Abstract Current debates regarding the genesis of the “Final Solution” from the “Jewish Question” tend to fall into two broad paradigms. The first emphasizes the mutual interplay of the Third Reich’s radical anti-Semitic ideology with increasingly precarious socioeconomic and geopolitical circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe, punctuated by the outbreak of the Second World War. The second highlights the inherently genocidal nature of colonialism transnationally and transhistorically. Despite a similar (if hardly identical) combination of racist and anti-Semitic ideology and wartime circumstances in East Asia, on the one hand, and on the other an imperial context that included the Japanese Empire’s own record of colonial subjugation and racial violence, Japanese authorities in wartime Shanghai proved reluctant to impose exceptional anti-Semitic legislation, much less carry out mass ghettoization or extermination of the Jewish minority. Indeed, whether based on “humanitarian” impulses, a desire to exploit the economic resources and political connections of Jewish refugees, or a pragmatic interest in satisfying their future German and Italian allies, the Japanese worked with the British and French municipal governments and Jewish relief organizations to ensure safe harbor for refugees, locate housing, and quell disease outbreaks among the vulnerable Jewish population. While Japanese-occupied East Asia was certainly not identical to German-occupied Eastern Europe, especially once the Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union, this analysis hopes to restore a sense of historical contingency and local specificity to the above-mentioned debates regarding the role of ideology, war, and empire in generating the Final Solution.
Core et al. (Fri,) studied this question.