years, the rise of communism, the invasion of the Japanese, and the advent of World War II would cause a steep decline in his business, and eventually force him to return to India in 1941.[19] Before fleeing Shanghai, however, Victor, along with other wealthy Baghdadi Jewish businessmen in Shanghai such as the Kadoories, secured safety and protection for the now thousands of European Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe and arriving in Shanghai. Sassoon secured housing, medical care, and food for the refugees. Additionally, as Jonathan Kaufman details in an article for the Forward, “Sassoon transformed the first floor of a luxury skyscraper he owned into a refugee reception center where each refugee was given blankets, bedsheets, a tin dish, a cup and a spoon. He installed a kitchen in the basement to provide 1,800 meals a day. He established a vocational center to train 200 men as mechanics, joiners and carpenters. Most of the refugees settled in a poor part of the city where housing was cheap. They dubbed it ‘Little Vienna’ and opened European-style cafes, published a German language newspaper, and started classical orchestras and German-language theatre groups.” [20]

Kaufman adds that  “although they were now poor and displaced, the newly-arriving refugees marveled at how welcoming many of their Chinese neighbors were - even though they couldn’t communicate with each other. ‘In Europe, if a Jew escaped, he or she had to go into hiding,’ a refugee recalled. ‘Here in Shanghai we could dance and pray and do business.’” [21]

Before long, however, the Japanese corralled the Jews of Shanghai into congested ghettos, which is where American soldiers discovered them at the end of the war in 1945. The Japanese had refused to exterminate the Shanghainese Jews, defying German commands to do so. [22] 

Today, a small, progressive Shanghai Jewish community still exists, although it is composed primarily of expats. [24]

SITE

Hong Kong’s Ohel Leah Synagogue was built by Jacob Sassoon in 1902 in honor of his mother Leah. Construction began “with the laying of the foundation stone” on August 7, 1901 by Abraham Jacob Raymond.

Erica Lyons of Asian Jewish Life magazine describes the architectural makeup of the synagogue: “[The Ohel Leah Synagogue] is flanked by two impressive octagonal towers. The interior of the synagogue was based on a simple rectangular basilica plan with a relatively open floor plan. Polished Aberdeen granite columns, a central elevated bimah enclosed by carved wood balustrades on three sides, and heavy, rich wood benches include a number of elements reflective of its Baghdadi/Sephardi heritage. The women’s gallery, located on the second storey, runs along three sides of the hall.

In 1996, the Ohel Leah Synagogue underwent renovation, which was followed by a rededication ceremony on October 18, 1998. 

Today, Ohel Leah is used by Hong Kong’s small Modern Orthodox Jewish community. [25] It is considered the oldest surviving synagogue in Asia. [26]

Hong Kong, China

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