| This SW project studies how statelessness, defined as a form of social and political exclusion inflicted on German and Austrian Jews in this study, shaped the experience of some 20,000 Jewish refugees who fled to and lived in Shanghai during World War II. To locate this research theoretically in previous literature, the author drew on the work of Salo Baron, Hannah Arendt, and Edward Said, linking Jewish history with philosophy, refugee studies, and democratic theory. This interdisciplinary approach has guided the archival research of this study and enhanced its realistic value. The thesis of this essay is that statelessness did not render refugees utterly rightless. Outside the sphere of state jurisdiction, Jewish refugees in Shanghai established self-governing institutions and formed a robust Jewish community beyond national, religious, and linguistic boundaries. Like the Jews in pre-Revolutionary France studied by Baron, Jewish refugees in wartime China discovered that Jewishness served as a substitute for nationality. |
