Page 68 [68]
OCR
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 history. 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 academic training to prompt my researching this topic. My brother-in-law, Rabbi Alex Weisfogel, had been a student of the Mirrer Yeshiva, the sole higher talmudic academic that survived 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 Kalmanowitz, president of the Mirrer Yeshiva, who had also reached these shores in early 1940. He was one of the most charismatic, 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 Shanghai 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 write my masters thesis on this subject. Still, this was only a minor work of about 125 pages, covering the entire century of Jewish life in Shanghai. For my doctorate, however, I narrowed the topic to the refugee community and deepened it to analyze this amazing chapter of Jewish history. Ibegan my research during 1961 or 1962 at a time when people from Shanghai would ask me, „Are you really interested in my experience?“ 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 extraordinary Japanese policy toward the Jews, which was responsible 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 documents 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 comprehending 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 residents of Shanghai or those involved in one way or another with the refugee community, whom I interviewed. These included a German Jewish refugee who had been a police inspector before the ascent of Hitler. After he went to Japan, he
