Reconstructing the vanished musical life of the shanghai jewish diaspora: A report

Abstract

In the 100+ years between 1840 and 1945, Shanghai was home to a number of Jewish diaspora communities, not all of whom came, but all of whom left as refugees. Each of these communities maintained its own traditions and practices; in modern Shanghai only a few historic buildings and sites remain. In this report of my ethnomusicological “study at home”, I use rare ephemera and other documents to reconstruct a now vanished musical world, assembling evidence of actual musical events, their purposes, participants and repertoire. I observe the many and varied ways in which music functioned as a (subjective) marker of cultural identity within a self-enclosed cultural enclave that was characterized more by its heterogeneity than by the commonality suggested by its Jewishness.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.