The Jewish method of learning is recognized in South Korea as helping to develop young minds to reach their potential. It is introduced early there in Talmudic studies to expound on children's secular education. Hardly "mind control." More like "mind expanding."
"How the Talmud Became a Best-Seller in South Korea
'About an hour’s drive north of Seoul, in the Gwangju Mountains, nearly fifty South Korean children pore over a book. The text is an unlikely choice: the Talmud, the fifteen-hundred-year-old book of Jewish laws. The students are not Jewish, nor are their teachers, and they have no interest in converting. Most have never met a Jew before. But, according to the founder of their school, the students enrolled with the goal of receiving a “Jewish education” in addition to a Korean one. ...
Park Hyunjun founded the school in 2013, and now runs it with his son, the dean. The two were trained at the Shema Education Institute, which was started by a Korean reverend and brings Christians from South Korea to Los Angeles, so that they can witness firsthand how Jews study, pray, and live. The reverend’s thesis is that the Jews have thrived for so many years because of certain educational and cultural practices, and that such benefits can be unlocked for Christians if those practices are taught to their children. During the drive from Seoul, the dean told me that he was worried about what I would think of his school’s Jewish classes. “I don’t always know exactly what Jewish education is,” he said. ...
Outside, over bulgogi, Park Hyunjun laid out the goals behind his curriculum. “I would like to make our students to be people of God and to have charity just like Jewish people,” he said. Before I left, the dean pulled out a crate of Talmud books in Korean that the school used. There were forty-page books with more cartoons than words and two-hundred-and-fifty-page books that included lesson plans and study questions. He conceded that he wasn’t sure if they had “the same concept of Talmud” as the Jews do. “Our Talmud book,” he said, “is kind of a story about our life.”
In 2011, the South Korean Ambassador to Israel at the time, Young-sam Ma, was interviewed on the Israeli public-television show “Culture Today.” “I wanted to show you this,” he told the host, straying briefly from the topic at hand, a Korean film showing in Tel Aviv. It was a white paperback book with “Talmud” written in Korean and English on the cover, along with a cartoon sketch of a Biblical character with a robe and staff. “Each Korean family has at least one copy of the Talmud. Korean mothers want to know how so many Jewish people became geniuses.” Looking up at the surprised host, he added, “Twenty-three per cent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish people. Korean women want to know the secret. They found the secret in this book.”
His comments were widely shared online. “Reports of the Talmud being a national classic in South Korea have been floating around for several years, but it’s now official,” announced the online newspaper Arutz Sheva. Ynet, one of Israel’s most popular news sites, reported the Ambassador’s comments in a piece that described South Korea as having “more people who read the Talmud—or at least have a copy of it at home” than Israel. A few smaller outlets were skeptical. An online outfit called Jewish Magazine argued that the “story about the Koreans studying Talmud has been blown out of proportion.” Mostly Kosher, a blog written by an Israeli lawyer, questioned whether the Korean Talmud was the same as the Jewish Talmud. ...
It was hard to imagine South Koreans halfway around the world deriving any value from this book without a guide like the rabbi at my Jewish day school. But, as it happens, they do have a guide: a seventy-eight-year-old rabbi named Marvin Tokayer, who lives in Great Neck. ...
According to Tokayer, “5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom: Secrets of the Talmud Scriptures” received glowing reviews shortly after it was published, in 1971. Tokayer estimates that it has gone through seventy printings and sold about half a million copies in Japan; his most recent royalty check came in October. He went on to publish more than twenty books about Judaism in Japanese, covering such topics as the Torah, Jewish education, and Jewish humor. ...
Between 2007 and 2009, Reverend Yong-soo Hyun, the man behind the Shema Education Institute, published, in six volumes, his own “official” version of the Korean Talmud. He sought to clean up (to “kosher,” as Tokayer put it) inaccuracies in the pirated books, and he asked Tokayer for help correcting certain details. To signal his version’s authority, he included a picture of himself with the rabbi, as well as a letter by Tokayer. ...
Tokayer could not believe that the book he had written nearly forty-five years earlier in Japan had achieved mainstream popularity in South Korea, that it was his book the Ambassador had been referring to on Israeli public television. But with every conversation I had and every bookstore I visited there, it became increasingly apparent that Rabbi Tokayer had unknowingly helped to create a movement thousands of miles away.
In June, 2014, I accompanied Jung Wan Kim, an Incheon-based P.R. manager and Talmud teacher, on a visit to Chul-whan Sung, then the head of the book-publishing division of Maekyung Media Group, one of the largest South Korean media companies. Sung’s office was in downtown Seoul. Kim wore a purple kippa. (“It’s my branding,” he explained, “so that people know I am a Talmud expert.”) He and a colleague had written two books about Jewish peer learning, which Maekyung had published, and he was now pitching another book: a Korean translation of the “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Talmud.” Sung was hesitant. He conceded that the Jewish learning books sold very well—more than fifty thousand copies, Jung Wan Kim’s co-author would later tell me—but he worried that the Talmud market was oversaturated. Sung estimated that “over eighty per cent of the country” had read most of Tokayer’s Talmud in some form or another.
While that statistic is difficult to verify, the book is indeed ubiquitous in Seoul. Every bookstore I visited in and around the city, including a small kiosk at the airport, sold at least one version of the Talmud. Rabbi Litzman, the Chabad rabbi in Seoul, told me that copies of the book are available in convenience stores and in some train-station kiosks. According to the Jewish Chronicle of London, the book can be found in book-vending machines. Most people I met in South Korea had at least heard of the Talmud, even if they had not read it. Aviya Amir, a master’s student researching the translation of the Talmud and its popularity in Japan and South Korea, told me that, in Japan, “nobody has a clue” what the Talmud is. “It’s not like in Korea,” she said, “where you ask random people on the street and tell them you’re researching Talmud, and they go, ‘Ah, Talmud.’”
Lee Kyou-Hyuk, a famous speed skater who carried the South Korean flag at the 2014 Olympics, recommended the Talmud to his fans. “I read the Talmud every time I am going through a hard time,” he told reporters. “It helps to calm my mind.” Kyobo, the largest bookstore in South Korea, keeps a list of the top two thousand “steady-sellers,” books that have sustained strong sales for multiple years. Six different Talmuds are currently on the list. Dr. Jeongso Jeon, a professor of children’s education at Bucheon University, near Seoul, said that, if you consider all of its versions, the book is “the second-best-seller in South Korea,” behind the Bible. (Another scholar I spoke to disputed this claim as an exaggeration.)
More than eight hundred different books, from more than three hundred publishers, are returned when you search for “Talmud” in the National Digital Library of Korea, an online directory of the National Library of Korea and the National Library for Children and Young Adults. Of those, a hundred and sixty-nine list Rabbi Tokayer as the author. Even when the books list other authors, the stories are more often than not borrowed from him; in some cases, the tables of contents have been directly copied from his books. But Young-sam Ma, the former Ambassador to Israel (he is now the Ambassador to Denmark), told me that Tokayer himself is not well known in South Korea. Only his book is.
In 1984, the publisher Tae Zang released its seventh edition of Tokayer’s Talmud, and included a letter from the editor. In just ten years, the editor claimed, Tae Zang had broken records and sold more than two million copies. “How could a nation like Korea that is not known to have so many readers sell so many Talmuds?” the editor wondered. “How could a book written by the Jews who are on the other side of the globe, and who have almost nothing in common with Koreans, deliver such an impact?” He gave partial credit to Rabbi Tokayer for connecting with Asian readers, but concluded that the real reason was the Talmud’s “limitless storage of wisdom.”
The Talmud’s inherent wisdom was something Koreans emphasized to me again and again. “Of course it is popular. It is a book of wisdom,” said Geum Sun Kim, a cheerful fifty-two-year-old who not long ago founded the Talmud Wisdom Education School, a Talmud tutoring center, in the wealthy Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. Located in an underground mall, across the hall from a dry cleaners, the school is easy to miss. Kim told me that about thirty students study Talmud stories with her once a week. When I visited, it was a national holiday, and she was catching up with Jeongso Jeon, the professor of children’s education, who is a friend. I asked why she doesn’t teach other books of wisdom—Confucian books, for example—and Jeon jumped in to answer. “There are so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners,” he said, “so the Korean people admire them as a model, and we try to follow their educational system.” He added that because “there aren’t many Jews around Korea,” there’s a “fantasy” of who they are and what they have accomplished.
In a 2014 global survey published by the Anti-Defamation League, more than half of South Korean respondents agreed with statements such as “Jews have too much power in the business world,” “Jews have too much control over the global media,” and “Jews have too much control over global affairs.” The A.D.L. labelled these responses as anti-Semitic. But Dave Hazzan, who lives in South Korea, argued in a piece for Tablet that those sentiments reflect the opposite: Korean philo-Semitism. Having control of business and global affairs is something Koreans aspire to, he wrote, adding that there is a desire among many Koreans “to emulate Jews” in order to overachieve “in the world arena.”
“Koreans are obsessed with education, and we have this stereotypical view of Jews as the model of academic excellence,” Dr. Hahm Chaibong, the president of the Asan Institute, a policy think tank based in Seoul, told me. The Talmud has come to embody this stereotype, and it is now seen as a cognitive tool in a country where there is an enormous amount of pressure on students to succeed in school. “Many people here think it improves our I.Q.,” Ambassador Young-sam Ma told me. South Koreans teach it early to their children and venerate it over traditional children’s books. “Aesop’s Fables is basic nutrition,” Young-sam Ma said. “The Talmud is like vitamins.” Well over half of the Talmuds listed in the Digital Library are children’s books; according to Geum Sun Kim, Talmuds are included on many elementary schools’ suggested reading lists. One popular subgenre of Talmuds is the “prenatal Talmud,” marketed to expecting mothers who want to encourage brain development in the womb.
Kim taught at a traditional Korean school for thirty years, and she described the educational system there as broken, full of rote memorization and devoid of analytical thinking. By using the Talmud to encourage students to think for themselves and to speak confidently, with “chutzpah,” she believes she can develop smarter, Ivy League-bound students. Maybe even a Nobel Prize winner.
In 2010, to promote the launch of Reverend Yong-soo Hyun’s “koshered” Talmuds, Rabbi Tokayer was invited to Seoul for a press conference. It was the first time he had visited South Korea in forty-six years. He brought along his eighteen-year-old grandson, Jonathan Rozenberg, then a yeshiva student. They spent several hours answering reporters’ questions about the book, about Jewish learning, and about Judaism more generally.
When Jonathan returned to his yeshiva in New Jersey and told his ultra-Orthodox classmates and family members about his experiences, he was chastised. The Talmud—the real one—explicitly forbids the teaching of the Talmud to non-Jews, he was told. Jonathan paraphrased the criticism he received this way: “Talmud study is neshama [Jewish soul] work. It speaks to your neshama. Koreans don’t have a neshama. By presenting it to non-Jews, you are desecrating the Talmud.”
When I described what I learned in South Korea to the rabbi who taught my seventh-grade Talmud class, he worried that Tokayer’s stories were providing a “simplistic” and “distorted” view of Judaism to South Koreans. “The Talmud is very deep, very profound, and very wise. Just learning the stories from the Talmud is like learning the entire history of the world in five minutes.” The rabbi was bothered by the fact that “most Koreans,” in Jung Wan Kim’s words, have no idea that there is a “real Talmud” beyond the “Korean Talmud.”
Other Jews I spoke to were concerned that Tokayer’s Talmud was helping popularize Jewish stereotypes in South Korea. Even positive stereotypes, some said, can be dangerous. As Dan Sneider, the associate director for research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford, and a former congregant of Tokayer’s synagogue in Japan, put it, “The line between ‘Jews, aren’t they incredible’ and ‘Jews, aren’t they somehow dangerous and sinister’ can be pretty thin,” particularly in countries like South Korea and Japan, where the dearth of Jews means they are essentially “an abstraction.”
Tokayer feels differently. “The dissemination of knowledge and wisdom from its Jewish sources is, to me, positive,” he said. “There is much to learn from Jewish wisdom, from our survival, and from our insights. Our life is an open book.” In December, 2014, he met with Reverend Yong-soo Hyun to discuss having the book translated into Chinese and Hindi. “It should go in every language,” he told me, his eyes opening wide. “It would make sense for anyone.'”
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-talmud-became-a-best-seller-in-south-korea