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I completed the research and writing of Japanese, Nazis and
Jews over a period of over ten years. It began with the writing
of my Masters thesis in 1958 on the Jewish Community of
Shanghai 1850-1950, at the Graduate School of the City
University of New York, where Ihad majored in East Asian hi¬
story. At that time no one had even written a term paper, let
alone a serious scholarly article on this exotic theme. Actually,
I had a personal angle as well, which combined with my aca¬
demic training to prompt my researching this topic. My bro¬
ther-in-law, Rabbi Alex Weisfogel, had been a student of the
Mirrer Yeshiva, the sole higher talmudic academic that survi¬
ved the Holocaust en toto, in Shanghai, courtesy of the
Japanese, Hitler’s Axis partner. While his colleagues stuck in
Vilnius during 1940, from where they eventually escaped to
Shanghai, he was able to get to the U.S., where he married my
sister. He became the assistant to Rabbi Abraham Kalma¬
nowitz, president of the Mirrer Yeshiva, who had also reached
these shores in early 1940. He was one of the most charisma¬
tic, successful rescue activists during the Holocaust, who made
excellent connections in Washington to help him in his rescue
efforts. At the same time he helped finance the travel of the
Mirrer Yeshiva to Shanghai and then supported them in
Shanghai (sending them money illegally via neutral countries).
After the war, my brother-in-law’s colleagues from Shang¬
hai came to visit him and us, (they lived with us for two years
68
after the war) and told us stories about their experience in
Shanghai as well as about the two earlier Jewish communities
(Bagdadi and Russian-Jewish) living in Shanghai. This
prompted me to combine this interest with my studies to wri¬
te my masters thesis on this subject. Still, this was only a mi¬
nor work of about 125 pages, covering the entire century of
Jewish life in Shanghai. For my doctorate, however, I narro¬
wed the topic to the refugee community and deepened it to
analyze this amazing chapter of Jewish history. Ibegan my re¬
search during 1961 or 1962 at a time when people from
Shanghai would ask me, „Are you really interested in my ex¬
perience?“ The best thing about this research, which took me
about nine years and the writing took two years. My research
did not finish with my doctorate (in Jewish history, Yeshiva
University, 1971), since I was still unclear about the extraor¬
dinary Japanese policy toward the Jews, which was responsi¬
ble for the survival of 18.000 Jewish refugees during the
Holocaust.
This continuing research, was inspired by an article I read
on the Japanese foreign policy, which very incidentally, made
me look at the entire picture of the Japanese and their view of
the Jews, in a totally different light. This made me review once
again, all my Japanese documents and related material. It took
me another three years, before I could put all the thousands of
pieces together to make sense out an amazing puzzle: why
would Japan, Hitler’s Axis partner, help rescue the German
Jews kicked out by Germany. More amazing was the fact that
the same Japanese officers who wrote antisemitic articles and
books, were responsible for helping the refugees in practice.
Even after I had discovered the reasoning of individual
Japanese officers, with their odd perspective of the Jews, I still
had to explain how and why a hard-headed government
in Tokyo should follow this strange policy, of inviting the
German Jewish refugees to come to their sector of Shanghai.
The documents that helped me understand this incredible
story was a collection of about 1.000 pages of Japanese
Foreign Office papers and other government papers relating
to Jews, which had been found in a Japanese second-hand
bookstore by a Jewish resident of postwar Tokyo. These do¬
cuments were translated by U.S. Army translators for an
American Chaptain, to whom J had given my masters thesis
and who wrote a small, popular book on Jews in the Far
East. However, he — nor my teacher of Asian Studies, who
was also interested in the Japanese and the Jews — could not
make sense out of the above-mentioned puzzling Japanese
policy toward the Jews, and he failed totally in comprehen¬
ding the Japanese or their policy. After I finally completed
the manuscript, it was published by Yeshiva University Press
in 1976, becoming their best seller. It has been reprinted
three times and translated into Chinese in 1993.
The most interesting aspect of my research, which kept me
going year after year, were the more than 100 fascinating re¬
sidents of Shanghai or those involved in one way or another
with the refugee community, whom I interviewed. These in¬
cluded a German Jewish refugee who had been a police ins¬
pector before the ascent of Hitler. After he went to Japan, he