Well, in India, the mezuzah on the door is not some piece of plastic or metal that you buy in the Judaica store. It’s a palm print. You dip the palm of your hand in blood on erev Pesach and put it on the doorpost. Another interesting minhag is the Chinese Jewish tradition of the Torah reader wearing a veil just like Moshe wore a veil after he came down from Mount Sinai.
In the book you also note that a Jew actually wrote the orchestration for the music of the Chinese national anthem.
Yes, his name was Aaron Avshalomov. He was born in northern Siberia to a Russian Jewish family and spent most of his career in China. He lived in America for a while, but his best music was produced in China, and he encouraged the Chinese to use their own music rather than imitate European classical music. When he wrote an opera, it was half Chinese, half western music.
What was Avshalomov doing in China?
His family lived there. There were 50,000 Jews in China. The parents of the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, spoke Chinese at home. His grandparents are buried in China. The city of Harbin in northern China was a booming Russian Jewish city, maybe one of the finest Jewish communities ever produced in diaspora. There were two Jewish banks, two Jewish schools, many shuls, Jewish soup kitchens, a Jewish hotel, and a Jewish high school that the actor Yul Brynner attended.
Are there other Jews who made a significant historical mark in the Far East?
The first prime minister of Singapore, David Marshall, was also the president of Singapore’s Jewish community. The first person to introduce psychiatry to China was a Jewish woman from Vienna, Fanny Halpern. And the closest friend, adviser, and bodyguard of the first president of China, Sun Yat-sen, was Morris Abraham Cohen, who was called “Two-Gun” Cohen. He was an unbelievable person. He saved Sun Yat-sen’s life several times and was instrumental in getting China not to vote “no” on the partition of Palestine to produce a Jewish homeland.
The New Yorker recently ran an article on the popularity of the Talmud in South Korea which credits you in large part for this phenomenon. Apparently your book of Talmudic stories and proverbs in Japanese was translated into Korean and became a bestseller in South Korea. How do you explain Koreans’ fascination with the Talmud?
The Koreans think: If we are studying very hard – which they are – and working very hard – which they are – how come we don’t have a Nobel Prize? And how come the percentage of Jews with Nobel Prizes is off the charts? What do the Jews have that we don’t? They think studying the Talmud is our secret.
You’ve written some 20 books in Japanese. What are they about?
At first I wrote about Jewish proverbs, ideas from the Chumash, the Jewish home, the Jewish school, Jewish holidays. Then I started to compare and contrast – our history with Japanese history, the Jewish school with the Japanese school, the Jewish mother with the Japanese mother, etc.
What was your purpose in writing these books?
To put the Jews on the map. Let them know who the Jews are because you also have anti-Semitic books floating around. The Japanese have no history with Jews. What do they know about the Talmud? What do they know about Shabbos? What do they know about the Bible? They never heard of any of this. So I wanted them to have a correct image of the Jew.