Rethinking history with the help of K-drama

 

I started watching K-drama because I realised that, when I watched US, UK, or Australian television or read most books, I sympathised with the hero. This was not because I had anything in common with the hero, or because the hero had earned my sympathies through their charming personality or sad circumstances. Even when the hero was intensely dislikable, I cheered them on. This is one of the results of the cultural acceptance of the chief protagonist as being someone who requires that level of audience support in our society. Because I live in a culture that looks for a hero to be the core of so many stories, I have been trained to support anyone who is positioned in a story as a hero.

My personal likes and dislikes were less important than where the character stood in the narrative. This centrality of the hero and the audience need to cheer them on, and our tendency to (also culturally) only allow some kinds of people – white and male, often young – to take that hero role are two of the reasons I have, myself, written heroes are are not male and white, and who manage illness or disability. Knowing that, why was I unable to stand back and decide, early on in a story, that this hero was hurting everyone around him or that hero should be replaced by another? Why did I fall into the path of cheering these heroes on, regardless?

I knew the theory: that it was the place in the story path the hero took. That I wasn't cheering that hero on, but accepting the validity of that narrative path. Given that the hero was seldom from any background resembling my own, it meant that I gave a privilege to that hero (normally, as I said, white and male and quite young but in many types of story also someone who would celebrate Christmas and who had a British or US accent) that I never give myself. I wanted to know what I was not seeing when I followed the hero’s path and cheered him along.

The hero path in K-drama is very similar to that in US television of related kinds. The stories use similar beats and plot points. The main difference is that the hero in K-drama is Korean, not from particular English-speaking countries. This is not a vast difference, but I did not need a vast difference to start to grapple with why I simply accepted heroes – I just needed to see that whenever I watched a TV show I automatically sympathised with the hero, regardless of whether this was a good idea or not. I needed to be able to choose when I cheered the hero on, and that small cultural distancing (Korean heroes rather than American or British) opened that choice up to me. 

Right now, I’m working on both fiction and non-fiction that includes Jewish history in ways we are not used to including them. We have structures for putting Jews in novels, and… I’m breaking those structures. When I began my research (as an historian, initially, and about the same time I started watching K-drama) I saw the use of a set of simple structures informing us that, historically, Jews were mainly money lenders, or were only recent part of European history, or were never fully settled in this place or that, or had earned expulsions, or didn’t exist for hundreds of years in places where they had clearly lived for hundreds before. There were set dates and event by which most popular accounts of Jews in Europe swore as accurate… and very little evidence used to back those opinions. I saw many amazingly good historians simply ignoring European Jews, or giving the same descriptions of European Jewish history and that these same descriptions could be traced back to a single author who themselves had not done any significant research. I saw vast amounts of nineteenth century research ignored. I saw, also, that hate rested comfortably on these same ‘facts’ and narratives. I also saw that most novels reflected this and that Jews were seldom in the novels at all, much less acting as protagonists. The big exception to this was Holocaust novels. It was OK for Jews to be protagonists if they suffered more than any human should have to suffer. This, the fiction and the non-fiction alike, informed the way we see Jews discussed in the press, and in cafes. For me, because I’m Jewish, it’s affected my whole life. Right now, it’s a bit scary to be Jewish in Australia. For twenty-five years I worked with other people to help a whole range of folks to emerge from discrimination and to be treated fairly. I had to leave that environment because of Molotov cocktails and related events. I wrote a little of my experience into The Wizardry of Jewish Women – I was living the history at that point. It’s ironic that what I spent twenty-five years working with others to improve is the exact knowledge I need for my own everyday.  This is why I decided to use fraction of my work for the non-fiction book here (with a few modifications, like this sentence) and share it with all of you. 

Fiction writers and historians have useful perspectives at times like this and I count myself very fortunate to be both. When I realised that I needed to know why all this was so and what wood we were missing by looking at three trees out of an entire forest ,I had the tools to work it out. At that point K-drama merged with popular history. I went to Germany and, thanks to Deakin University and Heinrich Heine University, was able to spend five weeks asking all the questions. I began climbing out of a deep and unhappy hole.

What did I find out? Some of it was blindingly obvious. For instance, the patterns others see or fail to see rest on certain historical understandings, for instance, which gave Christian dominance over interpretations of the past, or that did not see how who knew whom and how dominates the evidence we have and whose past it actually reveals. For some aspects of history this Christian dominance lay at the heart of how a given historian might interpret Jewish history. In these cases, often the focus is on what happened to Christians, without any questions about whether this applied only to Christians or whether minority cultures and religions were also considered. Then the explanation talked about “history of the Rhineland” for example, when it really should have said “Christian culture in the Rhineland” or “Christian history in the Rhineland.”

Other historians focus on written sources (which is most certainly the simplest approach to our complex pasts) without considering who had access to the culture in these sources. Close-knit Jewish communities were influenced by the work of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. But what of Jewish farmers? What of those working in trade or craft who traveled to other countries and even hallway across the world? What of those Jews who were not literate or who turned up to synagogue but led an everyday life where they did not connect with the learned who give us most of our sources? What of those Jews who do not appear in records of customs and tariffs, of law and of politics?

What I learned from this was bleedingly obvious: knowledge is not universal and it is fairer to track it from its source and to see how it spread than to assume a universal similarity of all lives. The concept of a ‘universal Jew’ blinds too many people from seeing the uniqueness and interest in the personal lives of historical Jews. Just as there is no single model for a hero in real life, Jews are as diverse as other humans. They are simply not often depicted this way in historical fiction.

Inherent in this ‘universal Jew’ and other constructs that blind us from seeing the bleedingly obvious is how culture and knowledge are shared. Who we know matters to how we share culture and how we live our lives now, but it mattered far more before the intense communication we assume is standard today. Even printing and affordable books were not available prior to the latter part of the fifteenth century. K-drama was not available in Australia until the rise of streaming services. If we look at broadsheets and chapbooks from the early sixteenth century we can begin to see shared culture and know that it cut across more boundaries, but even then, most people lived in small communities and only some of these communities are visible to twenty-first century folks. Sharing of knowledge usually operated more like chatrooms that contain a few friends than like social media.

Christian-based sources are those most commonly used to interpret western European history. They influence how we describe Europe’s past in general. The fact that only a part of society had been explained is missing from so much of what we think we know. Did you know, for instance, that Charlemagne’s confessor converted to Judaism but still remained close to Charlemagne? Jews are usually invisible unless there is a pogrom, persecution, or a particularly notable individual that not even Christian-origin sources can ignore. It’s a bit like histories that are all about the doings of the good and great and forget that without peasants, most of the Medieval good and great do not have the income or even the food to do the things they do.Peasants also have interesting lives and also are difficult to find out about.

In some regions of Germany, where the Christian majority excluded the Jewish minority from everything important, it may be that the overall stories we tell of those places are as we read them. However… we cannot assume that this is the case. We cannot assume that the story of any majority culture or dominant gender in any place or time is the story of that place and time.

To return to my hero metaphor, heroes may follow similar paths in story, but that is the path of that type of story. It does not reflect other kinds of stories. 

What’s more, the hero’s journey has a very curious and strange relationship to both history and to how we see history.Once upon a time, I attended a workshop at an Arthurian conference: it introduced the hero’s journey. All the key elements of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey were explained in detail. The participants were then given a list of the main attributes of the hero, and the core elements of their journey. The presenter walked us through major heroic characters (King Arthur was his favourite example) and ticked off all the places where the hero’s journey matched the story of Arthur as told by Mallory.

Quietly, I kept my own list. I checked the story of the medieval romance of Alexander, and what we know about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the life of a famous saint, and two other major historical figures. Between the lecturer’s examples and my own, Elizabeth’s most closely followed the hero’s journey.This is, I suspect, one of the reasons she is so treasured in popular memory. We recognise the path her life followed and transcribe it into popular story. 

It’s very difficult to do this for Jewish history, because very few Jewish lives are explained using that standard story. Even when, as with Elizabeth, the way we see a life might match the hero-journey narrative, very few writers or historians choose it for Jewish history or for the lives of historical Jews. We assume that Jewish stories should be told differently, in other words. Our most common stories about Jews are those of Shylock and Fagin and of victims murdered by hate. We carry these stories into our thoughts about the history of Jews. Every time Oliver! is played in Australia, I see an upsurge in antisemitism.

When friends of mine began to explore Jewish everyday life through looking at accounts and charters and many documents that have never been invisible but that were not looked at closely as sources of Jewish history for those places, I began to wonder about whether I needed to challenge my own view of Europe the way I’d challenged my own view of TV heroes. 

And so we come full circle. I’m almost at the stage where I can look for a publisher for this book. I have a bunch more understanding of why we’re in such a mess right now, politically and socially. Thank you, K-drama, historical novels and Charlemagne’s confessor.