Recently David Buxbaum (2008: 45) has described the development of Jews in Asia between Mumbai and Manila as follows: “Today in Thailand, Singapore, Japan, Philippines, and elsewhere in mainland China, Jewish life is again thriving, as it had in the past. Old synagogues are now active in use, Jewish schools are being established in many locations. New communities are growing up in old locations. In contrast to my arrival in East Asia in 1963, when Singapore was virtually the only centre of active Jewish life in East, Southeast and South Asia, today there are dozens of communities establishing centres for Jewish life in Asia. … While Chabad has played the key role in these developments in Asia, many others have contributed to this reformation.”
Even if the minorities are still small in numbers, Jewish presence in Southeast Asia (and elsewhere) should no longer be neglected in studying religious plu-ralism, religious change and religious developments in Asia. As we can see Chabad has started to be an important agent in revitalizing Jewish ways of living throughout Southeast Asia, not only on the religious level, but also on an eco-nomical level by providing, for example, restaurants serving kosher meals. Such restaurants are not only helpful for Jewish people, but they also attract “western”
tourists, who like the taste of this cooking which is closer to “western” cuisine and less spicy than dishes from local establishments in some Asian countries. In this way, Jewish “catering” fills a segment of business, which can cross religious borders and which also contributes to financial stability or progress of the small religious group (Ehrlich 2008: 7 – 8; Ehrlich 2010: 65). But despite these positive aspects, some latent tensions between local and “old” communities and the strict orthodoxy of Chabad rabbis may also arise, whose intention to care for Jews only is not totally free from the danger of keeping the Jewish community apart from the local society. So there are tasks for the future which the Jewish communities will have to solve in order to implant Judaism in the societies of Southeast Asian countries which are culturally deeply involved with Buddhism. In this way, it might be a task for the future for both Buddhists and Jews in Southeast Asia to look at each other’s religious traditions in dialogue, because Southeast Asia until the present is not among the score of “Buddhist-Jewish-Relations”, which only marginally take either Tibetan or Zen Buddhism into account, in academic discussions and interreligious dialogues as well (Teshima 1995; Todd 2004; Katz 2008).
For the historian of religion it is also obvious that these changes are closely connected with the political, social, economic and also general religious sit-uation in the given countries since the colonization and the post-war de-velopments. Focusing, as I have done, on Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia can also bring out the differences: Myanmar had a prosperous history during col-Manfred Hutter 74
onial times, but nationalistic political change nearly lead to extinction; Thailand has its own history with Jewish immigrants and businessmen, while Cambodia has only few years of Jewish history up until now. On the one hand, all three countries have their own history, and at least Thailand and Cambodia have common links through the efforts of the Chabad movement, bringing these two countries into global networks; while at the moment, the tiny Baghdadi-built community of Myanmar still has – also due to the political situation in that country until recently – lesser opportunities to share these global networks.
When we study religions in Southeast Asia, Jews are still often missing both in
“textbooks” and in statistics about religious adherents, but I think the Jewish minorities in these countries are a field of research that deserves the interest of Comparative Religion, as it is a small, but vivid part of a world religion.
Therefore, focusing on the history of Judaism in Asia is also part of a “world history” of religions, and as we have seen for refugees in Thailand, it is also part of the study of the Jewish history of Austria and Germany.
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Manfred Hutter 76
Alina Pa˘tru
1Judaism in the PR China and in Hong Kong Today: Its Presence and Perception
During the last 30 years, China has gone through the so-called process of opening up, rising as an economic world power as well. Since then, Jews have started to settle in China again after a break of several decades, and in the big cities organized forms of Jewish social and religious life appeared. In 1997 Hong Kong, the host city of a Jewish community which looks back on a history of 160 years, became part of China, playing an important role in the trade relations between China and the Western world. In Hong Kong there are seven synagogues now (figure for November 2011) which serve the special needs of the growing number of Jews.
The present-day Jewish communities on Chinese territory have to some ex-tent been subject of interest for Chinese historians (Pan / Wang / Wang 2011) and for Jewish journalists (Anna 2008; Klayman 2008; Levin 2008; Wade 2008; Weisz 2011), sometimes even for Jewish scholars (Ehrlich 2008; Ehrlich 2010). I myself have undertaken field work on them, looking at them through the eyes of a researcher in the field of religious studies. My paper seeks to give a short pre-sentation of some of my results, embedded in the theoretical frame which I will use for their analysis. Before doing that, I will offer some information about the specific research interest which I carry as a scholar of religious studies, about my working methods and about my particular aims.
1 Alina Pa˘tru, Dr. theol., is assistant professor for Comparative Religion at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. Between Oct. 2010 and Oct. 2012 she worked as a Humboldt Research Fellow on a postdoctoral project about Jews in contemporary China at the De-partment for Comparative Religion of Bonn University.