Jews and Koreans: An Increasingly Close Relationship

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

For the past few years, I have been part of a team that is teaching an Asian Studies course at the University of Prince Edward Island.

One of the professors, who is Korean-born, has been working diligently at raising the profile of Asian Studies and, specifically, creating courses in Korean Studies.

It got me to thinking about the relationship between Jews and Koreans.

While Communist North Korea is no friend of Israel’s, South Korea, which in 2012 celebrated the 50th anniversary of its diplomatic relations with Israel, is eager to intensify that relationship, particularly with regard to issues of security and peace – after all, both countries are threatened by missiles from across borders.

They also are working together in the spheres of renewable energy, science and technology, and bilateral trade.

North Korea has no identifiable Jews. South Korea is a country with a deep Buddhist history, but one which has embraced with vigour the Christianity brought to its shores by missionaries in the late 1800s. Official statistics say some 30 per cent of South Koreans are church-going. 

Jews are few and far between. They number some 500-600 people in a population of 50 million. But many South Koreans are philo-Semitic, and value the cultural traits in Judaism. In August 2005, the Jerusalem Summit promoting Christian support for Israel was held in Seoul.

Many South Koreans praise Jews as a high achieving and accomplished group, sometimes citing the disproportionate of successful Jewish businesspeople and Nobel Prize winners as evidence. In fact, Korean translations of the Talmud (the book of Jewish commentary on the Bible) are very popular in the country.

Of course on the level of personal relations, since most Jews historically lived in Europe and the Middle East, while Koreans inhabited the distant Korean peninsula at the far eastern edge of Asia, they had virtually no contact with other.

However, in Canada and the United States, this is no longer the case, as immigration has led to demographic proximity.  

Both groups tend to live in big cities and share common values such as hard work, close family ties and a reverence for education – some sociologists have referred to each of them as “model minorities.” 

For Jews, this emphasis has its roots in the Talmudic academies and the Talmud-Torahs birthed in the east European village. For Asians the origins lie in the Confucian societal system, under which civil officers were appointed only after passing difficult examinations requiring years of study. Not surprisingly, their children today meet each other in colleges and universities. 

As a consequence, anecdotal evidence points to increasing rates of intermarriage between Koreans and Jews in North America, and this is backed up by survey research. 

The book JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews, published two years ago, written by Helen Kiyong Kim and Noah Samuel Leavitt, sociologists at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington State, is the first book-length study of these couples and their children.

The Jewish-American Leavitt and the Korean-American Kim met at a dinner party in the late 1990s, when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago, and later wed. 

They started to notice that not a week went by without at least one Asian-Jewish couple appearing in the New York Times wedding announcements section.

When in May 2012, Facebook’s Jewish founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg married Chinese- American physician Priscilla Chan, Asian-Jewish marriages had become so common that many pundits found no reason to even mention the inter-ethnic aspect of the union.

A 2014 article by E. Tammy Kim, a writer on the editorial staff of the New Yorker magazine, observed that “New York City’s least remarkable interracial couple is the Asian American woman/Jewish man. In middle-class, over-educated enclaves of Manhattan and Brooklyn, it’s an inescapable pair.”

My own nephew, in Toronto, is married to a Korean-Canadian woman, whose parents came to Canada from South Korea. They are devout Presbyterians – some 80 per cent of Koreans in North America are members of various Christian churches.  (Our parents emigrated from Poland.)

He and his future wife met as students at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and had two wedding ceremonies, one Korean Presbyterian and one Jewish, three years ago. They couldn’t be happier, and so are their parents.