Silas Aaron Hardoon

Origins and early life

Silas Aaron Hardoon was born about 1851 in Baghdad under Ottoman rule, into a poor Baghdadi Jewish family, and he remained a practising Jew all his life.

Work and career

The family fled the persecution of Jews in Iraq for Bombay, and from there Hardoon reached Shanghai in 1868, where he entered the Sassoon firm as a rent collector and night watchman. He rose through the company, left it in 1901 to trade on his own account, and bought land along a muddy track in the International Settlement that he then paid to pave with hardwood blocks at his own expense; the street became Nanking Road, the commercial spine of Shanghai, and its frontages made him the largest landowner in the city and reputedly the richest man in Asia at his death.

He married Luo Jialing, a Eurasian Buddhist, in 1886; she never converted, and the couple raised a large number of adopted children of several religions, a household arrangement this fiche records plainly. He gave heavily to Jewish, Buddhist and Chinese causes alike, financing the printing of the Buddhist canon, Chinese schools, and the Beth Aharon synagogue, which he built on Museum Road in 1927. That synagogue mattered beyond his lifetime: in 1941 it housed the Mir Yeshiva, the only European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact, which had fled Poland through Lithuania and Japan to Shanghai.

He served on the boards of both the Shanghai Municipal Council and the French Concession, and he died in Shanghai on 19 June 1931.