Seoul: A Small, Visible Community

There is no ancient Jewish Seoul. No medieval quarter, no old cemetery, no synagogue with three centuries of soot on its lamps. The Jewish story here begins in uniform, in the early 1950s, when American servicemen carried their prayer books off troop ships into a country at war. That is an unusual way for a community to start, and it has shaped everything since. Seoul's Jewish life has always been a community of people passing through who decided, while they were here, to keep the practice alive.

For most of its history that life ran through the United States Army base at Yongsan, in the centre of the city. Friday-night services were held at the South Post Chapel; the base was where a Jew in Korea found a minyan, a Passover seder, a familiar tune. The arrangement was practical and a little improvised, and it lasted decades. It also meant the community's centre of gravity sat behind a military gate, which is a strange place for a tradition to live, but Jewish history is full of strange addresses that worked.

A community in transit

The honest difficulty with counting Seoul's Jews is that they keep changing. Estimates of the Jewish population of South Korea range from around a hundred to about a thousand, and the gap is not sloppiness; it is the nature of the thing. The community is overwhelmingly transient - soldiers on a posting, diplomats on a term, teachers and business people and students on contracts that end. It is a real community whose membership turns over like a hotel that never quite empties.

What changed the picture was the arrival of a permanent rabbi. In 2008, Rabbi Osher Litzman and his wife Mussy opened the Chabad Jewish Community of Korea in Seoul, the country's first Chabad house and its first standing synagogue outside the base. Before that, Jews in Korea leaned on the army for the rhythms of the year. Afterwards there was a kosher kitchen, a place for the holidays, somewhere a visiting Jew could find a Shabbat meal without a security pass. In 2019 the community opened the first mikveh on the Korean peninsula. A transient population had been given a fixed point.

The book everyone has read

Seoul holds a curiosity found almost nowhere else: a non-Jewish enthusiasm for Jewish learning that dwarfs the Jewish community itself. Across South Korea, popular books titled "Talmud" - simplified collections of stories and maxims, not the rabbinic work itself - sell in huge numbers and are read by parents hoping to lend their children a share of a reputation for scholarship. The genre traces back to Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, an American who served as a chaplain in the region and in 1971 published a popular Japanese book of Jewish wisdom that was later translated into Korean and sold in the millions.

In 2011 South Korea's ambassador to Israel told an Israeli interviewer that every Korean home had a copy. The claim is too tidy to take literally, and it refers to the one-volume popularisation rather than the real thing, but the impulse behind it is genuine and rather touching. A tiny, mostly foreign Jewish community lives in a country where the word Talmud carries admiration in the general culture. Few diasporas can say that their neighbours revere their books before they have met their people.