原文刊登日期：Sep. 17, 2013
原文擷取出處：FT | Patti Waldmeir
The arrival of year 5774 was celebrated in Shanghai, as in Jewish communities all over the world, with the tones of a cantor reciting Rosh Hashana prayers in a synagogue filled with people honouring one of the world’s oldest religions. Just like everywhere, except that the state owns the synagogue and the Communist party decides when Jews can worship there, ie not often.
隨著猶太曆5774年新年的到來，上海的猶太社區和全世界所有猶太社區一樣，人們聚在為紀念世界上最古老宗教之一而修建的猶太會堂裡吟唱新年禱文。與其他地方的猶太會堂唯一不同的是，這座會堂歸政府所有，猶太人何時可以在裡面舉行宗教活動由共產黨說了算（這意味著頻度不會很高）。
Outside the main gate of the leafy compound in which the Ohel Rachel synagogue is located, a sign says “Shanghai Afforestation Commission” – although, thankfully, there is no indication that the building is used to store agricultural equipment between Jewish high holidays. But the Shanghai Education Administration, which actually owns the building, limits the days on which it does open for worship to a handful. The rest of the time, the city’s best preserved symbol of Judaism is closed both to the public and to the observant.
拉結會堂(Ohel Rachel)坐落在一座綠意盎然的院子裡。但因受到會堂實際擁有者——上海市教育局的限制，會堂一年中對信眾開放的天數屈指可數。在開放日以外的其他時候，公眾和信眾都無法進入這座上海保存最完好的猶太教標誌性會堂。
But don’t worry, it’s not really personal: China is far less anti-Semitic than just plain anti-religious. Chinese Christians have it far worse.
但別擔心，這種安排並非有意針對猶太人。事實上，與其說中國反猶，不如說中國反宗教。
In fact, the story of Jews in China has remarkably little anti-Semitism in it, says Israeli Dvir Bar-Gal, whose vocation is researching and publicising Jewish life in Shanghai – including searching for thousands of desecrated Jewish gravestones that peasants have used as threshold stones, or to beat laundry against, since the cultural revolution.
“There is no anti-Semitism here – here everything is about business,” he says, as he guides us through the streets of Jewish Shanghai on one of his daily tours, which take in some of the most famous buildings on the Shanghai Bund (built by Baghdadi Jews early in the last century) but also the Jewish ghetto.
Bar-Gal 在他的“一日遊”中，領著我們穿行於當年猶太人在上海經常活動的街道，說著：“這裡沒有反猶主義——這兒一切都是生意。”他的路線既包括上海外灘（Shanghai Bund，由巴格達猶太人(Baghdadi Jews)在上世紀初建造）的一些著名建築，也包括當年的猶太人聚居區。
“No other city saved so many Jews,” says Mr Bar-Gal, as he tells the story of Shanghai, port of last resort during the Holocaust. When other nations closed their doors, only Shanghai (then controlled by Japan) did not require visas for entry and imposed no quotas on incoming Jews, more than 20,000 of whom fled there to escape Nazi Europe.
在那場針對猶太人的大屠殺中，上海是猶太人最後的避難所。當其他國家對猶太人關上大門時，只有上海（當時已在日本控制下）不要求猶太人提供入境簽證，也不限制猶太人入境總人數。
Shanghai was no promised land, even so. At the urging of the Gestapo, Japanese forces confined stateless Jews into Shanghai’s own version of a ghetto, in the Hongkou district, where they already had 100,000 Chinese neighbours. One in 10 did not survive the war, but this was through no fault of their hosts: they died of diseases they shared with their cheek-by-jowl local neighbours, or at their own hands when they could bear no more poverty and hunger. But there were no concentration camps and no organised extermination of Jews in Shanghai – a rare human rights story where China ends up on the right side of history.
然而在蓋世太保的敦促下，日軍開始把來自淪陷國的猶太人限制于上海市虹口區的一個聚居區，讓他們與10萬名中國鄰居擠在一起。區域內的猶太人有十分之一未能活著看到戰爭結束，但這不怪為他們提供容身之地的上海。至少上海沒有集中營，也沒有任何組織的清洗猶太人活動。在這段有關人權的歷史章節中，中國罕有地站在了正義的一邊。
Mr Bar-Gal takes us to one of the alleyways of that ghetto, where two men can scarcely walk abreast, where multiple families still crowd into dark, dank, tenement-style houses that can have changed little since the remaining Jews moved out of them after the Communist party won power in 1949.
來到當年上海猶太區裡的一條巷子。那條巷子窄得幾乎無法容納兩個人在裡面並排行走，兩旁的房屋光線昏暗、陰冷潮濕、簡陋至極，卻仍容納了好幾戶家庭。
Today, perhaps 5,000-6,000 Jews make their home in the city, says Mr Bar-Gal. So when the Jewish high holy days rolled round this month, a couple of hundred of them chose to celebrate at Ohel Rachel, built in 1920 by Baghdadi tycoon Jacob Sassoon, and named after his wife.
如今在上海安家的猶太人大約有5000至6000人。上個月的猶太新年，幾百名猶太人選擇在拉結會堂慶祝節日。拉結會堂建於1920年，建造者是巴格達猶太人大 Jacob Sassoon ，他用自己妻子的名字命名了這個會堂。
Bar-Gal Rhonda Levin was there, on the eve of the new Jewish year 5774, sitting in the section reserved for women in the cavernous house of worship, where a row of artificial elephant ear plants runs straight down the centre to keep the men away from their womenfolk. And at the dinner afterwards, over apples dipped in honey and other traditional foods, she explained her theory of the relationship between Jews and Chinese – a theory I heard repeatedly that night.
在巨大的拉結會堂中央，擺著一排人造綠葉植物，將男賓席和女賓席分隔開。在儀式後的晚餐上，Rhonda Levin 一邊吃著蜜汁蘋果和其他猶太傳統食品，一邊表達對猶太人與中國人關係的理解——同樣的見解我在那天晚上聽過許多次。
“To me the Chinese are just like the Jews,” said Ms Levin, who said she was “in town on a trade fair”. “Hardworking, good at business, focused on family,” she said, while another tablemate opined that, per head, Chinese and Jews have more Nobel Prizes than the average guy, too. Those are the same stereotypes some people hold against Jews – but here they are seen as a good thing.
自稱“在這裡參加一個貿易展會”的 Levin 說：“我覺得，中國人跟猶太人很像，工作勤奮，有經商頭腦，家庭倫理。”桌上另外一人提到，中國人和猶太人獲得諾貝爾獎的比例也高於各民族平均水準。這些對猶太人的刻板印象正是某些人反猶的理由，但在中國，這些特點都被視為優點。
At the end of the day, and for whatever reason, China has a lot of time for Jews and Jews have a lot of time for China. And now that China has figured out that there are plenty of tourist renminbi to be made from the story of the Jews of Shanghai – and the Chinese who saved them – there seems a good chance that the mutual admiration society will endure even into 5775, and beyond.
最終，無論如何，中國很重視猶太人，猶太人也很重視中國。而如今既然中國已經發現，“在上海的猶太人”（以及挽救了許多猶太人的中國人）是個不錯的噱頭，能夠讓遊客大掏腰包，兩個民族的這種相互欣賞，看上去很有可能會持續到猶太曆5775年，並一直持續下去。
原文出處 Originated from On the tourist trail of China’s Jews - FT.com
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