This chapter deals with Shanghai – once East Asia’s biggest Jewish community. It emphasizes the diversity of the Jewish community, which emerged with the arrival of Baghdadi Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, was invigorated by the arrival of Russian Jews in the early twentieth century and then more than tripled with the influx of refugees from Central and Eastern Europe on the eve of the Pacific War. The chapter tracks the origins of the Jewish settlement in the city, examines the reasons for its rise and decline and explores the emergence of a new community of Jewish professionals and ex-pats during the last three decades.

The purpose of this book is to explore the emergence of this idea of a shared European legal tradition as the dominant theory of understanding the past and the future of law in Europe during the postwar period. This entails tracing the role that was given to Roman law as the foundation of European law and the shared legacy it provided. Central figures in this transformation were scholars like Franz Wieacker and Paul Koschaker, who would, based on very different positions, be instrumental in the coming resurgence of both the Roman law tradition and the idea of a shared European heritage in law.