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 introduces the structure of the book, its focus and uniqueness. It then discusses the methodological obstacles embedded in the defintion of a “community” and “Jews” and goes on to present the ten main questions and lines of investigation that guide the book. In its final part, this chapter presents the book’s five sections, along with the history of each major region in Asia, its Jewish communities and a short summary of the relevant chapters.

This chapter discusses the question of Jewish settlement in North Asia from the early nineteenth century onward. Former criminals and their descendants turned into wealthy and proud people who looked down upon their poor brethren in the congested Pale of Jewish Settlement in the western part of the Russian Empire. Their wealth and role in Siberian life found architectural expression in the large and prominent synagogues, communal institutions and private houses that bore clear signs of their owners’ Jewishness.

This chapter deals with the Jews of Taiwan – a rather small community which emerged during the postwar era. It traces the history and evolution of the community, recognizing the vital role of various individuals and institutions, among them Chabad, which has enlivened Jewish life on the island since its arrival in 2011.

This chapter is concerned with the history and historiography of the traditional (native) communities of Jews in (Soviet) Central Asia. Most scholarly and popular literature, it argues, portrays these communities as distinct, secluded Jewish ethnic groups, disconnected from each other and from the wider Jewish world. However, a better understanding of their intertwined histories requires the placement of these Jewish groups in a wider cultural and geographical context.

This chapter explores the Jewish community in Japan and its ups and downs since its emergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century until today. Although a small community of usually no more than a thousand souls, it has been a home for diverse Jewish groups and a large number of talented individuals. The chapter traces its emergence, its growth following the Bolshevik Revolution, its ordeal during World War II, and its postwar recovery.

This chapter examines the relations between thousands of Yemeni Jews and the Jews of the Indian subcontinent in modern times. Starting in the eighteenth century, Yemenite rabbis and emissaries filled in religious functions in Jewish communities first in Cochin and among other groups. In the opposite direction, members of Bene Israel community served as officials and officers in the British army during the time it occupied Aden in 1839. These mutual relations formed intimate ties among various communities across the Indian Ocean.

This chapter by the late Jonathan Goldstein deals with the rise of the Jewish community in Singapore. In this port city, which emerged under British rule, Jews prospered initially in drug smuggling but with the years moved to other occupations. This chapter traces the evolution of this trading community of mainly Baghdadi Jews. It also examines its ordeal during the Japanese occupation, its survival during the period of decolonization and its present prosperity, along with the cultural and religious implications of its two-century existence.

This chapter explores the life of Jews in Indonesia before and after its independence. Emerging in the nineteenth century, the local Jewish community thrived in small and remote settlements under the rule of Dutch colonialism and reached its apex in 1941 with the influx of European refugees. Many of the Jews were detained during the Japanese occupation and following the country’s independence, the vast majority of them migrated to other countries. Since the Reformation era (1998 onward), however, Indonesia has witnessed the emergence of new Jewish identification whose leaders and motives the chapter examines.

This chapter focuses on the quest for the Ten Lost Tribes in modern Asia. It reveals the deep connection between early religious proto-Zionist thinking regarding the search for the Lost Tribes in Asia and the activities of present-day religious Zionists among the Bnei Menashe of eastern India. The issue of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and the finding of the remnants of the 2,700-year-old exile raises significant questions regarding the nature and future of Judaism and the Jewish ethnos in the global era, questions that clearly deserve further research. As such, the chapter concludes, the process of acceptance into the larger Jewish community is fraught with many obstacles.

This chapter on Harbin deals with the first city Jews settled in substantial numbers in modern China. Mostly émigrés from Russia, these Jews prospered during the first decades of the twentieth century as Harbin became a main hub for the Trans-Siberian Railway. At its peak, the Jewish community produced as many as twenty newspapers, but with the Japanese occupation of the city in 1932 and even more during the Chinese Civil War, the prosperity ended and the majority of its members left.

This concluding chapter examines the underlying commonalities, demographic features and distinctive characteristics of the Jewish settlement in modern Asia as they appear in this volume and analyzes them along the ten lines of investigation presented in the Introduction. This chapter provides also estimates for the size of the various communities since 1850 and offers illuminating insights into the contribution of the Jewish communities to Asia on the one hand and the place of Asia in modern Jewish history on the other hand.

This chapter deals with the large-scale evacuation of Ashkenazi Jews, perhaps as many as 1 million, to Central Asia following the German onslaught in 1941. It examines the encounter between the newcomers and this seemingly alien Asian region along with its native inhabitants, including the Bukharan Jews. This chapter also analyzes the cultural repercussions of the evacuation and its literary responses, especially the postwar writings of Grigory Kanovich and Dina Rubina.

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.