Ohio State University
Saving the Unwanted: The International Response to Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees, 1943-1949
This dissertation is a global microhistory of 15,000 Jewish refugees who found refuge in Shanghai from Nazi persecution. The Jewish refugees had chosen Shanghai out of necessity and convenience: It was one of the few places in the world in the late 1930s that did not require an entry visa owing to its “open port” status as established by Western Powers in the nineteenth century. Not until after the Second World War and Second Sino-Japanese War ended in 1945 did China reclaim full sovereignty over Shanghai. As part of national reunification efforts, the Chinese demonstrated anti-foreign sentiments to the point of compelling Jewish refugees to seek outside assistance, but not without difficulties beyond Jewish refugees’ control. This dissertation explores the dynamics that hampered the Jewish refugees’ ability to receive timely humanitarian aid and emigration assistance in the aftermath of Nazism. Specifically, it aims to show how Jews in Shanghai faced the multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination and the ways in which these forms compounded their sense of being unwanted. Told through memoirs, diaries, oral history interviews, correspondences found in organizational and states archives around the world, this story illustrates larger processes associated with the end of a war: the experience of liberation, the development of relief and rehabilitation policies, and the functioning of migration within the modern nation-state system. The dissertation applies insights from the vast scholarship on post-Second World War Europe’s humanitarian and refugee crises to Shanghai. In doing so, it uses comparative and transnational approaches to suggest that the history of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai should be understood as a global history of the aftermath of the Second World War. From Europe to the China theater, the dissertation sheds light on the deep effects of Western imperialism and persistent Eurocentrism and antisemitism on humanitarian aid and immigration policymaking in Australia, China, the United States, and the United Nations relief and refugee agencies. The Jewish refugees’ statelessness, Europeanness and Jewishness situated them in a liminal space between China and Europe, illustrating the challenges of cross-cultural dialogues and diplomacy between parties. Nationalism and racism, combined with anticommunism, continuously threatened humanitarian ideals in negotiations between Jewish refugees, government officials, and humanitarian workers in Shanghai and around the Pacific Rim. Together these ideological forces curtailed opportunities and denied assistance for Jewish refugees in Australia, China, Israel, and the United States. In this context, the dissertation argues that Shanghai’s Jewish refugees symbolized the unwanted human spoils of the treaty-port era for which few, if any, of the Powers involved wanted to take responsibility. Efforts to “save” Shanghai’s Jewish refugees were largely disingenuous because governments and international organizations maintained their attention and preference for Europe and its inhabitants.