The trans-Tasman relationship matured in the 1990s as Australia and New Zealand assumed somewhat more distinct identities, while simultaneously forging a closer partnership on the periphery of the Asia-Pacific region. No one in New Zealand pretends that the relationship with Australia is one of equals. Each is a central but asymmetrical priority for the other in economic, trade, foreign and security policies. The momentous global changes of the 1990s affected the two countries in similar ways and produced many similar responses. Along with the abatement of the Soviet threat from Southeast and North Asia, this gave rise to some fears of the retrenchment of the United States from Asia and to a resulting instability in Asia. Australian and New Zealand concerns therefore focused more sharply on the creation of structures of confidence building and security dialogues in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet New Zealand’s geopolitical distance from Asia relative to that of Australia, as well as New Zealand’s dissociation from the Australia, New Zealand and United States (ANZUS) security alliance for fears of nuclear contamination, took Canberra and Wellington along some separate defence paths.

This chapter introduces the structure of the book, its focus and uniqueness. It then discusses the methodological obstacles embedded in the defintion of a “community” and “Jews” and goes on to present the ten main questions and lines of investigation that guide the book. In its final part, this chapter presents the book’s five sections, along with the history of each major region in Asia, its Jewish communities and a short summary of the relevant chapters.

This chapter discusses the question of Jewish settlement in North Asia from the early nineteenth century onward. Former criminals and their descendants turned into wealthy and proud people who looked down upon their poor brethren in the congested Pale of Jewish Settlement in the western part of the Russian Empire. Their wealth and role in Siberian life found architectural expression in the large and prominent synagogues, communal institutions and private houses that bore clear signs of their owners’ Jewishness.

This concluding chapter examines the underlying commonalities, demographic features and distinctive characteristics of the Jewish settlement in modern Asia as they appear in this volume and analyzes them along the ten lines of investigation presented in the Introduction. This chapter provides also estimates for the size of the various communities since 1850 and offers illuminating insights into the contribution of the Jewish communities to Asia on the one hand and the place of Asia in modern Jewish history on the other hand.