WHEN penniless teenager Silas Aaron Hardoon arrived in the port city of Shanghai way back in the 1870s, he was hoping to have a decent place to sleep. Instead, his employers from the Sassoon trading corporation asked him to be a night watchman. For a bed, he got a dormitory that was to be shared with the Chinese employees.  

In those days for a foreigner to live in dormitories with Chinese workers meant he was starting his life at the bottom of the barrel.

A generation later, he went on to become the biggest landlord of a booming metropolis and built the biggest private lot at the heart of Shanghai for his extraordinary family.

Unlike his people of the Baghdadi Jewish community, he had a Eurasian wife. The couple adopted many children both Caucasians and Chinese. The Western kids were raised according to Judaism, taking the father’s name Hardoon, and the Chinese were raised in Buddhist traditions after their mother, Lou.

Hardoon was admired and hated by many at the same time. He was the only person in Shanghai to have a seat at the Shanghai Municipal Council and French Municipal Council. He also had a street named after him at the border of his private gardens and estate — the former Hardoon Road is now Tongren Road while his private estate was what is now the Shanghai Exhibition Center.  

Only very few cities in the world have gained so much from their minority residents as did the Jews in Shanghai.

Open port and cosmopolitan Shanghai was a perfect melting pot where the Jews could thrive and survive. One can never underestimate the contribution of Shanghai’s Jewish community for the city’s development. Even today it is easy to spot the many historical landmarks of Shanghai as standing exhibits of their contribution.

But the contribution to the development of the city went beyond the landmarks to the city’s infrastructure, its booming economy in the first part of the 20th century and to the city’s education, health-care and culture.

At the same time, no other city in the world offered a safe heaven and an anti-Semitic free zone to so many Jewish people in their darkest times, fleeing persecution due to their religious and cultural background.

Yet unlike other foreign communities in Shanghai, the Jewish community was not a unified group made from people coming from the same country speaking the same language. Three different waves of Jewish immigration came to Shanghai between the 1850s and the 1940s, arriving from different countries where the Jewish diaspora had thrived before.

First to come were the Babylonian Jews, primarily of Baghdadi origin, who left Baghdad for Mumbai (then Bombay) in India and then continued to Shanghai.

Like Hardoon, most of these Baghdadi Jews arrived in Shanghai to work in the Sassoon’s trading corporation. The Sassoon weaved a web of commerce at various cities across East Asia and in the emerging trading frontiers that was China.

Many of these youngsters later branched out from the comfort nest of the Sassoon Corporation to start their own business.

A very small group of them went on to become the financial movers and shakers of the emerging mega-metropolis in the east of China.

The second wave of Jewish immigrants came from Russia, fleeing the growing anti-Semitism led by the Russian tzar himself. In the 1920s, another group of Russian Jews moved down south from Harbin in China and Vladivostok in Russia to get away from the conflicts over Manchuria between the Japanese, Russians and Chinese.

A young Sioma Lifshitz ran away from his Russian industrialist parents in Harbin and headed to Vladivostok to become a Bolshevik.

But after witnessing a traumatic event, he sneaked into a ship heading out from Vladivostok. After several days the ship docked in Shanghai when the young stowaway entered the city that had no immigration control.

With a new identity, or rather choosing to hide his Jewish background, Sioma changed his name to Sanzetti and was open to any job the new city had to offer.

Less than eight years later in the November 1928 issue of “Studio Light,” a professional photography magazine published by Eastman Kodak, young Sanzetti was named “The Leading Photographer of Shanghai.”

He was only 26 years old at the time.

Sanzetti had two studios in Shanghai at that time. One of them was on Nanjing Road in the heart of the former international settlement. The second one was on Maoming Road in the former French concession.

Sanzetti’s collections offer an incredible and rare visual glimpse of Shanghai’s heydays — the elite of Shanghai’s foreign residents, as well as the wealthy Chinese.  

Sanzetti’s life story was an example of the hard work put in by the Russian Jews in Shanghai. Having little to start with but with their hard-working attitude, they built the backbone of the mid-class business — from truck companies to Western restaurants, pharmacies, bakeries and furriers.

Many of their shops filled Avenue Joffre — today’s Huaihai Road — and in other streets of Shanghai.

The third and last wave of Jewish immigrants spent the shortest time in the city. On average, they spent between 8-10 years in Shanghai. Yet this is the Jewish group that spread the story of Jews in Shanghai to the world.

They were central European Jewish refugees who flooded Shanghai before and during World War II.

In fact, there is no other city in the world that hosted, and with that saved, so many Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

The Third Reich stripped some 20,000 European bourgeoisies, among them doctors, lawyers, engineers and merchants, among others, off their assets before they managed to escape Europe.

As poor refugees they made their way to Shanghai mainly from Germany, Austria and Poland only to realize they may get into further trouble at the end of 1941 when the Japanese took over Shanghai while creating the axis alliance with the Nazis. 

At the end of 1938, Ruth Shany, a talented Austrian, arrived in Shanghai from Vienna with her parents — each of them carrying only two suitcases with no valuables.

At the port, they waited for trucks that were to ferry them to the communal shelters in Shanghai. The cattle trucks were sponsored by the Baghdadi Jewish families who made sure the poor refugees were not homeless.

The shelters were converted from factories, warehouses and schools.

Ruth and her parents lived in a crowded dormitory room shared by 33 people. For their daily food they had to line up at the communal soup kitchen.

With the continuous influx of new refugees these soup kitchen could offer only small portion of daily food to the refugees. Poverty, malnutrition and diseases were rampant in these shelters that took the lives of many of the refugees.

Like the other foreign communities, many Jewish residents of Shanghai left the city before or after 1949.  

Both the Jews and the Chinese claim over 5,000 years of history. But this extraordinary synergy on the banks of the Huangpu River spans just 110 years between the end of the First Opium War and the founding of New China in 1949.

In booming Shanghai, this was an extremely eventful century filled with unparalleled stories and exceptional characters that can fill endless volumes of books.  

 (Dvir Bar-Gal is a Shanghai-based Jewish history expert and has been running Jewish heritage tours of Shanghai since 2003.)