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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.
随着犹太历5774年新年的到来，上海的犹太社区和全世界所有犹太社区一样，聚在犹太会堂里吟唱犹太新年祷文。这座会堂是为纪念世界上最古老宗教之一的犹太教而修建的。与其他地方的犹太会堂唯一不同的是，这座会堂归政府所有，犹太人何时可以在里面举行宗教活动由共产党说了算（这意味着频度不会很高）。
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.
拉结会堂(Ohel Rachel)坐落在一座绿意盎然的院子里。院门外标牌写着：“上海市绿化委员会”。但值得庆幸的是，没有迹象显示，在不举行犹太教庆祝活动的时候，这里被用来存放农用设备。但因受到会堂实际拥有者——上海市教育局的限制，会堂一年中对信众开放的天数屈指可数。在开放日以外的其他时候，公众和信众都无法进入这座上海保存最完好的犹太教标志性会堂。
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.
但别担心，这种安排并非有意针对犹太人。事实上，与其说中国反犹，不如说中国反宗教。在中国，基督徒的日子难过得多。
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.
事实上，专门研究和宣传在上海的犹太人生活的德维尔•巴尔-贾勒(Dvir Bar-Gal)称，在华犹太人令人瞩目地几乎没有遭遇反犹活动。巴尔-贾勒的工作之一，是搜寻文革以来流散至民间的犹太人墓碑，这些墓碑被一些农民挖去，用作家里的门槛或洗衣板。
“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.
巴尔-贾勒在他的“一日游”活动中，领着我们穿行于当年犹太人在上海经常活动的街道，一边告诉我们：“这里没有反犹主义——这儿一切都是生意。”他的路线既包括上海外滩（Shanghai Bund，由巴格达犹太人(Baghdadi Jews)在上世纪初建造）边的一些著名建筑，也包括当年的犹太人聚居区。
“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.
巴尔-贾勒为我们讲述上海的故事。在那场针对犹太人的大屠杀中，上海是犹太人最后的避难所。他说：“任何其他城市拯救的犹太人都没有上海多。”当其他国家对犹太人关上大门的时候，只有上海（当时已在日本控制下）不要求犹太人提供入境签证，也不限制犹太人入境总人数。当时，为逃离纳粹控制下的欧洲，总计有逾两万犹太人来到了上海。
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.
即便如此，犹太人在上海也并非高枕无忧。在盖世太保的敦促下，日军开始把来自沦陷国的犹太人限制于上海市虹口区的一个聚居区，让他们与10万名中国邻居挤在一起。区域内的犹太人有十分之一未能活着看到战争结束，但这不怪为他们提供容身之地的上海。他们要么死于疾病（被紧邻的上海邻居们传染），要么死于自杀（因为无法继续忍受贫困与饥饿）。但上海没有集中营，也没有任何有组织的清洗犹太人活动。在这段有关人权的历史章节中，中国罕有地站在了正义的一边。
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.
巴尔-贾勒带我们来到当年上海犹太区里的一条巷子。那条巷子窄得几乎无法容纳两个人在里面并排行走，两旁的房屋光线昏暗、阴冷潮湿、简陋至极，却仍容纳了好几户家庭。自共产党在1949年夺取政权、犹太人搬离以来，这些房屋一直大体维持着原貌。
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.
巴尔-贾勒说，如今在上海安家的犹太人大约有5000至6000人。因此，在上月的犹太新年时，有几百名犹太人选择在拉结会堂庆祝节日。拉结会堂建于1920年，建造者是巴格达犹太人大亨雅各布•沙逊(Jacob Sassoon)，他用自己妻子的名字命名了这个会堂。
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.
在犹太历5774年新年前夕，朗达•莱文(Rhonda Levin)就在拉结会堂，坐在专门的女宾席。在巨大的会堂中央，摆着一排人造绿叶植物，将男宾席和女宾席分隔开。在仪式后的晚餐上，莱文一边吃着蜜汁苹果和其他犹太传统食品，一边表达她对犹太人与中国人关系的理解——同样的见解我在那天晚上听过许多次。
“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.
自称目前“在这里参加一个贸易展会”的莱文说：“我觉得，中国人跟犹太人很像，都勤劳肯干，有经商头脑，家庭观念重。”桌上另外一人提到，中国人和犹太人获得诺贝尔奖的比例也高于各民族平均水平。这些对犹太人的程式化认识正是某些人反犹的理由，但在中国，这些特点都被视为优点。
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.
最终，无论如何，中国很重视犹太人，犹太人也很重视中国。而如今既然中国已经发现，“在上海的犹太人”（以及挽救了许多犹太人的中国人）是个不错的噱头，能够让游客大掏腰包，两个民族的这种相互欣赏，看上去很有可能会持续到犹太历5775年，并一直持续下去。
