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This article discusses a book titled "China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Encounters" which contains 18 essays on the topic of the interaction between Jews and Chinese culture. The essays cover a range of subjects, including the reception of the Hebrew Bible in China, the influence of Jewish prophets on Chinese intellectuals, the portrayal of Jews in Chinese newspapers, and the survival of the Mir Yeshiva in Shanghai. The book provides valuable insights into the history and cultural exchange between Jews and Chinese, with contributions from both Chinese and Jewish scholars. However, one essay in the book is criticized for its dubious claims and lack of evidence. Overall, the book is a useful resource for those interested in the topic of Jews in China. [Extracted from the article]

The actions of the Japanese government and military before and during the Holocaust saved tens of thousands of Jews in Shanghai from murder by Japan's Nazi allies. Because the Japanese were brutal aggressors in East Asia, because their treatment of the Chinese population was genocidal, because the details and organization of Japanese sexual abuse of Korean women are still matters of international dispute, approaches to the Japanese treatment of European Jewish refugees begin from a negative standpoint. Japanese authorities have not investigated or revealed these actions, and Japanese academics have only just begun to consider this issue worthy of study. Discussion of Japanese policy in Shanghai is often dominated by evidence of antisemitism in Japan, the creation of the Designated Area in 1943 to confine Jewish refugees, and the brutally officious behavior of Kanoh Ghoya. The issuance of life-saving visas by Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul in Kovno, is treated as exceptional humanitarianism. This study focuses on the decisions and behavior of Japanese authorities toward European Jewish refugees in Japan and in Shanghai which allowed them to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of German research and writing about migration has been heavily influenced by politics. The assumptions and methods of successive generations of migration researchers demonstrate the interplay of social science and politics across very different political regimes. Soon after serious research began in the late nineteenth century, migration researchers divided into two camps. Urban statisticians with liberal political ideas used city migration registration data to analyze the circulatory movement of migrants within Germany. Conservative writers used census data to argue that migration was essentially movement from countryside to city, and was politically and morally injurious to the German people. These two sides hardened after World War I, as the conservative side increasingly incorporated racist ideas into their critique of migration. This debate continued even after the Nazis took power in 1933 with the competing publications of Rudolf Heberle and Wilhelm Brepohl. Heberle was forced to leave Germany and Brepohl became the Nazis’ favorite analyst of migration. After 1945, Brepohl retained his standing as a leading migration researcher in the German Federal Republic. The dominance of this conservative interpretation of migration continued into the 1970s. In recent decades, the writings of the liberal statisticians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been rediscovered, and German migration research has shifted again toward a more empirically based understanding of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

DEMOGRAPHIC research is rapidly rewriting the history of the preindustrial European population. Numerous recent local studies contradict the common stereotype of geographical stability; European communities before 1800 housed highly mobile populations. Much of this new research concerns England and France,[1] but significant migratory movement has also been found in early modern Sweden, Scotland, and Japan.[2] This paper surveys the evidence on mobility in Germany since the later Middle Ages, and places it within a broad socioeconomic context.
Such summaries already exist for other western European countries. The treatments of national data, by Clark on England, and Poussou and Hufton on France, constitute an important first step in creating a comparative understanding of preindustrial migration. These studies, however, provide few statistics which accurately measure migration rate, I thank R. Burr Litchfield and Elizabeth H. Tobin for helpful criticism of earlier versions. 1. For England, see Peter Clark, "The Migrant in Kentish Towns 1580-1640," in Clark and Pard Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500-1700 (Toronto, 1972), 117-63; Keith Wrightson, "Aspects of Social Differentiation in Rural England, c. 1580-1660," Journal of Peasant Studies 5 (1977): 33-47; John Patten, English Towns 1500-1700: Studies in Historical Geography (Folkestone, 1978); Peter Lastett and John Harrison, "Clayworth and Cogenhoe," in H. E. Bell and R. L. Ollard, eds., Historical Essays 1600-1750, Presented to David Ogg (London, 1963), 169-80; Edwin Brezette Dewindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth (Toronto, 1972), 166-205. For France, see a variety of articles in Annales de Dmographie Historique (1970), as well as E. Todd, "Mobilit et cycle de vie en Artois et en Toscane au XVille sicle," Annales E.S.C. 30 (1975): 726-44. 2. Robert J. Smith, "Small Families, Small Households, and Residential Instability: Town and City in 'Pre-modern' Japan,"... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines a form of social history, which is historical demography research, and its relation to political concerns. Historical demography cannot ignore politics because it studies behavior of real people living in concrete situations of class relations. But the links between politics and demography must be approached cautiously. Historical demography needs radical social theory but any complete social theory must also include a theory of population. It is concluded that historical demography is a necessary component of social history.