Brit-Am Historical Reports (12 July, 2015, 25 Tammuz, 5775)
Contents:
1. Johannes Reuchlin: A Hero of Civilization
The Renaissance Scholar Who Rescued The Talmud, Zohar and Other Books of Jewish Learning by Howard Zik
2. World War I; British soldier allegedly spares the life of an injured Adolf Hitler by History.com staff
3. How the Talmud Became a Best-Seller in South Korea - The New Yorker
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1. Johannes Reuchlin: A Hero of Civilization
The Renaissance Scholar Who Rescued The Talmud, Zohar and Other Books of Jewish Learning
Johannes Reuchlin, renaissance scholar and savior of seminal works in Jewish thought and theology.
by Howard Zik
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/interviews-and-profiles/the-renaissance-scholar-who-rescued-the-talmud-zohar-and-other-books-of-jewish-learning/2015/07/09/
Extract:
The defense firstly asserted the rights of the Jews to worship as they judged fit being citizens of the Roman empire
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2. World War I; British soldier allegedly spares the life of an injured Adolf Hitler by History.com staff
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-soldier-allegedly-spares-the-life-of-an-injured-adolf-hitler
Extracts:
On September 28, 1918, in an incident that would go down in the lore of World War I history, although the details of the event are still unclear, Private Henry Tandey, a British soldier serving near the French village of Marcoing, reportedly encounters a wounded German soldier and declines to shoot him, sparing the life of 29-year-old Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler.
...From July to October 1918, Tandey served with the 5th Duke of Wellington Regiment; it was during this time that he took part in the successful British capture of Marcoing, for which he earned a Victoria Cross for 'conspicuous bravery.'
As Tandey later told sources, during the final moments of that battle, as the German troops were in retreat, a wounded German soldier entered Tandey's line of fire. 'I took aim but couldn't shoot a wounded man,' Tandey remembered, 'so I let him go.' The German soldier nodded in thanks, and disappeared.
...A photograph that appeared in London newspapers of Tandey carrying a wounded soldier at Ypres in 1914 was later portrayed on canvas in a painting by the Italian artist Fortunino Matania glorifying the Allied war effort. As the story goes, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to Germany in 1938 to engage Hitler in a last-ditch effort to avoid another war in Europe, he was taken by the fuhrer to his new country retreat in Bavaria. There, Hitler showed Chamberlain his copy of the Matania painting, commenting, 'That's the man who nearly shot me.'
... evidence does suggest that Hitler had a reproduction of the Matania painting as early as 1937, a strange acquisition for a man who had been furious and devastated by the German defeat at Allied hands in the Great War.
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3. How the Talmud Became a Best-Seller in South Korea - The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-talmud-became-a-best-seller-in-south-korea
Extracts:
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.'
....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.
The Jewish Talmud is a dense compilation of oral laws annotated with rabbinical discussions, consisting of about two and a half million words. ...
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.
... He first visited South Korea and southern Japan in 1962, as a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force.
... the rebbe saw the worldly, college-educated rabbi as the perfect fit for a small but growing community of Jewish American professionals who had moved to Japan to capitalize on the country�s booming economy. In 1968, Tokayer and his wife made their way to Tokyo.
The idea to write a book about the Talmud for Japanese audiences wasn't Tokayer's, either. He credits Hideaki Kase, a Japanese writer he met while living in Tokyo. As they sat in the rabbi's office, Tokayer recalls that they were repeatedly interrupted by phone calls: a Jewish couple that needed marital counselling, two Jewish businessmen having a dispute, a scholar in China with questions about anti-Semitism. According to Tokayer, Kase asked the young rabbi how he had learned to deal with such complicated issues. 'I studied the Talmud,' the rabbi told him. Curious to learn more about the book, and confident that other Japanese people would be as well, Kase offered to introduce Tokayer to a publisher.
The resulting book was written over three days. Hoping to write an accessible, 'non-denominational' summary of the wisdom of the Talmud, Tokayer prepared notes for himself that included 'biographies of Talmudic rabbis, proverbs, puzzles, parables, Aesop's Fables-like stories, legal issues, and Jewish ethics.' He also jotted down a couple relevant autobiographical anecdotes that could serve as context. He read his notes to an editor and a stenographer, with Kase serving as translator. If anyone didn't like something, Tokayer said, 'out it went. It was censored on the spot.' The team responded more positively to some things than others. They liked, for instance, the Talmudic teaching, as interpreted by Tokayer, that sex dreams about someone else's wife are good, because a dream is merely a wish, and if you actually had sex with someone else's wife you wouldn't dream about it. ('Oh, that's interesting. Let's add that in there,' Tokayer remembers them saying.) He had only made it through the beginning of his notes when they stopped him and said that they had enough for a book.
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.
Kase served as Tokayer's translator for most of these books. Kase is now the chairman of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, which denies Japanese war crimes such as the Nanjing Massacre and the abduction of 'comfort women' by Japanese soldiers. In their 1995 book, 'Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype,' David G. Goodman, a professor of Japanese literature, and Masanori Miyazawa, a history professor from Japan, highlighted Tokayer's dependency on Kase: 'Tokayer cannot read his own work and does not always know what is in it.' With Kase 'speaking through' Tokayer, they argue, some of Tokayer's books 'lent credence to the strangest myths and most stubborn stereotypes of Jews in Japan.'
Its difficult to determine exactly how 5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom: Secrets of the Talmud Scriptures migrated to South Korea and China. .. about fifteen years ago, in a bookstore in China, Tokayer was stunned to find illustrated versions of his Talmud stories in a series of childrens books promoted at the cash register.
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 versions authority, he included a picture of himself with the rabbi, as well as a letter by Tokayer.
....Dr. Jeongso Jeon, a professor of childrens 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.)
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.
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.'