This chapter deals with Shanghai – once East Asia’s biggest Jewish community. It emphasizes the diversity of the Jewish community, which emerged with the arrival of Baghdadi Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, was invigorated by the arrival of Russian Jews in the early twentieth century and then more than tripled with the influx of refugees from Central and Eastern Europe on the eve of the Pacific War. The chapter tracks the origins of the Jewish settlement in the city, examines the reasons for its rise and decline and explores the emergence of a new community of Jewish professionals and ex-pats during the last three decades.

This chapter examines the Baghdadi network in British Asia and its identity crisis during decolonization with a focus on Southeast Asia and the survival of the Singapore community in particular. The chapter argues that through the colonization process, the transient identity of the Baghdadi Jewish diasporic communities was largely cemented as an anglicized one. However, following decolonization, the class divide within the communities was made all the more obvious as the anglicized elites emigrated to English-speaking countries while leaving the poor behind, as noted in Singapore.

This chapter gives an overview of the four different Jewish groups that have inhabited the Indian subcontinent during the modern era: the Cochin Jews in southwest India; Bene Israel; the Paradesi Jews; and the Baghdadi Jews. The chapter focuses on their encounter with modernization and their subsequent identity formation. It suggests that the main conflict these Jews have faced, both as a group and as individuals, was how to reconcile between Indian nationalism and Zionism.