Nehardea Magazine

Journal of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center
No.14, Autumn 2003

IRAQI JEWS IN THE DIASPORA

A FORGOTTEN BAGHDADI JEWISH TYCOON:

SILAS HARDOON IN SHANGHAI, 1874-1931

Dr. Chiara Betta

On July 21, 1931 an elderly scholar masterfully added the missing dot to the Chinese character zhu (owner) of the ancestral table of Silas Aaron Hardoon, a rite that according to Chinese popular religion marks the transferal of the deceased spirit to the tablet. The rite of the dotting of the tablet was followed on July 22 by an extravagant memorial service held in the Aili Garden, during which Chinese funeral specialists performed elaborate mortuary rites, resembling those carried out during Chinese funerals. Not surprisingly, these events profoundly shocked the Shanghai Baghdadi Jewish community that had not yet recovered from the visible and noisy presence of Buddhist monks and Taoist priests at Hardoon's Jewish funeral.

Luo Jialing and Hardoon in their residence surrounded by Chinese

pupils attending the school they founded in their garden

Without any doubt, Silas (Saleh) Aaron Hardoon was a controversial figure in Shanghai's Baghdadi Jewish circles. Born in Ottoman Baghdad, most probably in 1851, he moved as a small child with his impoverished family to British Bombay where his father secured a menial occupation under the patronage of the merchant-prince David Sassoon, the scion of Baghdad's most eminent Jewish family. Hardoon's commercial life was shaped by his close association with the Sassoon family, first as an employee of David Sassoon, Sons & Co. in Bombay, Hong Kong and Shanghai and then as partner and manager of E.D. Sassoon & Co. in Shanghai. Hardoon spent the most important years of his life, between 1874 and 1931, in Shanghai's foreign settlements, areas administered by foreign municipal councils, which gradually blossomed into China's most westernised areas. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Shanghai grew into a cosmopolitan metropolis, the cultural matrix of Chinese modernity and a major industrial and commercial hub. Hardoon took full advantage of the city's exceptional economic growth and invested his savings in the booming real estate market of the foreign settlements. He founded his own firm in 1901 and after leaving E.D. Sassoon & Co. in 1911 he devoted his time to the management of his vast real estate portfolio. At the same time we cannot discount that in the first decade of the twentieth century the Hardoon firm also dealt in opium, a legal commodity until 1917. In Chinese circles Hardoon was, in effect, known as a dealer of tu, a Chinese word that alluded both to opium and land.

At the time of his death in 1931 Hardoon was reputed to be the richest individual foreigner in East Asia. He owned valuable land along Nanking Road, Shanghai's fashionable commercial thoroughfare, a shopping area comparable to London's Oxford Street and New York's Fifth Avenue. Hardoon leased some of his properties to the city's leading department stores, such as the Wing On [Yongan gongsi] and Sincere [Xinxin gongsi], which had introduced the concept of modern shopping to fashionable Shanghainese in the early twentieth century. Hardoon also owned a number of lilong, alleyways built in a hybrid architectural style. He rented his lilong houses mostly to lower-middle Chinese tenants and famously chased in person anyone who was late in paying their rents. As a friend of Hardoon summarised "Even when he became a millionaire in terms of pounds sterling he would climb tenement stairs to badger poor Chinese tenants who were a day behind in their payment".

In contrast to other leading Shanghai Baghdadi Jews, Hardoon attempted to integrate into the Chinese host environment rather than merely seek to be accepted in local British circles. Hardoon started to move in the Chinese socio-cultural milieu after marrying in 1886, Luo Jialing, a Eurasian whose father Isaac Roos might have been Jewish. Notwithstanding her foreign origins, Luo Jialing fully identified as Shanghainese and Chinese, was deeply imbued with Chinese popular culture and earnestly believed in the Buddhist faith.

The Hardoons led an extravagant existence in the Aili Garden, a Chinese-style Garden designed at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Buddhist revolutionary monk Huang Zongyang, an acquaintance of the founder of the Chinese republic Sun Yat-sen. Since the couple did not have children Luo Jialing adopted Chinese children who took her surname; and after 1919 the Hardoons legally adopted eleven foreign children who were supposedly brought up as Jews. Most of the children were Russian Jews and White Russians and were given in adoption to the Hardoons by impoverished parents or relatives who had fled to China in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution.

In the Aili Garden the Hardoons associated with old-fashioned Confucian scholars, Buddhist monks, disgraced Qing officials, the Shanghai gentry-merchant elite, righteous revolutionaries and corrupt militarists. Between 1909 and 1913 they sponsored the publication of the Buddhist canons, the Tripitaka, an enormous scholarly work. In 1915 in the premises of the Aili Garden they established an old-fashioned school, a number of cultural associations and even a publishing house. The latter published learned journals, a fine reprint of the Kangxi dictionary and even a valued Chinese translation of the Koran. Significantly, in the first volume of the Koran, Hardoon - the initiator of the project- is depicted wearing Chinese clothing in the style of a traditional Chinese merchant-philanthropist.

The Hardoons also sponsored innumerable Chinese charities and Hardoon was bestowed with many honours by Beijing governments in the early 1920s. At the same time, Hardoon refrained from becoming deeply engaged in Jewish charitable endeavours though towards the end of his life he financed the building of the Beth Aharon synagogue, a magnificent building which was completed in 1927.

The death of Hardoon on June 19, 1931 marked the beginning of the end of the Hardoon's fortunes. Shortly after his death scores of distant relatives from Iraq laid claims to the inheritance and at least two cases were heard in the local Shanghai British courts. Luo Jialing then disinherited temporarily her adopted son George Hardoon, the main beneficiary of Silas Hardoon's will, and, being blind she was even tricked into signing a fake will. After Luo Jialing passed away at the end of 1941 the inheritance battle took various turns and twists: in Japanese occupied Shanghai the Chinese Luo children and the Hardoon children signed various secret agreements on how to divide the Hardoon estate among themselves. With the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 everything was, however, swiftly lost as the Hardoon estate consisted almost exclusively of real estate. In 1958 the Sino-Soviet Friendship building was erected on the premises of the Aili Garden, the final sign that Hardoon's fortune had evaporated once Shanghai came under Communist rule.

*Dr. Chiara Betta is a historian of modern China presently living and working in Athens (cbetta@ath.forthnet.gr). Her research focuses on Shanghai's social history, the trade diaspora of Baghdadi Jews in China and ethnic nationalism in Chinese Central Asia. She is presently in the process of writing a book on Silas Aaron Hardoon entitled Tycoon: Silas Aaron Hardoon in Old and New Shanghai, 1874-1997.

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IRAQI JEWS IN THE DIASPORA
A FORGOTTEN BAGHDADI JEWISH TYCOON: SILAS HARDOON IN SHANGHAI, 1874-1931 Dr. Chiara Betta
On July 21, 1931 an elderly scholar masterfully added the missing dot to the Chinese character zhu (owner) of the ancestral table of Silas Aaron Hardoon, a rite that according to Chinese popular religion marks the transferal of the deceased spirit to the tablet. The rite of the dotting of the tablet was followed on July 22 by an extravagant memorial service held in the Aili Garden, during which Chinese funeral specialists performed elaborate mortuary rites, resembling those carried out during Chinese funerals. Not surprisingly, these events profoundly shocked the Shanghai Baghdadi Jewish community that had not yet recovered from the visible and noisy presence of Buddhist monks and Taoist priests at Hardoon's Jewish funeral. Luo Jialing and Hardoon in their residence surrounded by Chinese pupils attending the school they founded in their garden Without any doubt, Silas (Saleh) Aaron Hardoon was a controversial figure in Shanghai's Baghdadi Jewish circles. Born in Ottoman Baghdad, most probably in 1851, he moved as a small child with his impoverished family to British Bombay where his father secured a menial occupation under the patronage of the merchant-prince David Sassoon, the scion of Baghdad's most eminent Jewish family. Hardoon's commercial life was shaped by his close association with the Sassoon family, first as an employee of David Sassoon, Sons & Co. in Bombay, Hong Kong and Shanghai and then as partner and manager of E.D. Sassoon & Co. in Shanghai. Hardoon spent the most important years of his life, between 1874 and 1931, in Shanghai's foreign settlements, areas administered by foreign municipal councils, which gradually blossomed into China's most westernised areas. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Shanghai grew into a cosmopolitan metropolis, the cultural matrix of Chinese modernity and a major industrial and commercial hub. Hardoon took full advantage of the city's exceptional economic growth and invested his savings in the booming real estate market of the foreign settlements. He founded his own firm in 1901 and after leaving E.D. Sassoon & Co. in 1911 he devoted his time to the management of his vast real estate portfolio. At the same time we cannot discount that in the first decade of the twentieth century the Hardoon firm also dealt in opium, a legal commodity until 1917. In Chinese circles Hardoon was, in effect, known as a dealer of tu, a Chinese word that alluded both to opium and land. At the time of his death in 1931 Hardoon was reputed to be the richest individual foreigner in East Asia. He owned valuable land along Nanking Road, Shanghai's fashionable commercial thoroughfare, a shopping area comparable to London's Oxford Street and New York's Fifth Avenue. Hardoon leased some of his properties to the city's leading department stores, such as the Wing On [Yongan gongsi] and Sincere [Xinxin gongsi], which had introduced the concept of modern shopping to fashionable Shanghainese in the early twentieth century. Hardoon also owned a number of lilong, alleyways built in a hybrid architectural style. He rented his lilong houses mostly to lower-middle Chinese tenants and famously chased in person anyone who was late in paying their rents. As a friend of Hardoon summarised "Even when he became a millionaire in terms of pounds sterling he would climb tenement stairs to badger poor Chinese tenants who were a day behind in their payment". In contrast to other leading Shanghai Baghdadi Jews, Hardoon attempted to integrate into the Chinese host environment rather than merely seek to be accepted in local British circles. Hardoon started to move in the Chinese socio-cultural milieu after marrying in 1886, Luo Jialing, a Eurasian whose father Isaac Roos might have been Jewish. Notwithstanding her foreign origins, Luo Jialing fully identified as Shanghainese and Chinese, was deeply imbued with Chinese popular culture and earnestly believed in the Buddhist faith. The Hardoons led an extravagant existence in the Aili Garden, a Chinese-style Garden designed at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Buddhist revolutionary monk Huang Zongyang, an acquaintance of the founder of the Chinese republic Sun Yat-sen. Since the couple did not have children Luo Jialing adopted Chinese children who took her surname; and after 1919 the Hardoons legally adopted eleven foreign children who were supposedly brought up as Jews. Most of the children were Russian Jews and White Russians and were given in adoption to the Hardoons by impoverished parents or relatives who had fled to China in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. In the Aili Garden the Hardoons associated with old-fashioned Confucian scholars, Buddhist monks, disgraced Qing officials, the Shanghai gentry-merchant elite, righteous revolutionaries and corrupt militarists. Between 1909 and 1913 they sponsored the publication of the Buddhist canons, the Tripitaka, an enormous scholarly work. In 1915 in the premises of the Aili Garden they established an old-fashioned school, a number of cultural associations and even a publishing house. The latter published learned journals, a fine reprint of the Kangxi dictionary and even a valued Chinese translation of the Koran. Significantly, in the first volume of the Koran, Hardoon - the initiator of the project- is depicted wearing Chinese clothing in the style of a traditional Chinese merchant-philanthropist. The Hardoons also sponsored innumerable Chinese charities and Hardoon was bestowed with many honours by Beijing governments in the early 1920s. At the same time, Hardoon refrained from becoming deeply engaged in Jewish charitable endeavours though towards the end of his life he financed the building of the Beth Aharon synagogue, a magnificent building which was completed in 1927. The death of Hardoon on June 19, 1931 marked the beginning of the end of the Hardoon's fortunes. Shortly after his death scores of distant relatives from Iraq laid claims to the inheritance and at least two cases were heard in the local Shanghai British courts. Luo Jialing then disinherited temporarily her adopted son George Hardoon, the main beneficiary of Silas Hardoon's will, and, being blind she was even tricked into signing a fake will. After Luo Jialing passed away at the end of 1941 the inheritance battle took various turns and twists: in Japanese occupied Shanghai the Chinese Luo children and the Hardoon children signed various secret agreements on how to divide the Hardoon estate among themselves. With the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 everything was, however, swiftly lost as the Hardoon estate consisted almost exclusively of real estate. In 1958 the Sino-Soviet Friendship building was erected on the premises of the Aili Garden, the final sign that Hardoon's fortune had evaporated once Shanghai came under Communist rule. *Dr. Chiara Betta is a historian of modern China presently living and working in Athens (cbetta@ath.forthnet.gr). Her research focuses on Shanghai's social history, the trade diaspora of Baghdadi Jews in China and ethnic nationalism in Chinese Central Asia. She is presently in the process of writing a book on Silas Aaron Hardoon entitled Tycoon: Silas Aaron Hardoon in Old and New Shanghai, 1874-1997.
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