Text and Context: Redemptive Societies and New Religious Movements in Modern and Contemporary China and Southeast Asia

During the Second World War the Nazis wiped out the world of Jewish scholarship centred in Talmudic academies or ‘Yeshivot’ in Europe. Remarkably, one academy survived intact.  The Mir yeshiva was based in Byelorussia, but in 1939 fled Stalin to independent Lithuania. The outbreak of war put an end to Lithuanian independence, and placed the large Jewish world of Eastern Europe in an impossible situation, between Stalin and Hitler.  This paper tells the story of how one Yeshiva escaped to China, keeping alive a way of life almost entirely extinguished elsewhere.