Unlike the late 1980s, self-claimed rescuers in the 1990s—as Braham insightfully pointed out—were mainly post-communist countries. Among them are Poland, Albania, and Turkey. All these texts shared a few features in common: Firstly, interpreting individual rescuers or …show more content…
In many cases, some of these factors combined with others beyond this generalization. One example is China, to which diplomacy rather than nationalism was the most immediate concern at the moment. Having newly established relationship with Israel, China in the 1990s was at its early stage of exploring its Jewish history, searching for stories and events that contained the greatest diplomatic value. Scholars as part of the state ideology wrote simultaneously on the Kaifeng Jews, Harbin Jews and Jewish refugees in Shanghai, without a clear orientation except emphasizing on the friendship and similarity between the two people. It was not until around 2005 that the myth of “Shanghai Ark”—how China rescued the Jews—became a metanarrative that shaped the way that the entire Jewish history in China was understood and interpreted in the Chinese mainstream discourse. In the 1990s, although China—like other post-communist countries that Braham described—was experiencing a similar social fluctuation and disillusion caused by the rapid marketization and the redistribution of power, its narrative of Holocaust rescue had little to do with xenophobia and anti-Semitism. On the other hand, without being a communist country, France welcomed in 1993 the first academic accounts of how France as a nation rescued the Jews, a project that predicted three histories of similar kind in the 2000s, one of which by the same