The story began innocently enough, with a social-scientist-cum-real-estate-agent named Zhang Tiejiang, who discovered the prior Jewish ownership of many historic homes that he was supposed to demolish for a city planning project in 1992. Taking an interest, he studied the Jewish graves in Huangshan cemetery, translating their Russian text with the help of a computer program. His timing was auspicious: 1992 was the year China established diplomatic relations with Israel, and in 1999 China’s premier made his first official visit to Jerusalem. Also auspicious: Heilongjiang Province, long reliant on declining industries like coal mining, had hit an economic slump. In 1999 Zhang Tiejiang published his idea in an article for a state news agency titled “Suggestions for the Study of Harbin Jews to Quicken Heilongjiang Economic Development.”

  This article made its way to the higher-ups in the Chinese government in Beijing, who dispatched an official to Heilong­jiang’s Academy of Social Sciences to “intensify the study of the history of Harbin Jews.” A Center for Jewish Studies was established, with a massive budget enabling unqualified people producing minimal research to enjoy trips abroad. “Develop[ing] the travel industry and attracting business investments,” the center’s original website announced, was “the tenet of our existence and purpose.” In years following, the government’s $30 million produced far more tangible results, including not only the cemetery refurbishment but also the transformation of the New Synagogue into a Jewish museum, the reconstruction of the Old Synagogue and the Jewish secondary school, and the labeling of formerly Jewish-owned buildings as landmarks in the city’s historic heart.

  This attempt to “attract business investments” by researching Jewish history seems, to put it gently, statistically unsound. Among the tens of millions of tourists to China each year, forty thousand annual Israeli visitors and even fewer Jewish tourists from elsewhere amount to a rounding error. And the idea that Israeli or other Jewish-owned companies would be moved to invest in Heilongjiang Province out of nostalgia for its Jewish heritage seems unlikely at best. The only way to understand this thinking is to appreciate the role Jews play in the Chinese imagination.

  Most Chinese people know next to nothing about Jews or Judaism. But in a 2009 essay reviewing trends in Jewish studies in China, Lihong Song, a professor of Jewish studies at Nanjing University, pointed out a common pattern in what they do know. “My students’ first association with Jews is that they are ‘rich and smart,’ ” he noted. “The shelves of Chinese bookstores,” Song explained, “are lined with bestsellers on Jewish subjects.” What Jewish subjects might those be? Well, some of those bestselling titles are Unveiling the Secrets of Jewish Success in the World Economy, What’s Behind Jewish Excellence?, The Financial Empire of the Rothschilds, Talmudic Wisdom in Conducting Business, and of course, Talmud: The Greatest Jewish Bible for Making Money. Song claimed that this was not antisemitic, but rather “some sort of Judeophilia.”

  At a 2007 “International Forum on Economic Cooperation between Harbin and the World’s Jews,” held in Harbin with dozens of invited Jewish guests who ranged from the Israeli ambassador to a group of Hungarian Jewish dentists, Harbin’s mayor welcomed participants by citing esteemed Jews such as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller (neither of whom was Jewish). He then announced that “the world’s money is in the pockets of the Americans, and the Americans’ money is in the pockets of the Jews. This is the highest acclaim and praise to Jewish wisdom.”

  Former Harbin Jews often remembered Harbin as a kind of paradise. “They owned the town,” Irene Clurman, a daughter of former Harbin Jews, told me, describing the nostalgia that many “Harbintsy”—ex-Harbiners—expressed for their beloved city. “It was a semicolonial situation; they had Chinese servants and great schools and fur coats.” Or in the words of her grandmother Roza (later Ethel) Clurman in a 1986 interview, “Harbin was a dream.”

  Roza Clurman’s husband—Irene Clurman’s grandfather—was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Harbin during the Japanese antisemitic reign of terror, after which his lucrative business (he introduced indoor plumbing to Manchuria) and his high-end rental building were confiscated, leaving his family with nothing. And the Clurman family’s horror stories had begun much earlier: Roza Clurman was five during the 1905 Odessa pogrom, hiding in an attic for days on end while the neighborhood was ransacked and her neighbors murdered. The move to Harbin didn’t quite prevent her family from being targeted, given that her husband also wound up murdered. But “my grandmother absolutely had a nostalgia for Harbin,” Irene Clurman insisted. In her interview, Roza Clurman admitted that “everything changed” in Harbin, but she spent far more time describing its glory: the steaks the family ate, their household staff, the children’s private lessons.

  The ascent from pogroms to private lessons was dizzyingly fast, obscuring the community’s equally precipitous decline. One Harbintsy descendant, Jean Ispa, told me how her father, an orphan, made his way to Harbin alone solely to study music, since Russian conservatories didn’t take Jewish students. Running away from an orphanage, he collected scrap metal to buy a ticket to Harbin, where he was promptly jailed for entering the country illegally—and where musicians in the Jewish community bailed him out. “He was sixteen when he made this journey,” Ispa told me in wonder. “He gave concerts in Harbin. I even have the programs he played.” Another Harbin exile, Alexander Galatzky, was eight during the pogroms of the 1919–1920 Russian Civil War, when he and his mother repeatedly barricaded themselves in their apartment in Ukraine and listened to the screams of their neighbors being murdered and raped. When the ship fare his father sent from New York was stolen, their only hope was to go east to Manchuria, where his father planned to meet them. In reminiscences he wrote down for his family, Galatzky described boarding a cattle car to leave Ukraine: “Mother has a bundle of old clothes with her. The soldier on guard of the cattle car is trying to take it from her. She clutches at it, crying, kissing the soldier’s hand. We have no money or valuables and the old clothes can be bartered for food en route. Without them we would starve.” After a life like that, Manchuria was paradise.

  Of course, one could tell the same story about Russian Jews who emigrated to New York. But in Harbin, where Russian Jews created their own Russian-Jewish bubble, their sense of ownership and pride was greater—and that pride made the story of their community’s destruction into a footnote. Of the Harbintsy descendants I interviewed, most mentioned friends or relatives who were kidnapped, tortured, or murdered during the Japanese occupation. All had their family’s hard-earned assets seized by Manchuria’s various regimes. But in the next sentence they would tell me, again, how Harbin was “a golden age.” An entire organization in Israel, Igud Yotzei Sin (Association of Chinese Exiles), exists solely to connect homesick “Chinese Jews” around the world with one another through networking, social events, scholarships, and trilingual newsletters which run to hundreds of pages. Until recent years, members gathered weekly in Tel Aviv to play mah-jongg, drink tea, and reminisce about the wonders of Harbin. Teddy Kaufman, who ran the organization until his death in 2012, published a memoir entitled The Jews of Harbin Live On in My Heart, extolling the Jewish paradise. His father was the community president who’d wound up in a gulag.

  Harbin’s Jewish “golden age” lasted less than one generation. Even before the Japanese occupation, things were unpleasant enough that leaving was, for many, a foregone conclusion. Alexander Galatzky, the boy whose mother bartered old clothes to feed him on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, kept diaries as a teenager from 1925 to 1929 that his daughter Bonnie Galat recently had translated. The diaries revealed an assumption that most teenagers don’t live with: everyone planned to leave, and the only question was where to go. He counted off his friends’ departures—to Palestine, to Russia, to Australia, to America—and waxed nostalgic about leaving, as he capitalized in his diary, “FOR GOOD.” “My old classmate Misha leaves for Paris today,” he wrote, describing one of many permanent goodbyes. “For good, I think . . . It’s a scary word, ‘FOR GOOD.’ Biro left, and Pinsky, and I think I’m leaving next year too . . . and not with Mom and Dad, but alone.” Galatzky’s fears came true; the following year he left for Paris via train and ship through Shanghai, Ceylon, and Suez. Later he wound up supporting his parents, after they fled Harbin with little more than old clothes.

  Many came to recall the community’s destruction as if it were almost expected, like snow or rain. Alex Nahumson, who was born in Harbin and emigrated in 1950 at the age of three with his family, reports only “very happy memories” discussed by his parents. “The Chinese never did anything bad to us, just the Russians and the Japanese,” he told me by phone in Hebrew from his home in Israel—despite the fact that his family’s assets were plundered by the Maoist regime. “When my parents talked about Harbin, they only talked about their dacha [country home], the theater, the opera,” he averred. When I brought up the kidnappings during the Japanese occupation, he verbally shrugged. “That’s just crime,” he insisted. “Crime happens everywhere.” His parents survived all of these regime changes, he said cheerfully, “between the raindrops”—a Hebrew expression for evading repeated disaster. Losing everything they had was inevitable, like the weather. As the Russian Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem once put it, Jewish wealth is like snow in March, melting and washing away. Later in our conversation, Nahumson mentioned, almost casually, that his own grandfather was kidnapped and tortured by the Japanese.

  It is hard to describe what, exactly, was wrong with Harbin’s New Synagogue Jewish Museum—or as it said on my ticket, the “Construction Art Museum,” a name that comes from the building’s current ownership by the Harbin Municipal Construction Department. One feels the overwhelming need to applaud this (mostly) Jewish museum’s mere existence, to carefully delineate its many strengths, to thank the locals for their bountiful goodwill. For it did have enormous strengths, and the goodwill was abundant. Still, from the moment I arrived at the large domed building and entered its wide-open space with an enormous Star of David decorating the floor—it only occurred to me later how ridiculous this detail was, since the floor would have been covered with seats when the synagogue was in use—I felt that creeping “Jewish Heritage” unease, the unarticulated sense that despite all the supposed goodwill, something was clearly off. But then my actual Jewish heritage kicked in, consisting of centuries of epigenetic instincts reminding me that I am only a guest. I swallowed my discomfort and started snapping pictures.

  The Jewish history exhibition filled the second floor—the women’s gallery of the synagogue. There, in vast arrays of photographs, I observed smiling, well-dressed people building synagogues, celebrating weddings, attending Zionist meetings, patronizing a library, posing in scout uniforms, working in a hospital, rescuing neighbors from a flood, and skating on the river. The displays were informative enough, even if their translated captions sometimes disintegrated into word salad. Beneath one portrait of a man wearing a prayer shawl and a tall clerical hat, for instance, the English caption read, “Judean assembly mark in harbin choir leading singer gram benefit maxwell minister radical.” I asked Derek what the original Chinese caption meant. He smiled apologetically and said, “I’m not sure.”

  It was all admirably thorough, if a little garbled. But toward the far end of the gallery, on the part of the floor that had been constructed over the alcove where the ark for Torah scrolls once stood (the actual alcove for the ark is now a foyer leading to a restroom), I entered a set of little rooms whose contents puzzled me.

  The first room was dominated by a large wooden desk, with a life-size white plaster sculpture of a bald and bearded Western man seated before an ancient paperless typewriter. The brass plaque in front of him read, “Real workplace of Jewish industrialist in Harbin.” Confused by the word “real,” I asked Derek if this was supposed to be a specific person. He glanced at the plaque and explained, “It is showing a Jew in Harbin. He is doing business.”

  In subsequent rooms, more tableaux of frozen Jews unfolded. There were life-size plaster Jews frozen at a grand piano, a life-size plaster Jew frozen in a chair with knitting needles, and two child-sized plaster Jews frozen on a bed, playing eternally with plaster blocks. This, the brass plaque informed me, was “The Display of the Jews’ Family in Harbin.” The plaque continued: “At the first half of the 20th century, not only was the display of the Jews’ family simple, but also practical and the children lived a colorful life there.” The children’s blocks, like the children, were devoid of color. Later I discovered the unnamed inspiration for this display: Harbin’s annual Snow Sculpture Park, full of figures carved from blocks of manufactured snow.

  After the rooms full of frozen Jews, the photographs of mostly dead Jews resumed, dominated by “real Jewish industrialists” who “brought about numerous economic miracles” in Harbin, including the founders of Harbin’s first sugar refinery, first soybean-export business, first candy factory, and China’s first brewery. The wall text explained how Harbin “offered the Jews an opportunity for creating new enterprises and providing a solid foundation for their later economic activities in Europe and America.” This was true, I suppose, if one thinks of Harbin as a kind of business-school exercise, rather than a place where actual Jews created actual capital that was subsequently seized, transforming them overnight into penniless refugees, if they were lucky.

  One enterprise prominently featured in the museum, for instance, was the Skidelsky Coal Mine Corporation. The Skidelskys were among the “Siberian Jews” who provided the initial capital for Harbin—although “initial capital” is an understatement. In an account of his family’s holdings in Prospect magazine, Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords and a Harbin native, described how his great-grandfather Leon Skidelsky held the contract in 1895—prior to Harbin’s founding—to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Manchuria to Vladivostok. The Skidelskys were one of only ten Jewish families allowed to live in Vladivostok, since the railroad desperately needed them. They held long-term concessions on three thousand square kilometers of timber in Siberia and Manchuria, and enough long-term mining concessions to make them one of the region’s largest employers. They continued supplying the railroad as it changed hands from the Russians to the Chinese to the Japanese. In 1924, Leon’s son Solomon even charmed a local warlord into selling him a thirty-year lease on a mine, by repeatedly and deliberately losing to him in poker.

  In 1945, Solomon Skidelsky was still nine years shy of running out the lease when the Soviets sent him and his brother to die in a gulag, and Communists—first Soviet and then Chinese—seized the mines. Decades later, Lord Skidelsky filed his claim. “In 1984,” Lord Skidelsky recounted, “I received a cheque for 24,000 English pounds in full settlement of a claim for compensation that amounted to £11 million.” When he visited Harbin in 2006, local TV crews trailed him and presented him with flowers. The flowers were worth somewhat less than £11 million.

  When I expressed my sense that the museum was telling only part of a story, Derek raised an issue that Ben-Canaan brought up with me repeatedly, that the museum focused exclusively on wealthy people—thus underscoring the idea that Jews are rich. “Obviously there were poor Jews here too,” Derek pointed out. “The building across the street was the Jewish Free Kitchen.”

  It was only as I was leaving, through the enormous mezuzah-less door, that I looked back at what was once the sanctuary and understood what, exactly, was wrong. Above the vast Star of David floor, the museum was dominated by an enormous blown-up photograph of a 1930s farewell banquet, its rows of Harbin Jews in their tuxedos gathered to say goodbye to yet another Jewish family fleeing, as Alexander Galatzky had put it, “FOR GOOD.” Suddenly the Jewish Heritage miasma melted away, and the realization hit me: Nothing in this museum explained why this glorious community no longer exists.

  Harbin is a rather hideous city, its Soviet-style apartment blocks stretching as far as the eye can see. But the city’s historic heart has been restored so thoroughly that if not for the Chinese crowds and street signs, one could imagine being in prewar Europe. The restoration included turning the historic tree-lined Central Avenue into a pedestrian mall that doubles as an outdoor architectural museum, where each original building—80 percent of which were once Jewish-owned—is labeled with a plaque describing its past. Unfortunately the restoration also included installing loudspeakers that constantly blast high-volume Western music. When I arrived, they were playing “Edelweiss”: Bless my homeland forever. The music made it hard to think.

  Derek pointed out the various restored buildings on Central Avenue and elsewhere in the neighborhood: the Jewish-owned pharmacy, the Jewish Free Kitchen, the Jewish People’s Bank, and many private homes, all now occupied by other enterprises. The “Heritage Architecture” plaques affixed to each historic building couldn’t have been more direct: “This mansion,” a typical one read, “was built by a Jew.”

  The most impressive Central Avenue building “built by a Jew” was the Modern Hotel, a building whose story captures the Harbin Jewish community’s roller coaster of triumph and horror. The Modern Hotel was built by the Jewish entrepreneur Joseph Kaspe, and from the moment it opened in 1909, it was the height of Manchurian chic. The Modern wasn’t merely a high-class establishment frequented by celebrities and diplomats. Its premises also included China’s first movie theater, and the hotel frequently hosted theatrical performances, lectures, and concerts with seating for hundreds. Kaspe also created other Modern-labeled luxury products like jewelry and high-end food. In other words, the Modern was a brand.

  When the Japanese occupied Harbin, they immediately set their sights on the Modern. But Joseph Kaspe was one step ahead of them. His wife and two sons had moved to Paris, where they had acquired French citizenship—so Kaspe put the Modern in his son’s name and raised the French flag over the hotel. He assumed the Japanese wouldn’t risk an international incident just to steal his business. He was wrong.