It was hard to imagine South Koreans halfway around the world deriving any value from this book without a guide like the rabbi at my Jewish day school. But, as it happens, they do have a guide: a seventy-eight-year-old rabbi named Marvin Tokayer, who lives in Great Neck.

I discovered Tokayer’s name in a bookstore in Manhattan’s Koreatown. Among the store’s roughly five thousand volumes were eight different books called “Talmud,” several of which listed Rabbi Tokayer as the author and included pictures of him inside their front covers. One version included “A Personal Message from the Author,” in English, in which Tokayer expressed his belief that “the Korean people and the Jewish people have so much in common, and share so many similar values.” The letter was signed by him and included an address.

I met Rabbi Tokayer several months later at his home in Great Neck, a predominantly Jewish part of Long Island. On his quiet street, there were mezuzahs as far as the eye could see. He wore a button-down shirt with a dark sweater and dark dress pants; atop his thick white hair sat a black yarmulke. His living room was decorated with Asian art: the carpet from China, the woodblock prints and vase from Japan, the wooden rice chest from Korea.

Tokayer told me that he did not plan on becoming a rabbi. When he was younger, he wanted to be a comedian—he even performed amateur standup shows in the Catskills, and he still frequently slips into Borscht Belt patter. (His favorite joke he used to tell: “What’s the difference between in-laws and outlaws? Outlaws are wanted.”) He first visited South Korea and southern Japan in 1962, as a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force. At that time, Asia was “the moon,” he said. He had been dodging military service and was on a circuitous path to becoming a doctor: college, rabbinical school, then medical school. (“I didn’t want to be an expert on the four hundred muscles of the jaw without seeing the whole person,” he told me.) But, after graduating from rabbinical school, he joined the Air Force, where he was given the option to serve as a private or volunteer as a chaplain.

After his service, he became the rabbi of a congregation in Queens, and got engaged. At the urging of a friend, he sent a wedding invitation to the famed Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the head of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement. Rabbi Tokayer was not a “chabadnik,” but he had met the rebbe and admired him. The rebbe declined, but invited Tokayer and his new wife to visit for a blessing. On that visit, according to Tokayer’s animated retelling, the rebbe “boxed me in a corner,” and said, “You’re going to Japan.” “I said, ‘What are you talking about? I just came to say hello.’ ” But the rebbe saw the worldly, college-educated rabbi as the perfect fit for a small but growing community of Jewish American professionals who had moved to Japan to capitalize on the country’s booming economy. In 1968, Tokayer and his wife made their way to Tokyo.

The idea to write a book about the Talmud for Japanese audiences wasn’t Tokayer’s, either. He credits Hideaki Kase, a Japanese writer he met while living in Tokyo. As they sat in the rabbi’s office, Tokayer recalls that they were repeatedly interrupted by phone calls: a Jewish couple that needed marital counselling, two Jewish businessmen having a dispute, a scholar in China with questions about anti-Semitism. According to Tokayer, Kase asked the young rabbi how he had learned to deal with such complicated issues. “I studied the Talmud,” the rabbi told him. Curious to learn more about the book, and confident that other Japanese people would be as well, Kase offered to introduce Tokayer to a publisher.

The resulting book was written over three days. Hoping to write an accessible, “non-denominational” summary of the wisdom of the Talmud, Tokayer prepared notes for himself that included “biographies of Talmudic rabbis, proverbs, puzzles, parables, Aesop’s Fables-like stories, legal issues, and Jewish ethics.” He also jotted down a couple relevant autobiographical anecdotes that could serve as context. He read his notes to an editor and a stenographer, with Kase serving as translator. If anyone didn’t like something, Tokayer said, “out it went. It was censored on the spot.” The team responded more positively to some things than others. They liked, for instance, the Talmudic teaching, as interpreted by Tokayer, that sex dreams about someone else’s wife are good, because a dream is merely a wish, and if you actually had sex with someone else’s wife you wouldn’t dream about it. (“Oh, that’s interesting. Let’s add that in there,” Tokayer remembers them saying.) He had only made it through the beginning of his notes when they stopped him and said that they had enough for a book.

According to Tokayer, “5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom: Secrets of the Talmud Scriptures” received glowing reviews shortly after it was published, in 1971. Tokayer estimates that it has gone through seventy printings and sold about half a million copies in Japan; his most recent royalty check came in October. He went on to publish more than twenty books about Judaism in Japanese, covering such topics as the Torah, Jewish education, and Jewish humor.

Kase served as Tokayer’s translator for most of these books. Kase is now the chairman of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, which denies Japanese war crimes such as the Nanjing Massacre and the abduction of “comfort women” by Japanese soldiers. In their 1995 book, “Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype,” David G. Goodman, a professor of Japanese literature, and Masanori Miyazawa, a history professor from Japan, highlighted Tokayer’s dependency on Kase: “Tokayer cannot read his own work and does not always know what is in it.” With Kase “speaking through” Tokayer, they argue, some of Tokayer’s books “lent credence to the strangest myths and most stubborn stereotypes of Jews in Japan.”

Tokayer denies this, and says that, when he met him, Kase was not yet a revisionist, and had a “superb reputation” as a translator. He told me that it was possible Kase “sensationalized” aspects of his books, “in order to sell copies,” and acknowledged that someone browsing just the titles, such as “There Is No Education in Japan: The Jewish Secret of Educating Geniuses,” might mistakenly conclude that his books were “inflaming Jewish myths.” But he hadn’t heard of a single Japanese review to that effect, and said that most of his books, especially his earliest ones, are apolitical introductions to Jewish texts and culture. The interactions he’s had with Japanese readers have been consistently positive and wholesome. He remembers receiving a letter from one reader who told him that he was so engaged reading one of his books that he missed his bus stop. And he recounted that once, while walking down the aisle on a flight between Japan and the U.S., he noticed a Japanese passenger laughing hysterically at a book. When he asked the man what he was reading, they were both startled to realize that it was Tokayer’s book about Jewish humor, with a picture of Tokayer on the cover.