A couple of miles south of Taipei’s city centre, National Chengchi University is tucked away between cloudy mountains as picturesque as a Chinese brush painting. The colleague I met on my first research trip to Asia was friendly enough to invite me for lunch on my first day on campus, but he seemed puzzled as to why I was conducting research on the Jewish people and antisemitism in East Asia. The reason for his puzzlement became clear as we sat down at an Italian-style restaurant near the main campus gate. The well-prepared documents that he had brought to lunch, and which consisted of a list of the faculty members’ current research projects, made it evident that scientists at his university tended to study prevailing topics. I, in contrast, was concerning myself with the hate which a mere 0.003 per cent of his country’s population might potentially face.
While we waited for an Asian take on Italian pasta, he seemed uncertain what to make of my research topic. The food appeared so thoughtfully arranged on the plate that one would have had a hard time describing it as Italian, and my host asked a single word: “Jews?” As I had yet to discover the brevity and indirectness of questioning in which East Asians often politely confront a problem, I was unsure how to respond. I was not prepared for the formality of debating and a seeming unwillingness to come to any conclusion. There was no direct critique of my ideas as such, instead always a repetition of the same word, no matter how much I explained myself: “Jews?”
I was focused on the strange paradox of there being vast admiration of Jews and simultaneously high rates of antisemitism at the eastern end of Asia, a region with almost no Jewish history or presence. The scale on how scholars measure antisemitism in East Asian countries is relatively high. In its 2014 poll, the Anti-Defamation League found South Korea to be among the most antisemitic countries in the non-Muslim world, with 53 per cent of the population harbouring anti-Jewish attitudes (which is only 3 per cent lower than Iran). It also saw high rates of antisemitism in Japan, at 23 per cent (about as high as in Estonia or Argentina), and the People’s Republic of China, at 20 per cent (equivalent to Italy). But there is also a high level of admiration of Jews in East Asia that has led some scholars to describe the region’s appreciation of Jewish people in highly philosemitic terms.
How Jews became fetish objects in East Asian countries can be seen with books called Talmud, which are bestsellers sold in almost every bookshop (and even some book vending machines) and are even part of the public-school curriculum in South Korea. Initially a product of Japan, this so-called Talmud has led to “Jewish education” institutions opening up in underground shopping malls in Seoul where parents send their children to improve their IQ.
There is enormous pressure on education in the rapidly changing region of East Asia. As Jews are often portrayed and admired as geniuses in science and business, anything labelled “Jewish” is viewed as a means of self-development, even though its content may be on Confucianism, the Virgin Mary, the Brothers Grimm, or Goethe.
The image of Jews in East Asia is a strange mix of opposites, a paradoxical blend of admiration and mockery, identification and denial. In my book The Japanese Talmud I explore what “Jew” means to many East Asians, and whether it is anything that Jewish people themselves would recognise.
People can stay at the Talmud Business Hotel in Taiwan or attend Chinese centres for Jewish studies with academics who have never met a Jew. There is a legend that Japanese people are a Lost Tribe of Israel, and “Anne’s day”, named after Anne Frank, is a euphemism for menstruation in Japan. Yet the phenomenon can manifest in even more disturbing ways: South Korea’s “Adolf Hitler Techno Bar & Cocktail Show”, or Taiwan’s concentration camp–themed restaurant that is designed to give customers the experience of eating in a concentration camp (photographs of Auschwitz victims are on the walls, while the toilets are called “gas chambers”).
To understand this paradoxical phenomenon, one must consider the different way East Asian cultures tend to perceive the world. Considering antisemitism in the East Asian context brings difficulties, as the term’s existing definitions do not apply properly to the region. Researchers on the phenomenon of unreasonable thoughts towards Jews come from various fields of study such as history, psychology, sociology, theology and literary studies. What combines these different ways of approaching the problem is — apart from being produced by Western scholars — a belief in a universal human form of cognitive functioning. Research on the mind, however, demonstrates there is a fundamental difference between Western and Eastern ways of perceiving the world.
People who grow up in an East Asian culture seem to be better at accepting opposing concepts simultaneously. Study of East Asia demonstrates that it is possible for antisemitism and admiration, or philosemitic love, towards the Jewish people to both exist in a single human mind. Something that appears at first as a cultural misunderstanding or as being lost in translation can be understood as an expression of the mind that developed in an East Asian cultural context. One cannot understand East Asia without concepts of paradox logic, and one cannot claim to fully understand antisemitism by ignoring how a quarter of the world’s population processes cognitive information.
One might argue, due to the lack of a meaningful Jewish presence in East Asia, that antisemitism in this region is a problem with little significance. I disagree, given we are living in an increasingly interdependent — and Asian — world, and because the study of antisemitism is not only of benefit to its direct victims. Rather, it helps us to understand how people — and societies — function and view the world, should they follow this ill-guided way of thinking.
Generally speaking, East Asians (compared to Westerners) regard the world as highly changeable, complex and consisting of interrelated components, and often see events as moving back and forth between extremes. Westerners are inclined to attribute behaviour to the actor, while Asians are prone to attribute behaviour to the context. While Westerners understand the world as being largely static, Easterners see it as more adaptable and constantly changing. East Asians certainly use categories as well, but they are “less likely to abstract them away from particular objects” as the social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett writes. There is the whiteness of snow or the whiteness of silk in ancient Chinese thought, for instance, but not whiteness as an abstract which can be applied to things.
In Western thought, in contrast, objects have qualities and essences like whiteness, which allow one to confidently predict an outcome or behaviour of the object, independent of its context. Eastern traditional thought, however, takes objects as having concrete properties that interact with their environmental circumstances. There are Jews perceived as somehow evil, and Jews perceived as role models, not “the Jew” common to Western antisemitic or philosemitic thought processes.
In an East Asian way of holistic thinking, nothing exists in an isolated and independent way but rather must be understood in its relationship to context, like musical notes creating a melody in relation to other notes. So the concept of Jews perceived in relation to education is different from the concept of Jews perceived in relation to business or politics. Antisemitism and philosemitism are two phenomena separated by the same obsession.
After my lunch at the campus restaurant, my host walked me outside to bow down. He said goodbye to me, then looked across campus at the mountains covered in clouds and studied them carefully, as if he were looking for an anchor for his thought: “Jews?”
Christopher L Schilling’s The Japanese Talmud: Antisemitism in East Asia was published by Hurst last year
