Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
How did the Koreans and Jews endure?
It’s impossible to not feel affected by the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, with photos of innocent men, women and children from both sides dying due to horrible violence, whether they are Jews intentionally butchered by Hamas on that fateful Saturday or Palestinian children buried under the rubble of concrete and steel crumbling after a bomb has been dropped. What suddenly struck me, however, was that the victims looked remarkably similar. If they weren’t distinguished by the types of clothing or delineated by the voice-overs from reporters as the video footage flashed by, I wouldn’t be able to tell who was a Jew and who was a Palestinian.
Perhaps this is only natural since both are descended from ancient Canaanites, intermixed with the other ancient peoples of the times from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Further, Jews have been driven from their biblical lands multiple times throughout history and lived for long periods in different parts of the world, intermixing with indigenous peoples in those parts. In fact, genetics studies have shown that there is no one common genotype for all Jews from different areas of the world. This is self-evident. Jews can look Swedish with blonde hair and blue eyes or Arab with olive skin and jet-black hair. So, who is a Jew?
We can ask that same question to Koreans. Despite the Korean myth that says Koreans are homogeneous people who uniformly wore white and were preternaturally good with a bow and arrow, I doubt that there is a specific genotype that would distinguish a Korean from a Japanese from a Manchurian. Genotypes, like culture, are not a static end state but an ongoing process of complex intermingling that undulates with history, migration, climate and other multiple macro factors that drive the collective behavior of a set of people over time. If cultural artifacts such as language and clothing can change over time, why can’t the genotypes and phenotypes of a people?
This then, brings up the intriguing question of, what defines a people? If it’s not how you look, what language you speak, or even what DNA you share, then what is the glue that keeps the identity of a group of people intact, consistent, and cohesive across thousands of years? Moreover, how come some people manage that cohesion while most others fade away into the mists of history? How come we still have Jews, Koreans, Egyptians etc. today but can no longer encounter the Hittites, Scythians, Huns, etc.? I am sure that we still have their genetic descendants walking amongst us today, but their collective identities have gone.
I don’t think there is a definitive answer to this question, but I would venture to guess that it might have to do with the strength, resilience and reinforcement of the story that define a particular ethnicity. In the absence of anything else that can define an ethnicity, what else is there except a story that members of that particular group share in common, a story that is propagated and passed on through generations?
As Yuval Noah Harari writes, “Sapiens rule the world, because we are the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. We can create mass cooperation networks, in which thousands and millions of complete strangers work together towards common goals … The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively. This mysterious glue is made of stories, not genes. We cooperate effectively with strangers because we believe in things like gods, nations, money and human rights. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.”
The resilience of this narrative cohesion is especially impressive when you think of the Jews, since they were scattered and had to maintain this common story without a land to anchor them. Of course, the Jewish ethnic story is based on Judaism the religion that kept the common practices and rituals alive even as the people themselves underwent changes – perhaps this helped. On the other hand, Koreans, while they had the advantage of geographical steadfastness, never had a singular religion, cultural tradition, or historical milestone that kept the “Korean story” together and consistent to constitute a single ethnic identity over the millennia.
Perhaps, then, the stickiness of an ethnic identity story lies in the adversity that a group of people have had to endure over time from outside groups. In this case, instead of the in-group identifying the boundaries that define the out-group, it is the attacks from the out-group that push the attacked into a cohesive sense of common identity, armed with adversity stories that are reinforced every time they face danger again from another out-group. In this case, ironically, it is the constant existential threat to a group's survival that makes their story more enduring and powerful.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect The Korea Times’ editorial stance.