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 chapter is concerned with the history and historiography of the traditional (native) communities of Jews in (Soviet) Central Asia. Most scholarly and popular literature, it argues, portrays these communities as distinct, secluded Jewish ethnic groups, disconnected from each other and from the wider Jewish world. However, a better understanding of their intertwined histories requires the placement of these Jewish groups in a wider cultural and geographical context.

This chapter on Harbin deals with the first city Jews settled in substantial numbers in modern China. Mostly émigrés from Russia, these Jews prospered during the first decades of the twentieth century as Harbin became a main hub for the Trans-Siberian Railway. At its peak, the Jewish community produced as many as twenty newspapers, but with the Japanese occupation of the city in 1932 and even more during the Chinese Civil War, the prosperity ended and the majority of its members left.