In the 100+ years between 1840 and 1945, Shanghai was home to a number of Jewish diaspora communities, not all of whom came, but all of whom left as refugees. Each of these communities maintained its own traditions and practices; in modern Shanghai only a few historic buildings and sites remain. In this report of my ethnomusicological “study at home,” I use rare ephemera and other documents to reconstruct a now vanished musical world, assembling evidence of actual musical events, their purposes, participants and repertoire. I observe the many and varied ways in which music functioned as a (subjective) marker of cultural identity within a self-enclosed cultural enclave that was characterized more by its heterogeneity than by the commonality suggested by its Jewishness.