No Exit: David Marshall and the Last Jews of Shanghai

David Marshall, Singapore’s first Chief Minister, visited China in 1956, and became the man who got the last Jews out of China. On Sunday November 20, we heard from Marina Shlau Cunningham, a member of one of those Jewish families who was here until 1957. It’s quite a story. (For the event recording, click here.)

Who’s David Marshall?

David Marshall was born in Singapore in 1908 to Sephardic Jewish parents from Baghdad. He was a brilliant criminal lawyer, a great orator, and a fierce anti-colonialist. In 1955, he became the then-colony’s first elected Chief Minister, and took on the mission of negotiating full internal self-government for Singapore, a precursor to independence. But the Merdeka (Freedom) Talks in April 1956 failed, and Marshall resigned in June. He then accepted an invitation to lead a Singapore trade delegation to China in September that year, where he would spend two months.

The Jewish Community Behind the Bamboo Curtain

In June 1956, Marshall received a letter from Reuben David “Ruby” Abraham in Shanghai. Abraham was the leader of the Council of the Jewish Community (CJC), and had heard of Marshall’s visit on the BBC. Abraham explained that there were still 563 Jews in China, and that although Israel had approved entrance visas for all China Jews, the Chinese authorities had yet to grant the exit permits necessary to leave. He urged Marshall to intervene.

In September, Marshall received a message from British politician C. Leslie Hale, Labor MP for Oldham West, who had also been in touch with Abraham. Hale, too, encouraged Marshall to raise the matter of China’s forgotten Jews with his Chinese hosts, and added that pressure from the Soviet Union was behind the Chinese reluctance to grant the exit visas—402 of the 563 Jews in China were Soviet citizens.  In Letters from Mao’s China, a compilation of letters written during his visit, Marshall indicates that this was the result of negotiations between Mao and the famously antisemitic Stalin.

In 1956, China’s Jewish community was divided between three main cities: 105 in Tianjin, 207 in Harbin, and 251 in Shanghai. Marshall doesn’t mention meeting the community in Harbin or Tianjin, but in Shanghai, he met with Abraham and with the Jewish community.

Dignity in Distress

Marshall’s letters provide a glimpse of Shanghai Jewish life in 1956. “Lovely children, attractive parents, well dressed…” The children sang Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, he was taken to see the New Ohel Moshe synagogue on Rue Tenant de la Tour (Xiangyang Road), and as it was Sukkot, he was taken to see a sukka hut.

Life was as normal as people could make it, but when he spoke to and met with the Jewish community at Shelter House, a home for destitute Jews, he found it heartbreaking: “It was two hours of concentrated agony as I heard tale after tale. It is an inhuman thing that, after depriving them of their assets and driving them to live in a charity shelter, the Chinese government refused them exit visas,” he wrote in Letters from Mao’s China, adding that he was impressed by their dignity in distress.

The Abrahams of Shanghai

Marshall’s host, Reuben Abraham, knew Shanghai well: his grandfather had worked for David Sassoon & Sons in the 1840s, and his father, David Ezra Joshua (D.E.J.) Abraham, was a successful merchant whose Abraham & Co. building still stands on Beijing Road. David Abraham was active in Jewish community affairs, chairing the Shanghai Jewish Community from 1910 for over 30 years, and co-founding the Shanghai Jewish School in 1902 (then on Dixwell Road (Liyang Road), within the Shearith Isreal synagogue). 

While many in the Jewish community had indeed been stripped of their assets, that was not true of everyone. Marina Cunningham’s family still lived in their spacious house on Yongjia Road, with a swimming pool; her family photographs show elegantly attired men and women at parties.

Reuben Abraham had to give up his well-appointed house with extensive grounds on Avenue Foch (Yan’an Road) which had been in the family since 1910. He’d also had to give up his priceless Chinese art collection, but he was one of the lucky ones: he was provided with a house owned by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).

The Great Negotiator

On 9 October, Marshall met with Zhou En-lai. Zhou was pushing for Singapore to permit Singaporean Chinese to renounce their citizenship and return to China, the land of their ancestors, if they wished.

“That is something I can understand,” said Marshall, “because it is part of the Jewish tradition. And you will no doubt be unhappy to be reminded that it is a tradition that has not been respected here, your Excellency.”

-David Marshall, as quoted in Silverstein, Lynn, and Josef Silverstein. “David Marshall and Jewish Emigration from China.” The China Quarterly, no. 75 (1978)

Marshall, the great negotiator, deftly used that as his entry point to ask that the Jews, too, be allowed to leave China and return to their homeland, if they wished.

Although Zhou denied that the Jews had been refused exit visas, he promised to look into it. Two days later, on October 11, Abraham wrote to Marshall that exit visas were being issued, and he would leave by mid-November.

By March 1957, A.M. Begg, then chief clerk of the CJC, wrote to Marshall from Hong Kong that nearly all the remaining Jews in China had secured exit permits, and it seemed that none would be detained. Marina Cunningham and her family were one of those last families, leaving Shanghai for Quito, Ecuador, in March 1957. And all because of a Jewish Singaporean mensch.

REFERENCES:

Marshall, David, Letters from Mao’s China, ed. Michael Leifer (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1996)

Qiao, Michelle, “Abraham Co Building Harks Back to a Different Era,” Shanghai Daily, July 11 2014.

Silverstein, Lynn, and Josef Silverstein. “David Marshall and Jewish Emigration from China.” The China Quarterly, no. 75 (1978): 647–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/652988. Accessed November 12 2022