Early Days: 1912-1949
Taiwan is indeed an exception from many of its East Asian neighbors in that a Jewish community did not form until the second half of the 20th century. That is not to say that there was no Jewish presence in Taiwan before then. Although there is no evidence at this time, it is possible that Jews came to Taiwan “as early as the seventeenth century as merchants or administrators in the service of the Dutch East India Company, which established trading posts around the Asian region from a base in Indonesia,” as many of the company’s investors at that time were Jewish.1
The earliest evidence is Samuel, Samuel & Co., a company originally founded in Yokohama, Japan by Marcus Samuel, a Iraqi Jew; it expanded to Taiwan in 1912, at the time a Japanese colony. Marcus Samuel’s brother, Samuel Samuel, later went on to found the company that became Royal Dutch Shell. The Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon family, known as the “Rothschilds of the East” for its impact on China, also sent opium to Taiwan; the Dutch van Nierop family had some minor trade interests here. However, it appears that these trading companies generally did not send Jewish workers to Taiwan and it is unlikely that there were ever enough Jewish men in Taiway at the time to form a minyan or any kind of community, unlike in larger trade ports like Shanghai.
In 1937, Japan invaded Shanghai, where many Jews were beginning to settle and form a community after escaping Nazi Europe thanks to liberal Chinese visa policies. Despite Japanese control, “the Nationalist government in Chongqing at the time not only had a carefully considered Jewish policy, but it was also deeply involved with the European Jewish refugees.”2 Numerous plans were tossed around by the Chinese for where to settle the Jews and pitched plans for Yunnan province; the Japanese considered settling them in Manchukuo, another Japanese colony. As Medzini notes, “interestingly, at no time was the possibility of settling Jews in Taiwan or Korea (Chosen) even mentioned, let alone discussed in detail,” and there is no evidence of Jews settling there at the time. 3 A community of Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms years earlier through Harbin had already formed a community of their own by the second world war in Harbin and many later migrated to Shanghai.
A vast majority of Jews after the end of the war left China for Israel or the United States, and some Russian Jews were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union. Those who stayed behind fled when foreigners were exiled by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949; most went to the aforementioned countries and some went to Hong Kong. There is little evidence to suggest that significant numbers of Jews went to Taiwan at this time as few foreigners wanted to live in a place where martial law had recently been imposed and whose economy was suffering after the departure of the Japanese. Some have appeared in time, though, including Jewish spouses of Chinese, and perhaps some who were stateless and had few other options, like Nathan Rabin. Morris Abraham Cohen (better known as “Two-Gun Cohen”) travelled to Taiwan as a loyal KMT member but didn’t stay long and only made occasional work visits.
Sources
- Shapiro, Don. Ms. Taipei: Survival of a Jewish Community without Deep Roots. Haifa University, n.d. p2.
- Gao, Bei. “The Chinese Nationalist Government's Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II.” Modern China 37, no. 2 (March 2011): 230. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23053323.
- Medzini, Meron. Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews During the Holocaust Era. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2016. 70.