Henry Abramson: They all sit down, and the Japanese say to them, “We want to know, once and for all — why do the Germans hate you so much?”
The Amshinover Rebbe says to them, “Well, it’s obvious. They hate us because we’re Asian, just like you”
Yael Steiner: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Jonathan Schwab: And I’m Jonathan Schwab, and today we have something completely different and something really special. We have our esteemed education lead, Dr. Henry Abramson, joining us today on the podcast.
Yael Steiner: Welcome. We’re so excited to have you.
Jonathan Schwab: Yeah, welcome.
Henry Abramson: I’m so grateful that you invited me. Thank you, I appreciate that. And “now for something completely different”, that was probably a deep cut of a reference, huh? Well, welcome.
Henry Abramson: Can I share with you that listening to your series on American Jewry, you guys are like super graduate students? You call yourselves nerds, but really all I do is give you a little bit of information, hey, this is kind of a cool idea, and you go and do the research. I feel so proud listening to you.
Yael Steiner: Thank you. I’m really honored.
Jonathan Schwab: Wow, thank you so much. That’s really nice. I’m very complimented by that. I like how you stress that we do the research, so if we say something incorrect, it’s easy for you to distance yourself, “I didn’t give them that information, they did their own research.”
Henry Abramson: Plausible deniability. Right, right.
Yael Steiner: Speaking of graduate students, just for people who might not know, a lot of you hopefully know Henry from his amazing YouTube Jewish history videos. They’re a lot of fun, they’re really engaging, he tells some amazing jokes in them too. But just for everyone’s edification: Henry is the dean of Lander College for Men at Touro University, beyond his obviously most important role as education lead on this podcast.
Henry Abramson: Thank you very much.
Yael Steiner: So we’re very excited to hear what you’ve been up to. We know your history expertise has taken you around the world to a lot of really fascinating places, some places that surprise me with respect to their connection to Jewish history. I think that’s what we’d like to dig into today.
Jonathan Schwab: Yeah, we’ve been spending all summer learning about and talking about America, and meanwhile you went halfway around the world, the whole way around the world, to Japan and Korea.
Henry Abramson: And Korea.
Yael Steiner: Were those two different trips, or did you do one right after the other?
Henry Abramson: No, we were in the southern part of the main islands of Japan, and we curved around, and since we weren’t too far from Korea, we hopped over to the peninsula. Actually, a really good reason to do that is the complexities of the international date line and how it affects the observance of Shabbat, so we made sure we spent Sunday in Korea. It was kind of a super-kosher trip. And the Jewish history there is absolutely fascinating. By the way, I should mention, the reason I get to spend my vacation days from Touro University visiting these amazing places is because I have this wonderful side gig as the historian on board for Kosher River Cruises and KRC Expeditions.
Yael Steiner: Amazing.
Jonathan Schwab: Yeah, yeah.
Yael Steiner: It’s just, something in my educational experience, I haven’t heard much about Jewish life in either of those places. But as we’ve gathered these past few years, there seems to be a kernel of Jewish history just about everywhere. So probably a little more than a kernel in these two places, it sounds like.
Jonathan Schwab: Yeah.
Henry Abramson: Absolutely, absolutely.
Jonathan Schwab: You said so much, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything about Jews in Japan. My knowledge is zero. Zero knowledge of Jews in Japan.
Henry Abramson: I’m really happy to give you a tiny crash course, but I don’t want to overdo it, because we may want to devote a whole season to the Jews of Asia, which is really amazing. So just the nickel tour here: there are four periods of Jewish migration to Japan that we know something about. There’s this stereotypical notion that Japan is a closed society, completely insulated from the rest of the world. In fact, there were periods in Japanese history when they did artificially seal the borders and refuse to allow people to come in, or even Japanese people to leave for the continent or for Europe. But it’s more an oscillation between insularity and openness to the outside world that happens over centuries in Japanese culture.
Henry Abramson: Okay, so you want to hear about the four periods of Jewish settlement in Japan?
Jonathan Schwab: Yeah.
Henry Abramson: The first period we know comparatively little about. We don’t have any specific names, and it’s a reasonable conjecture to argue that Jews were in Japan as early as, potentially, the ninth century. We know that because we have significant evidence of Jews traveling the Silk Road all the way to China. Kaifeng is one of the most important centers of Chinese Jewry, it was quite significant, and it survives to the current day, although in a very fractured state in the twenty-first century. The Kaifeng Jewish community has been a well-known thing for centuries, and we know there was extensive trade between the Japanese islands and the mainland, with Jews intrinsically involved in trade. So we have a syllogism that suggests there must have been Jews on Japanese soil at that time, we just don’t have data about it.
Henry Abramson: The next really fascinating period, and I think we’ll dive in deeper, is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Inquisition was at its peak and Jews were traveling all over the world to escape its clutches, in some cases openly reaccepting their Jewish identities and living openly as Jews. We have fascinating evidence of Jews making it all the way to Japan trying to avoid the Inquisition, which is extreme, and amazing. We know about this because they were arrested by the Inquisition when they later traveled to a Catholic country, and we have trial records describing how they’d gone all the way to Japan trying to reassert their Jewish identity. Really fascinating period, primarily sixteenth, seventeenth century, and it’s associated with the Age of Exploration, when Europe began penetrating the Far East to engage in trade and sometimes conquest in Asia.
Henry Abramson: The third period is the late nineteenth century, when a lot of Russian Jews, particularly Ashkenazim, made their way down to places like Harbin, on the mainland, and also traded with Japan through the ports where foreigners were allowed, Nagasaki being the most important of those. You have a real nineteenth-century Jewish community active in Nagasaki, with a cemetery, with lots of Jewish people buried there, and so on. It was quite significant.
Henry Abramson: And then, finally, you have the post–World War II migration, the famous story of the Mir Yeshiva, which spent an incredible season in Japan on its flight from the Nazis. Japan really is an unusual refuge for so many Jewish populations over the millennia. There are Jews in Japan today, of course, primarily in Kobe and Osaka, with a small number in Tokyo. So those are the four periods.
Yael Steiner: What kind of reception did Jews get in each of these four migration periods from the local Japanese population?
Henry Abramson: That’s a really interesting question. The first period, the ninth, tenth century, we just don’t have any data, so we don’t know anything about the reception because we don’t know the specifics of who was coming. The crypto-Jews who came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we know about primarily through Inquisition transcripts, and apparently they were fairly well regarded by their Japanese neighbors, in a handful of cases we have on record. Japanese people were apparently impressed by the Jews’ reluctance to have wild parties. Don’t forget, these are people hiding from the Inquisition, and they already stood out, their complexion looked different from everyone else’s, so they definitely didn’t want to make waves. But the casual references we have suggest they were very well received.
Henry Abramson: We also have fascinating stories. A lot of the reason we’ve discovered these is thanks to a scholar named de Sousa, who has done amazing work studying the slave trade in Japan. In the course of his research he came across references to Jews as slave owners in the region, and some of the case studies he’s developed are remarkable. Judging from those testimonies, it’s fascinating, in a couple of cases the Jews were caught up in it because the slaves they purchased, which was pretty standard for the sixteenth, seventeenth century, were typically Chinese women who, as children, were baptized by their slave traders and then sold, in this case, to Jewish families. Those Chinese, now-Catholic, slaves living in Jewish families actually grew up learning to speak perfect Portuguese, the lingua franca of these Jews, learning all the laws of kashrut, and eventually converting to Judaism, remaining with their family after being emancipated.
Henry Abramson: In one particular case, a woman named Victoria Diaz, that was the name given to her at baptism, actually participated in rescuing her host family from the Inquisition. Absolutely amazing story. So, to answer your question, Yael, from our very limited evidence, it seems the crypto-Jews were received very well in Japan.
Jonathan Schwab: It sounds like they weren’t the only Portuguese expats or explorers making their way to Japan. Were they part of that community of merchants, I assume?
Henry Abramson: Generally speaking, when people talk about “Portuguese merchants,” that’s often just a synonym for Jews. There definitely would have been Portuguese merchants who weren’t Jewish, imagine how badly they’d feel having to say, “I’m actually just Portuguese, not Jewish, excuse me.” There has to be a certain number of them, particularly among the actual sailors on the ships. But the ones who tend to stand out in the records, possibly because of researcher bias, looking for that kind of thing, are overwhelmingly Jewish. We see this in Europe too: whenever records mention “members of the Nation,” it means Portuguese Jews who were technically Christians because they’d been forcibly converted since 1497.
Yael Steiner: So these slave traders, the ones who baptized this woman, Victoria Diaz, they’re Catholics coming from Europe to the Far East. Are they bringing any pieces of the Inquisition with them that’s dangerous for the Jews who fled there?
Henry Abramson: The slave traders were typically indigenous, and they were selling their own neighbors, so to speak, you see this in Africa too, where Africans were involved in selling other Africans. They’d then be shipped off to Brazil, or to South Carolina, or places like that. Many different ethnicities were involved, but at the bottom, it’s all about money, the economics of it.
Jonathan Schwab: You’ve referenced this in some of your videos, that’s the Abramson Rule of History, right? When in doubt, it has something to do with money.
Henry Abramson: Yeah, that is. Thank you for making that connection. When you don’t know what the answer is, just say money, it probably is money. It’s been my painful experience.
Yael Steiner: But the Jews who fled the Inquisition to the Far East weren’t running up against violent Christians?
Jonathan Schwab: We’re just confused, because it sounds like there was no religious persecution in Japan, no governmental or structural persecution of Jews?
Henry Abramson: No, well, this is a bigger question about Japanese history than Jewish history. We should understand that the cultural context of Japan is another planet compared to Europe. The Grundlage, the foundational idea, of that society is Shinto, which we’d call a kind of polytheism, basically nature worship, with tens of thousands of local shrines representing local rivers, ponds, trees, and so on. One feature of polytheism generally, including Western polytheism, is that it tends to be very tolerant, “your god, my god,” you worship this one, I’ll worship that one. Shinto, per se, is very tolerant, mah she’ein ken, in complete contrast to Western faiths, particularly Christianity and Islam, which are much more insistent that everyone belong to their club and not the other one. Shinto isn’t like that. Then you have a layer of Buddhism when it reaches the islands, with many different iterations in Japan.
Henry Abramson: So Jews were just seen as some other worshippers, there wasn’t really any reason to be opposed to them. There is, however, a period when Christians were terribly persecuted by the Japanese government, because they were associated with the leading edge of European colonialism, which the Japanese came to fear. That’s one of the reasons the whole country essentially shut its doors, and there were massacres of Christians, because Christianity had actually become quite popular in Japan, in an attempt to close out this foreign ideology.
Henry Abramson: So the third period is really interesting, because during the Meiji Restoration, in the 1860s, Japan realized, my gosh, we’ve been preserving these amazing, beautiful arts. The Japanese put a tremendous amount of energy into things like rock gardens, I saw people out there literally with tiny scissors, the kind I use to trim my beard, carefully choosing which leaf to cut. Really, really particular.
Henry Abramson: So the nineteenth century, the Meiji Restoration, that’s when they said, “My gosh, we’ve put all this energy into samurai swords, and they’re coming at us with Gatling guns.” So they embarked, with tremendous national unity and discipline, on an attempt to rapidly modernize, to industrialize, to restructure their government. That’s the whole period that becomes a great national, intellectual, and spiritual struggle for the Japanese as they try to figure out how to become modern. They were a very significant imperial power, controlling much of mainland China, rapidly expanding their economy. There’s more to say about it, but it would take us too far afield, it led them to disaster, because they made some ridiculously poor choices during World War II, over and over again, and had to go through another mini Meiji Restoration after the war.
Henry Abramson: With a dramatic new constitution, which, by the way, Jews were very much involved in writing. The current Japanese constitution had Jews at the very top of its editorial community, including one particular Japanese-German woman, I believe her first name was Beate, though I should look it up; maybe we’ll put it in the show notes. She made sure, this Jewish woman, a German expat trapped there during the Holocaust in the 1930s, who’d studied in America and was a rare native Japanese speaker who also spoke perfect English, she was brought back as a woman in her twenties and wrote the section in the Japanese constitution on the equality of the sexes, which was a big change in Japan at the time. But let’s stick with the nineteenth century.
Jonathan Schwab: Well, Henry Abramson: I’m having so much fun talking with you, you guys are such great students. So, the nineteenth century, during the Meiji Restoration, when Japan realized it had to borrow ideas and technology, that’s when they started opening up to Western commerce, particularly in the south. Nagasaki, a deep-water port, was where they let in lots of foreigners, and that’s when the Jews came.
Henry Abramson: A lot of Jews were already in the region, particularly by the time of the Russo-Japanese War, sometimes as conscripts, and they saw a lot of opportunity there. They ended up settling, publishing newspapers, and were very involved in textiles in Japan. All of this was happening through this migration, largely of Russian Jews. I actually have a personal connection to that, although in the opposite direction: in 1904, when war erupted between the Russian Empire and Japan, which has a massive Jewish backstory, a lot of Russians were scrambling to conscript soldiers to send off to fight. My zayde, alav hashalom, didn’t want to get conscripted into the Russian army, so when he saw there was a land-grant program in northern Canada, he took it and went all the way to northern Ontario to set himself up as a farmer. That lasted about five years, he was a very bad farmer, and he ended up going into the shmatte business. He opened a menswear store that my father took over, and I was born there too. So I have that connection to Japan, personally, sort of a reverse connection.
Yael Steiner: Wow.
Jonathan Schwab: Wow.
Henry Abramson: So that’s the third period, when you have lots of Jewish traders coming into Japan and introducing traditional Jewish trades like textiles.
Jonathan Schwab: Are they fleeing Russia too? I know we just talked, in our Emma Lazarus episode, about how starting in 1881 Jews were desperately trying to get out of Russia after pogroms began in earnest. So it sounds like it’s around the same time, and we tend to think of them coming to the US and landing at Ellis Island, but Japan is a lot closer, depending on where in Russia you are, I guess.
Henry Abramson: Yeah, I think, it’s a bit of a schlep on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which was built, I believe, around 1904. It was definitely a super-schlep, probably easier to get to America. I think the word “fleeing” needs a little unpacking, too, because during that big wave of emigration from the former Russian Empire, from 1881 until about 1924, there were Jews who were real refugees fleeing actual harm, families destroyed and so on, but they were a small minority of the vast number who left. The main reason most Jews left is that, like all people, they tend to put down roots where they’ve lived, especially after living in the Russian Empire for centuries, in some of the Polish regions maybe eight or nine centuries. It takes a lot to overcome the inertia of leaving where you were raised, it has to get worse and worse. And what happened with the 1881 pogroms was not so much the violence itself, some estimates put it at forty-two Jews killed, a terrible tragedy for those forty-two people, but a tiny number compared to the violence of the late nineteenth and especially the twentieth century. The main reason Jews began to seriously consider leaving is that they lost confidence in the Russian government as a Rechtsstaat, a society governed by law.
Henry Abramson: So you start asking, “What am I doing here?” and you begin looking for opportunities. You could say a lot of these Jews really were migrating for economic reasons, but the economic opportunities mattered so much because they’d lost faith in the future of the Russian Empire. Long answer, right?
Yael Steiner: Can I jump ahead a few decades? I don’t know how much data we have about this, but when the Japanese Empire allies with Germany during World War II, what does that mean for the physical safety of Jews, if any, within Japan’s sphere of influence?
Henry Abramson: That’s a great question, and it illuminates a really fascinating chapter of Japanese-Jewish history. I’ll try to tell it as compressed as I can, because I’m so excited about it, I learned so much, and I thought it was fantastic. So, you’re right, Japan allies with the Nazis, but not so much around their antisemitic agenda, which they had difficulty really understanding, like, why are we wasting time on this tiny minority, especially this tiny minority in Japan? Not relevant to us, they thought.
Yael Steiner: Like, why would we risk losing the war by keeping the camps running instead of putting that money into fighting?
Jonathan Schwab: Right.
Henry Abramson: Right, that’s more of a German question. Even in Japan it was, “Hey, our main interest is our holdings in mainland China. We want to keep what they called Manchukuo.” Japan is very poor in resources, they needed steel, iron, things only available on the mainland, and they allied with Nazi Germany because they saw that alliance as useful to their imperial goals. The Jewish question was basically left on the table until about 1940, the Japanese had no real interest in pursuing that part of Nazism, however important it was to the Nazis.
Henry Abramson: But the Nazis, with their obsession, sent a figure from Warsaw, known as the “Butcher of Warsaw”, who said to his Japanese allies, “What’s going on? The Führer wants you to take action against these Jews. We know there’s a whole yeshiva of Jews who made their way, thanks to Chiune Sugihara, from Kovno, across to Kobe.” And the Japanese were pressured, in 1941 in particular, to do something about their Jews. So they decided to find out, what is the story with these Jews?
Henry Abramson: This is an amazing story. We all know about Sugihara, an incredible hero, maybe we should do a whole episode on him. But there’s another individual in Japan who’s only recently beginning to get more attention. He wrote a memoir in 1959, in English, that got buried and ignored, and Japanese people have since discovered him and translated it into Japanese. His name is Setsuzo Kotsuji. Fascinating individual, born around 1899. He was a Shinto priest as a child, from the age of nine it was his job to light the altar fires his family had been tending for about eight hundred years. Talk about family pressure. Fast-forward, he ends up converting to Christianity, and then converting to Judaism, becoming Avraham ben Avraham. He was received with tremendous state honors in Israel, and you know how the airspace has been closed during wartime, like during the Yom Kippur War while it was being fought? When they found out Setsuzo Kotsuji had died and wanted to be buried in Israel, they opened the airspace just for his flight so he could be buried with honors. May his memory be a blessing.
Henry Abramson: It’s an amazing story. So, in, I believe, 1909, two things happen to him. First, the emperor dies, and there’s a great general who’s very well regarded, who’s won all kinds of great battles, but every time he suffers a setback in his military career, he asks the emperor for permission to commit seppuku, to take his own life, out of shame for having lost this or that battle. The emperor keeps telling him no, he’s not allowed to resign that way, he has to keep fighting. And he keeps doing amazing things afterward. But then the emperor dies, and the general says, “Now I can take my own life,” and he does. Young Setsuzo thinks, “I don’t understand this, why would you do that? You’re an incredibly talented general, you have so much to your credit, and all you want is an excuse to end your life?” It really bothered him. And that same day, he walks into a used bookstore and finds a Japanese translation of the Tanakh. It blows him away, he’s thirteen years old. He says, “My gosh, they have this idea of a God who actually talks to people and tells them what God wants them to do”, the total opposite of Shinto, of honoring ancestors and place. Judaism has a supernatural figure who has a relationship with humanity. He can’t stop thinking about it.
Henry Abramson: He goes through a very poignant moment, which he describes in his memoir, where he essentially goes off the derech from Shinto, he breaks down and tells his mother, “I can’t light the fire anymore. I can’t do it.” He becomes a Christian priest, explores Catholicism, ends up becoming Presbyterian, and comes to America to study Hebrew, because the part of the Tanakh he especially likes, what he calls the Old Testament, there’s no Jews around for him to talk to about it. He writes his PhD dissertation on the Hebrew language and becomes totally fluent. He does eventually meet Jews, in San Francisco, finds a Reform temple, walks in, and at first they don’t believe him. He says, “I’m just really interested,” and eventually convinces them. They give him a siddur, his first Hebrew, Jewish book, so to speak, besides the Tanakh. He goes back to Japan, marries, has children, and in the 1930s is stationed in Manchukuo.
Henry Abramson: This is when the Japanese begin asking, “Okay, what are we going to do with the Jews? What exactly is the story with the Jews?” They organize various conferences, one in particular in Harbin, on the Chinese mainland but controlled by Japan, and bring all the Jews there to ask, “What’s your deal? Who are you? What do you want?” Setsuzo is invited, and he gets up and gives a speech in biblical Hebrew.
Yael Steiner: That no one understood.
Jonathan Schwab: Yeah.
Henry Abramson: Right, who is this guy, and why does he speak such strange Hebrew? They could barely understand him, but they were really impressed. That’s when he becomes famous among the Jews. A few years later, he’s back in Kobe, and he finds out the Mir Yeshiva is on its way. The Jews of Kobe reach out to him, “We don’t know what to do.” There are fifty Jewish families, and we’re talking about roughly four thousand people, plus the yeshiva, coming to their town, and they need a way to support them, since many don’t have visas, or only have temporary ones. People say Sugihara was the pitcher and Setsuzo was the catcher.
Henry Abramson: What he does is remarkable, he goes to his brother-in-law, a very wealthy man he’s never had a great relationship with, who tends to give him his hand-me-down suits, and says, “I’ve never asked you for anything, but I need a tremendous amount of money to save lives.” His brother-in-law takes a day or two and then gives him a massive bag of money. Setsuzo goes back to Kobe, gathers all the local officials, takes them out, wines and dines them, lots of sake, lots of singing, and on the third day, almost like the Purim story, he says, “I have a favor to ask. There are all these Jews coming here with only three-day transit visas, they’re supposed to go from Russia, through Japan, to Curaçao, but they don’t have transport, they don’t have this, they don’t have that. How am I supposed to manage this?” And they say, “You’re such a good guy, don’t worry, we’ll keep extending the visas”, and that’s exactly what happens. He manages to get their visas extended over and over.
Henry Abramson: There’s another, smaller hero, too, who’s very important. When all these Jews land at a port on the mainland, Vladivostok, if I remember correctly, a Japanese official receives instructions: “There are all these people coming; we don’t think they’re actually going to leave Japan. Do not allow them to board any ships.” And this official, named Nabuto, says, essentially, “Forget that, look at all these people, they look so bedraggled.” And he lets them board. So that’s another small hero who may have resulted in the saving of so many lives. There were even Jews who got on the boat without a visa from Sugihara, stuck going back and forth for weeks between Vladivostok and Tsuruga, in Japan, and Setsuzo arranged visas for them too, so they could come aboard. They ended up in Kobe for several months, right as the Nazis were really pushing the Japanese to do something about their Jews.
Henry Abramson: So here’s the most amazing part of the story, you probably heard some version of it, but I’ll tell it again, because maybe somewhere out there is a Jew who hasn’t. The Japanese police say, “We have to know once and for all, we’re really being pressured by our Nazi allies to do something about our Jews. We don’t understand why they want us to do this so badly. We’ve got other concerns. Why should we do this?” So they say, “Let’s ask the Jews.” They contact Setsuzo, since he’s the intermediary, and say, “Bring the heads of the Jewish community here to Tokyo, we want to interview them.” Setsuzo goes as translator. They bring a small delegation, including the Amshinover Rebbe, the representative of the Jews in Kobe, one of the refugees from Europe. They all sit down, and the Japanese say to them, “We want to know, once and for all, why do the Germans hate you so much?”
Henry Abramson: The Amshinover Rebbe says to them, “Well, it’s obvious, they hate us because we’re Asian, just like you.” And Setsuzo, translating, describes how the Japanese sat back for a moment, thought about it, left the room for about an hour, came back, and said, “Okay, you’re good to go.” They sent them back to Kobe, no questions asked.
Jonathan Schwab: That’s a great answer.
Yael Steiner: Wow.
Henry Abramson: And within a couple of months, Setsuzo was able to get them visas to Shanghai, which was an open city, and they spent the rest of the war there, along with all the other refugees, up to about forty thousand total in Shanghai. Really incredible. After the war, Setsuzo goes on with his life, but he’s so attached to Judaism that he tells his wife, “I can’t help it, I have to become a Jew.” He goes back to Jerusalem and converts with the Beit Din HaGadol in Yerushalayim, taking the name Avraham ben Avraham. That’s basically his story. Amazing, right?
Yael Steiner: Wow. We actually have a plan to do an episode about Harbin next season, but it sounds like we might want to add one about Sugihara and Kotsuji. Is that how you say his name?
Jonathan Schwab: Setsuzo Kotsuji.
Henry Abramson: Yeah. Setsuzo Kotsuji, I have trouble with it too.
Henry Abramson: Can we talk about the Korean Talmud?
Yael Steiner: Yeah, I was actually just thinking about it, because I watched your video about it this morning. When you mentioned that he picked up the Tanakh in a used bookstore, what fascinated me most about what you said about Korea is this: there’s a town filled with used bookstores, filled with Jewish artifacts, and particularly a Korean version of the Talmud. This Korean obsession, or real interest, in the Talmud really fascinated me.
Henry Abramson: I’m glad you bring it up, because I find it fascinating too. It’s kind of a wild story. There’s an important rabbi named Marvin Tokayer, who spent many years in Korea and Japan after World War II and wrote quite a few books. He initially had contact with a somewhat antisemitic Japanese thinker, and we have to understand that Japanese antisemitism is kind of unusual. If you have to choose an antisemitism, this is probably the one to go with, because there’s an expectation that the Jews have some secret sauce that allows them to dominate the globe, and the Japanese wanted to know what that secret sauce was.
Jonathan Schwab: Because at this point they’re thinking, “We need to become an imperial power, so…”
Henry Abramson: Right, that’s the kind of thinking. It’s not necessarily hostile, like “we have to get rid of this threat”, it’s more, “Wow, we admire the Jews, who obviously have some kind of special stuff going on. What exactly is that? We want some of that for ourselves.” So Tokayer essentially translated aggadic stories, the legendary parts of the Talmud, stories of rabbis, and so on, into Japanese. It’s sort of Talmud-light, not the complicated back-and-forth of whose cow gored whose other cow, but the more enlightening, important stories. He put together a collection, and it went viral, people were translating it, bootleg editions circulated one after another. It had a certain impact in Japan, but for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, it had a massive impact in Korea.
Henry Abramson: The Korean “Talmuds” that exist today include a growing academic strand actually trying to determine what the Talmud really is, but a much larger phenomenon is the secondhand Korean translations of the Japanese translations of Talmudic stories from Marvin Tokayer in particular. It’s amazing how pervasive it is in that society. I’ve talked with many Koreans who’ve told me it’s a custom in Korea to give a copy of the Talmud to a couple as a wedding gift, like giving a beautiful edition of the Shas as a gift here.
Jonathan Schwab: We have that custom too, a leather-bound Shas.
Yael Steiner: A leather-bound luxury Talmud.
Henry Abramson: And what’s really striking is the children’s Talmuds, they really want their children to absorb Talmudic values, because they see it as a way to get a leg up in society. I spent a lot of time finding these editions online, then using AI, because my Korean is almost nonexistent, Jonathan Schwab: Mm.
Henry Abramson: I know maybe six phrases, because I worked in a Korean restaurant as a teenager. But at any rate, I went and translated the publishers’ blurbs describing these books into English. Some of what they say is that if you study this book, you’ll become wealthy, you’ll become powerful, and you’ll gain something they call, I had to leave the term in Korean characters when I asked my AI, cho seysul, which apparently means something like savoir-faire, a kind of charisma, so that people see you as cool. If you study the Talmud, apparently, you’ll gain all these wonderful personal attributes.
Yael Steiner: I was going to say “rizz,” or “aura.” Do your kids say you have rizz? Do they say “our dad has so much rizz”?
Jonathan Schwab: Wow.
Henry Abramson: Rizz, rizz, I’d like to use that word, but I know…
Jonathan Schwab: Our Gen Z listeners will love that reference.
Henry Abramson: My kids say cool things to me, and I try to remember the phrase, but by the time I use it, it’s already out of date.
Yael Steiner: Well, if I know what it is, it’s definitely not cool anymore.
Henry Abramson: But the point is, they really want their children to learn Talmud, and there are so many examples of children’s Talmud, even, amazingly, a prenatal Talmud. The blurbs actually tell mothers to read the book to their unborn child, and it comes with a CD you can play, like Baby Einstein.
Jonathan Schwab: Mm-hmm. It’s like Baby Einstein.
Yael Steiner: It’s Baby Einstein.
Henry Abramson: It’s supposed to improve your child’s cognitive development, and it really is a cultural thing in Korea. Now, one last observation. I read a really important Association for Jewish Studies review article by a scholar named Gribetz, she’s at Yale now, I’ve forgotten her first name, sorry, and another scholar named Kim.
Yael Steiner: Is this…
Jonathan Schwab: Sarit Gribetz.
Yael Steiner: Sorry, sorry.
Jonathan Schwab: Sarit Gribetz lives across the street from me.
Henry Abramson: Oh my gosh, well, tell her I love that article. I’ve actually emailed with her, but tell her again. So she makes a very salient observation: in Western culture, when you look at surveys of Western literature, the Talmud is never included in the syllabus, you don’t see a chapter on the Talmud in those big Oxford anthologies of Western literature, even though it’s a massively important body of literature that had a tremendous impact on millennia of civilization. Ironically, the Koreans have integrated the Talmud into their understanding of Western literature before the West has. I thought that was a really important observation. Sorry, Yael, you were going to say something.
Yael Steiner: Fascinating. Probably because they’re not as saturated in virulent antisemitism as the West is.
Henry Abramson: Could be, ken shehu.
Jonathan Schwab: So I have a lot of questions about this Talmud, because my assumption was that it was especially the legalistic parts, the stereotype of the guys, and women too, but more typically guys, who don’t even go to college, who get a bachelor’s degree in Talmudic law, and spend their whole life studying Talmud, then get a 180 on the LSAT because they know legal reasoning so well. That’s what I thought the Korean fascination was with, this really well-developed system of law where you can see them argue it out. But you’re saying it’s the stories part?
Jonathan Schwab: Interesting, those are the parts we skip most of the time.
Henry Abramson: Yep, and not even just that. I think that’s unfortunate, actually, because those stories are the part I love most. But no, it’s mainly the aggadah, the legendary portions. And they’re not even that particular about whether something is actually Talmudic, they’ll frequently quote passages from the Tanakh as if they’re part of the Talmud. One especially revealing instance: there’s a story where Marvin Tokayer, the author of the first edition, happened to mention, I’d never heard this before, the idea that the first page of the Talmud is blank, and so is the last page. Not sure how accurate that part is, but he told his interviewer that this is meant to show you already have the first part of the Talmud within you, you already have page one, and you have to add the final page. So the interviewer asked, “So what would you add to the Talmud?” And on the spur of the moment, Tokayer told a story about something that happened with him and his brother in a canoe, when they got lost. That story ended up incorporated into these bootleg copies of the Talmud, as if it were part of the canon, when really it’s part of Tokayer’s own writing, not actually the Talmud. But it shows this openness to the Talmud.
Henry Abramson: When I went to these used bookstores, which were fantastic in Korea, in a place called Busan, with a whole street of them, any bibliophile knows used bookstores are better than regular bookstores, because that’s where you get the thrill of discovery. I’d go in with my phone and Google Translate and say, “Do you have any copies of the Talmud?” and they’d say, “Sure,” and show me a shelf of twenty-five books. I went into one children’s bookstore, and my wife had to pull me out because I was about to buy an eighteen-volume hardcover set of children’s Talmud books, I’d already bought a full backpack of books. It’s amazing how saturated they are with so many different editions.
Jonathan Schwab: Is there a critical edition of any of this, here’s the Korean Talmud, and here’s its source, or what’s changed in the story?
Henry Abramson: In the Gribetz and Kim article there’s some discussion of how it compares to the actual Talmud, a small amount. I’m not aware of anyone who’s done a more in-depth study, because you can just look at the table of contents and see right away this isn’t exactly what we call Talmud, but it’s derived from it. Here’s another interesting observation, you know how, here in the West, we have this tendency to fetishize Eastern things, to “orientalize” them? I don’t mean that negatively, we have, for instance, forms of yoga that nobody in India would recognize.
Jonathan Schwab: Like people with tattoos of characters that don’t mean what they think they mean.
Yael Steiner: Right, tattoos that don’t mean the thing they’re supposed to mean.
Henry Abramson: Right, right. What we do to Eastern cultures here in the West, they’re doing, to a certain degree, to the Talmud, fetishizing it, giving it qualities it doesn’t really have, but it’s still lots of fun.
Jonathan Schwab: And is it, go ahead, Yael.
Yael Steiner: I was going to say, I can already see myself getting off this recording and Googling “Korean Talmud,” and Google’s going to say, “Did you mean Koren Talmud?”, but that’s not what I’m looking for.
Jonathan Schwab: Is the idea, then, I don’t know, reading these stories, is there almost a magical, good-luck quality to them, or are they stories with clear morals, and that’s why they’re important?
Henry Abramson: I think it’s more the latter than the former. These are adapted for children in many cases, and I can’t say I’m well read in the Korean Talmud, since I basically have to run every page through AI to read it. But I think there’s a great PhD dissertation here in Rezeptionsgeschichte, the reception history of a book in another culture.
Jonathan Schwab: For someone who reads Korean and Aramaic, this is, Yael Steiner: There’s somebody out there who…
Jonathan Schwab: There’s got to be somebody, yeah.
Henry Abramson: Yeah, there’s got to be. It’s so much fun talking to you both.
Yael Steiner: This was really great. I wish we had many more hours to do this, hopefully we will in the future, but unfortunately not today. These trips sound amazing; I wish I could join one day. They’re just unbelievable.
Henry Abramson: Amen, there’s a lot of history. You know what, let’s talk offline, because we occasionally bring influencers along on these trips, and I think you might even qualify.
Jonathan Schwab: Wow.
Yael Steiner: That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
Yael Steiner: Sounds wonderful. Thank you for joining us, Henry, this was really amazing.
Henry Abramson: It’s my pleasure, really. Thank you so much.
Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds, brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review. It really helps new listeners find the show.Check out unpacked.media for everything Unpacked related and go to Spotify or YouTube to watch our latest videos.Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds at unpacked.media. We really love to hear from you.
Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Yael Steiner.
And by me, Jonathan Schwab. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson and our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht.