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By Root 4356 0

political upheavals in India and China gave these journeys a new finality. When the communist armies entered the port cities of China, the seaboard would close to migration for two generations. Many of the later journeys from Southeast Asia would be passages into banishment or exile. Dying empires and new nations guarded their frontiers jealously. Much was lost in the process. The dream of a greater Malay nation floundered against the Dutch blockade of the Indonesian republic. Prosperous ports became backwaters. Penang, which bridged India, Burma and the Eastern world, faced the decline of its entrepôt trade, and the loss of its special status as a Straits Settlement. Fired by ‘Penang patriotism’, and afraid of being swamped in a Malay-dominated state, the Straits Chinese and other outward-looking traders fought to retain their British citizenship, and campaigned to secede from the new Federation of Malaya. But they could not survive alone. More enclosed state structures were being erected that placed greater importance on internal identity politics, the local defence of status and nationality, than on the pursuit of global sympathies. Wherever new ‘national’ boundaries were drawn, they broke up older communities that had transcended them, and left behind ‘orphans of empire’.4

A cosmopolitan age was drawing to a close. Many of the minorities who had embodied it lost influence, and some were even confronted by the spectre of statelessness. Singapore’s Jews, who numbered over 1,000 in 1941, were mostly of Middle Eastern, and specifically Baghdadi descent. They dispersed across India, Southeast Asia and coastal China in the nineteenth century, where many of them achieved prosperity and status. But in the war, the community began to break up. The story of Alfred Lelah was typical. He was born in Baghdad in 1913, and had first visited Singapore as a young child with his father. This led him to see it as a safe haven when in 1938, worried about the deteriorating relations between Arabs and Jews, he decided to leave Iraq. He created a comfortable niche for himself, trading in Japanese goods which were at the time boycotted by Chinese firms, and re-exporting them to the Middle East. Shortly before the Japanese invasion Lelah evacuated his wife and children to India, but he remained, and was interned along with the rest of the Jewish and European community. When the camps were liberated, and because he carried an Iraqi passport, Lelah was ‘repatriated’ via Cairo to Iraq. Before the war, in an Indian Ocean administered by the British, it would have been relatively easy for him to return to Singapore. But now Iraq lay outside the British orbit, and on arriving in Basra, Lelah was charged for his repatriation costs in local dinars and found that his immigrant status was very insecure. He struggled to reach Bombay to find his wife and children, moving through a succession of grim, isolated transit camps, and eventually secured a passage for his family from Calcutta back to Singapore. When he finally boarded the ship he destroyed his Iraqi passport. On his return, Lelah faced the full force of colonial exclusion: a British immigration officer who had been imprisoned in Changi with him refused an entry visa to his parents. His family was now homeless. They were given refuge by relatives in a house in Bencoolen Street, a Jewish quarter of the city, but they had to share it with its new occupants: the Malayan Communist Party.5 Lelah had travelled to Iraq with a fellow internee, Jacob Ballas, who later described how their world had changed:

The Second World War showed us that we are Jews and we were pushed aside as a Jewish community by the Japanese. And we were considered enemies. When the war was over we saw and couldn’t believe what had happened in Europe, the crematoriums and Auschwitz, and about Hitler and what he did to the Jewish people, which were unbelievable to us, because we’d never experienced any of these.

With this came the realization that disaster could strike anywhere, as it did in Iraq in 1948 when, in the wake of the