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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 71100 2009 Association for Jewish Studies
doi:10.1017/S036400940900004X
C ZECHS , G ERMANS , A RABS , J EWS : F RANZ K AFKA S J ACKALS AND A RABS BETWEEN B OHEMIA AND PALESTINE
by
Dimitry Shumsky
I. J ACKALS
AND
A RABS
BETWEEN
J EWS
Franz Kafkas short story Schakale und Araber (Jackals and Arabs) was published in October 1917 in the monthly journal Der Jude, the intellectual organ of German-speaking Zionism founded and edited by Martin Buber.1 The narrator, an unidentified and pleasant-mannered European man traveling in the desert, makes a stop at an oasis in an Arab area. The circumstances of his journey and its objectives are unknown. It becomes apparent from his story that the man has come to the Arab desert merely by chance from the far North, and that he has no intention of remaining in the area for long.2 All of a sudden, shortly after his tall [and] white Arab host has retired to the sleeping area, the narrator finds himself completely surrounded by a pack of jackals.3 One of them, who introduces himself as the oldest jackal far and wide, approaches the man and implores him to solve once and for all the long-standing dispute between the jackals and the Arabs, as the traveler alonea man hailing from those countries in which reason reigns supreme, which is not the case among the Arabsis capable of doing so. Once the jackal elder has related to the European traveler the story of his tribes tribulations, and how they have been compelled to reside alongside the filthy Arabs from one generation to the next, another jackal produces a pair of scissors, which, according to the jackals ancient belief, is to serve the long-awaited man of reason from the North to rescue them from their abhorrent and hated neighbors.4 But at that moment, the Arab caravan leader appears, wielding an immense whip. The reader learns that
1. Schakale und Araber appeared together with another short story of Kafkas, Ein Bericht fr eine Akademie (A Report to an Academy), under the joint title Zwei Tiergeschichten (Two Animal Stories); see Franz Kafka, Zwei Tiergeschichten: I. Schakale und Araber, Der Jude II (191718): 48890. The notations that follow refer to Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). 2. Kafka, Collected Stories, 176. 3. Ibid., 175. 4. Ibid., 177, 178.
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not only was the Arab awake while the jackal elder sought to persuade the European man to undertake the salvation project and listening attentively to the jackals words, but in fact, he has been well aware of the jackals intentions for a long time:
Its common knowledge; so long as Arabs exist, that pair of scissors goes wandering through the desert and will wander with us to the end of our days. Every European is offered it for the great work; every European is just the man that Fate has chosen for them. They have the most lunatic hopes, these beasts; theyre just fools, utter fools.5
It appears, though, that the jackals continual attempts to outwit the Arabs by eliminating them at the hands of a European while they are asleep do not unduly arouse the Arabs anger, but rather amuse them greatly. And so, the Arab caravan leader, who has brought for the jackals the carcass of a camel that expired that night, lashes them hard with his sharp whip, as he observes, not without pleasure, how the jackals are torn between their fear of the Arabs whip and their craving for the carcass of his camel.6 The European, whose tendency not to interfere in the local dispute between the jackals and Arabs is evident throughout the story, now nevertheless appears unable to stand aside at the sight of this wanton cruelty toward the ravenous animals, and he takes hold of the Arabs arm as the latter once more wields his whip.7 Although the jackals have not won the longedfor active support of the representative of European reason for their cause, he is at least willing to ease their suffering and, to some extent, to moderate the confrontation at its peak. Indeed, the Arab is eventually convinced of the futility of whipping the jackals as they eat the carcass, and he leaves them to continue their feast undisturbed.8 Largely influenced by the text-immanent approach that emerged in literary criticism precisely at the time Kafkas work was in vogue following the Second World War,9 most of the earlier students of Jackals and Arabs were reluctant to treat the story against its immediate historical background, attempting instead to interpret it from within. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that interpretations of this sort ignored an external factthe Jewish national orientation of the periodical in which Jackals and Arabs first appearedand thus did not inquire into any possible Jewish-based context of the story.10 Herbert Tauber claimed that in the character of the Arab the unalterable, inexorable law of the World is opposed to [humanitys] all vain dreams of redemption, as represented in the jackals glorification of cleanliness, in itself a parody of the human dream
5. Ibid., 178. 6. Ibid., 17879. 7. Ibid., 179. 8. Ibid. 9. Helen Milful, KafkaThe Jewish Context, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 (1978): 227. 10. On Der Judes national Jewish orientation and its position in the German Jewish intellectual world toward the end of the First World War and thereafter, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 3335.
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11. Herbert Tauber, Franz Kafka: An Interpretation of His Works (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), 70. 12. Charles Neider, Kafka: His Mind and Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 81. 13. Walter H. Sokel, Franz KafkaTragik und Ironie; Zur Struktur seiner Kunst (Munich: Albert Langen, 1964), 146. 14. Andr Nmeth, Kafka ou le mystre juif (Paris: J. Vigneau, 1947), 3538. 15. William C. Rubinstein, Kafkas Jackals and Arabs, Monatshefte fr deutschen Unterricht 59, no. 1 (1967): 1318. 16. Ibid., 16. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 1415.
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Arabs represent the Wirtsvolk, a productive, territorial people rooted in the soil of their homeland, a model of the nation that Zionism sought to create.19 Rubinsteins theological-messianic interpretation was combined with Tismar s Zionist interpretation by Hartmut Binder in his Kafka-Handbuch,20 and by Ritchie Robertson in his thorough research on the Jewish political aspects of Kafkas writing.21 Thus, a triangular interpretative construct took root in the study of Jackals and Arabs: The jackals were seen as the wandering Jews of the Diaspora in general and the Jews of Western Europe in particular, piteous, cowardly, and impotent creatures whose very existence is at the mercy of the territorial nations; the Arabs as free non-Jews, upright and powerful, a nation as all the nations, as in the Zionist vision of self-normalization; and the narrator as a messianic figure, in whose beneficial intervention the jackals/Jews continue in vain to put their faith, as a parable of the refusal of the Jews of the Diaspora in general, and the assimilationist Western Jews in particular, to take responsibility for their own destiny and existence.22 The trend toward reading Jackals and Arabs within a Jewish-Zionist context, notable in Kafka studies since the 1970s, reflects the growing recognition among scholars of the importance of Zionist influences on Kafkas worldview, and consequently on his literary writing. Whereas the first works devoted to Kafka at the time of his rediscovery in the 1940s and immediately following the Second World War rejected outright the assertion of his Zionist friend and literary executor Max Brod (18841968) as to Kafkas deep inner commitment to the Zionist idea, more recent research has generally acknowledged Kafkas complex position on Zionism, which cannot be described in one-dimensional terms as pro- or antiZionist.23 Without agreeing with Brods somewhat dogmatic and oversimplified assertion that Kafka was a Zionist von innen,24 and on the strength of a thorough perusal of the author s diaries and letters, the research literature of the past two generations or so has thus sketched an ambivalent portrait of his rejectionattraction relationship with Zionism, a dynamic of inner tensions and conflict that was to mature into a gradual acceptance of the Zionist option from his late twenties onward. Thus, alongside what has been perceived as Kafkas outright manifestations of interest in national Jewish culturesuch as his admiration for the performances
19. Jens Tismar, Kafkas Schakale und Araber im zionistischen Kontext betrachtet, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 19 (1975): 31113. 20. Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Handbuch (Stuttgart: Alfred Krner Verlag, 1979), 2:329. 21. Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 164. 22. Sander L. Gilman offered a different Jewish interpretation, emphasizing the centrality of the difference in eating customs between the jackals and Arabs, and regarding Kafkas story as a parody of the Jewish customs of ritual slaughter and kashrut. See Sander L. Gilman, Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15053. 23. On this point see Milful, KafkaThe Jewish Context, 227, 230. 24. Max Brod, ber Franz Kafka (Frankfurt: Fischer Bcherei, 1966), 271; see also Felix Weltsch, Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas (Berlin-Grunewald: F. A. Herbig, 1957), 38.
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25. Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 1230; Anne Oppenheimer, Franz Kafkas Relation to Judaism (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1977), 4246; Vivian Liska, Neighbors, Foes, and Other Communities: Kafka and Zionism, Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 34849; Niels Bokhove, The Entrance to the More Important: Kafkas Personal Zionism, in Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, ed. Mark H. Gelber (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 2627; and see also Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958), 17681. 26. See, e.g., Hartmut Binder, Kafkas Hebrischstudien: ein biographisch-interpretatorischer Versuch, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967): 53033; Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 241; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 22425; Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4142; and Alfred Bodenheimer, A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafkas Hebrew Notebooks, in Gelber, Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, 25970. 27. Christoph Stlzl, Kafkas bses Bhmen (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1975), 13436; Milful, KafkaThe Jewish Context, 230; Binder, Kafka-Handbuch, 1:375; Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason, 6370, 290; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 1314, 14142; Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870 1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99100, 13841; Alter, Necessary Angels, 3942; and see also Ritchie Robertson, The Creative Dialogue between Brod and Kafka, in Gelber, Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, 28396. 28. Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend, 18182. 29. Hartmut Binder, Franz Kafka and the Weekly Paper Selbstwehr, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 12 (1967): 135, 140; and Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 126.
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Kochba circle, who conducted a protracted intellectual dialogue with Martin Buber after his appearance before them in Prague with his famous Three Addresses on Judaism in 190910, played, alongside Buber, a central role in establishing Der Jude in 1916, as well as in determining the content of its first issues, one of which included Kafkas Jackals and Arabs. Indeed, by early November 1915, Brod had urged Buber to invite Kafka to contribute to the future Jewish national journal.30 In view of all this, once the adherents of the Zionist interpretation of Jackals and Arabs had argued that the tale reflected the state of relations between Jews and non-Jews (as seen by Kafka at a time when he was influenced by Zionism), it would not have been unreasonable to expect them to address the question of whether, and how, this picture related to the perception of relations between Jews and non-Jews in the views of the Zionists of the Bar Kochba group who were close to Kafka. In fact, the Bar Kochba Zionists perception of the relations between Jews and non-Jews during the period under discussion related first and foremost to two rather more specific and concrete contexts: Bohemia, from whose soil and in the face of whose local challenges their Zionism had grown, and Palestine, the focus of Zionisms political aspirations. Scott Spector, in his Prague Territories, has been the only one to study Jackals and Arabs against the background of the multinational Prague experience of the author and the intellectuals close to him, and he proposed a view of the story as a reflection of the relationships between Jews, Germans, and Czechs in Prague and Bohemia, as perceivedin his understanding, to be discussed laterby Kafka and the Prague Jewish intellectuals nurtured on German culture, among them the Bar Kochbaites.31 Notwithstanding Kafkas deliberate use of the term Arabs, Spector did not consider the relevance of the contemporary Palestinian context of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in unraveling Kafkas message in the story. Tismar did indeed note that within the context of the journal Der Jude, concepts such as Arabs and desert symbolized the geographic area that constituted Zionisms ultimate goal.32 In her doctoral dissertation, Anne Oppenheimer noted somewhat more explicitly that the story has a comment to make on the ArabJewish conflict.33 But these writers chose not to discuss this issue in any great depth, and therefore they did not address the specific Zionist viewpoint of the Middle East, as seen from Prague. The anti-Zionist propaganda discourse among intellectuals in the Arab world following the establishment of the state of Israel did not hesitate, on the other hand, to read Kafkas Arab quite literally. But as Atef Botros recently and convincingly showed, these anti-Zionist interpretations altogether tear Kafkas story from its historical context, viewing it as an early reflection of the
30. Arthur A. Cohen, introduction to The Jew: Essays from Martin Bubers Journal Der Jude, 19161928, ed. Arthur A. Cohen (University: Alabama University Press, 1980), 1011. 31. Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafkas Fin de Sicle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 19194. 32. Tismar, Kafkas Schakale und Araber, 314. 33. Oppenheimer, Kafkas Relation to Judaism, 268.
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view on the state of ethnic relations in Palestine in the face of the Zionist settlement there? And above all, is it possible to discern any connection between the Bar Kochbaites approach to the CzechGermanJewish question in Bohemia and the ArabJewish question in Palestine? II. J ACKALS
AND
A RABS
BETWEEN
J EWS
B OHEMIA
Spector, whose Prague Territories is without doubt an original and fascinating combination of scrupulous textual analysis and innovative theoretical perspective on fin-de-sicle Pragues intellectual and cultural history, is, as mentioned, the only scholar who has sought to read Jackals and Arabs in association with the author s local experience in his multicultural and multinational hometown.39 Spector interpreted the figurative triangle of jackalsArabsnarrator as a parable of the CzechGermanJewish relationship: The jackals, abject but instilling fear to some extent, represent the Czech masses; the Arabs, powerful and proud, are the Prague Germans; while the mysterious figure of the narrator-mediator is none other than Kafka himselfthe German-speaking Prague Jew, gripped with apprehension and fear at the sight of the tumultuous jackals/Czechs, and pressing himself close to the caravan of the Arabs/Germans.40 A reading of this sort faithfully reflects Spector s more general interpretation of the cultural experience and intellectual work of the Prague Jewish writers and thinkers of Kafkas generation and background. The German-writing Prague Jewish intellectuals, among them the Zionists Bergmann and Brod, are presented in his book as people who grew up in and were shaped by a kind of German cultural bubble. While their ancestors, Spector asserted, had been centered on a map of universalist and hegemonic German high culture, the generation of the sons found itself devoid of any real cultural ground.41 Faced with the continuous erosion of German hegemony and the flourishing of the young Czech culture, members of the generation of Kafka, Bergmann, and Brod felt themselves to be isolated on a kind of island, which belonged no longer to the past, and could find no place for itself in the future.42 In order to extricate themselves from this spiritual-cultural isolation, these German Jewish intellectuals initiated a comprehensive and varied cultural project, which included the expressionist creations of Franz Werfel and Paul Kornfeld; the energetic efforts of Brod and the poets Otto Pick and Rudolf Fuchs to translate Czech literature into the German language; the Zionism of Bergmann, Brod, and the Bar Kochbaites; and the innovative literary writing of Kafka. This project, according to Spector, was founded with the intention
39. According to the Austrian population census method, which adopted the category of everyday language as a criterion for defining ones national affiliation, Pragues population in 1900 numbered some 415,000 Czechs (speakers of Czech on a day-to-day basis) and 33,776 Germans (speakers of German on a day-to-day basis), while the 27,289 members of the Jewish religion were divided among these two groups55 percent Czech speakers as an everyday language, and 45 percent German speakers. 40. Spector, Prague Territories, 19192. 41. Ibid., 20. 42. Ibid.
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In his groundbreaking book in the study of Jews of the Czech lands in the modern era, Hillel J. Kieval took issue with the traditional representation of Bohemian and Prague Jewry in the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as a bastion of German culture in the center of a hostile Slav world.47 Against this, he indicated for the first time a number of highly significant demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural processes that had gradually occurred in Bohemian Jewish society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and that had matured into a very tangible undermining of Bohemian and Prague Jewrys German orientation at the turn of the century. In contrast to the Germanocentric historiographic image of ongoing Jewish alienation from the surrounding Czech-speaking majority, Kieval established a sound claim for the continuity of everyday contacts between the Jews and the Czech population beginning in the preemancipation period, during which most Bohemian Jews were continually wandering through the Czech rural areas.48 This phenomenon became more entrenched during the internal Jewish migration that occurred in the two decades following the political changes of 184849, when a considerable part of rural Jewry set their sights on the Czech provincial towns, in which they became integrated with the burgeoning Czech middle class and gradually became what Kieval defined as Czech-Jewish assimilationists.49 This type of Czech Jew, many of whom moved to Prague in the last quarter of the nineteenth century following the severe crisis experienced by the Czech economy in the provincial towns in the 1880s, became, according to Kieval, the generators of radical change in the self-image of the sociocultural profile of Jews in the Bohemian capital at the beginning of the twentieth century: from German Jewry to Czech Jewry, a process he defined as secondary acculturation.50 This development, the prime institutional agent of which was the vociferous Czech Jewish assimilationist movement, found its manifest expression, according to Kieval, in the gradual decline of the phenomenon of the German-language Jewish primary schools, in the ever-wider adoption of Czech as the day-to-day language of communication among Prague Jews, and, above all, in the growing reservations of
Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 18481918 (PhD diss., University of London, 1974), 18990; Stlzl, Kafkas bses Bhmen, 93; Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival, 262; Zohar Maor, Mistika, yetsira u-sheiva el ha-yahadut: Ch . ug Prag be-tehilat ha-mea ha-esrim (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005), 79, 150, 17274, 247, 27577; and Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 13. See also Wilma A. Iggers, Die Prager Juden zwischen Assimilation und Zionismus, in Berlin und der Prager Kreis, ed. Margarita Pazi and Hans D. Zimmermann (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 1991), 22; Hartmut Binder, Paul Eisners dreifaches Ghetto: Deutsche, Juden und Tschechen in Prag, in Le monde de Franz Werfel et la morale des nations, ed. Michel Reffet (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001), 111; and Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 37. 47. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 3. 48. Ibid., 1012. 49. Ibid., 2527. 50. Ibid., 4, 198200.
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51. Ibid., 4858, 6063, 19899. 52. Ibid., 100. 53. Ibid., 113, 198203.
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a somewhat exceptional phenomenon in relation to the other members of the circle. In order to complete the reevaluation of the Germanocentric narrative in the historiography of Pragues Jews and Zionists, it is worth clarifying that the phenomenon of gradual erosion on the part of the local Czech component of the exclusive status of imperial German culture in relationships between Jews and their environment was paradigmatic in the case of the sociocultural experience of key figures in the Bar Kochba Association, as well as among the members of the wider circle such as Brod and Kafka. Indeed, in line with the overwhelming majority of Prague Jews of their generation, they were educated in German culture, and the German tongue was their primary intellectual vehicle. Nevertheless, in everyday life, they and their families were exposed to the Czech environment, language, and culture. They grew up in buildings with ethnically mixed populations who spoke different languages, in which the Czech component was prominentBergmann and Kafka in Czech Jewish buildings, Brod, Kohn, and Weltsch in Czech German Jewish ones.54 This constituted an exception to the accepted residential patterns among the Jews of Prague, whose most intimate spheres of life tended toward an existence separate from non-Jews, and who preferred to have other Jews as their neighbors.55 Unlike most of their schoolmates in the German high school, who throughout their schooling boycotted the study of the Czech language (apart from Weltschs class, half of which did partake in them), and also unlike the majority of students in the German high schools throughout Bohemia at the same period, Bergmann, Kafka, Brod, and Weltsch consistently studied Czech by choice.56 And insofar as Kafkas two Zionists, Bergmann and Brod, are concerned, it is of particular importance to
54. For information on the ethno-language composition of the population of the apartment buildings of Bergmann, Kafka, Brod, Kohn, and Weltsch, see, respectively, Archiv hlavnho msta Prahy (AHMP), fond staci operaty, I131, 1900; AHMP, fond staci operaty, I602, 1900; AHMP, fond staci operaty, I527, 1900; AHMP, fond staci operaty, I349, 1911; and AHMP, fond staci operaty, V125, 190110. 55. Cohen, Jews in German Society, 4951. 56. For Bergmann and Kafka, see AHMP, fond koln katalogy, Nemcke st. gymnasium, Stare Msto, 18 tda, 18931901/K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 18931901, KlassenKatalog, IVIII Klasse; for Brod, see AHMP, fond koln katalogy, Gymnasium nemck statn, Stepansk ul., 18 tda, 18941902/K. k. Staatsgymnasium, Prag Neustadt, Stephansgasse Hauptkatalog, 18941902, IVIII Klasse; for Kohn, see AHMP, fond koln katalogy, Nemcke st. gymnasium, Stare Msto,18 tda, 190210, K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 190210, KlassenKatalog, IVIII; for Weltsch, see AHMP, fond koln katalogy, Nemcke st. gymnasium, Stare Msto,18 tda, 19011909/K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 19011909, KlassenKatalog, IVIII. Hartmut Binder found that the study of the Czech language in Bohemian German high schools fell into the category of relatively compulsory study (relativ obligater Lehrgegenstand), and that German-speaking students for the most part did study the Czech language (Binder, Paul Eisners dreifaches Ghetto, 116). And yet, according to statistical data from the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, only 38.6 percent of all the students in Bohemian German high schools chose to study the Czech language. See Karl Hellmut, Die Gymnasien und Realschulen in Bhmen im Schuljahre 190607, Deutsche Arbeit 7, no. 4 (January 1908): 244.
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57. Pieter M. Judson, Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of Hapsburg Monarchy, Social Analysis 33 (September 1993): 4748. 58. Shmuel Hugo Bergmann Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Arc 4 1502/156. 59. Ibid.
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It was not by chance that Bergmann remembered this confrontation with the discourse of Deutschtum in Prague as a most significant milestone in the development of his awareness toward the point at which he turned to Zionism.60 Upon coming up against one of the more grotesque manifestations of the Germanocentric position in the Bohemian capital, such as the rendering of The Watch on the Rhine by Jewish youngsters on the banks of the Vltava, the young Bergmann became ever more aware of the gap between the Germanocentric discourse that recognized the existence of but one Kultur in Bohemia and Prague, regarding them as geocultural entities of sorts affiliated with Vienna and Berlin, and the multicultural realities in this region. On the other hand, the more Bergmann became exposed to the opposing influences of the local multicultural and, indeed, multinational environment beyond the blister of his class, as the burgeoning Czech element was continually challenging the component of German acculturation within him, so did the sense of a particularistic Jewish self take on a sharper form for him. This was part of his recognition of the complexity of the local Bohemian landscapes national-cultural character, which was denied by the Germanocentric discourse, in general, and of his identification with the Czech challenge to German hegemony in particular. When he came to the national Jewish Bar Kochba Association through the cracks that grew evident in the monocultural, Germanocentric blister of his educational environment as a result of the challenge of Czech nationalism, the Zionist Bergmann saw in the divestment from the imperial German discourse and in the search for a dialogue with the local Czech nationalism the guiding principles for the deportment of a Jewish nation in the multinational Bohemian arena. Thus, in one of his first Zionist articles, in which he proposed a series of measures for amending the curriculum in German-language Jewish community schools with the aim of transforming them into an infrastructure for the renewal of Jewish national life in Bohemia, Bergmann presented the issue of the teaching of the Czech language and putting it on an equal footing with German within the framework of Jewish education as nothing less than a Jewish national issue.61 This means that, as someone who would from now on fight tirelessly for official recognition of the Jewish nation as part of the local Bohemian and Prague multinational landscape, he first of all sought to abolish the logic of the hegemony of the imperial German component over the relations of Jews with their linguisticcultural surroundings, in the aspiration of establishing Zionismthe third local nationalismas an element that would work for reshaping Bohemia as a space for a more balanced, trilateral of its three national groups.62 Bergmann expressed himself in even clearer language in his programmatic article Prager Brief of 1904, in which he laid out his position on the issue of the triangular relations between the burgeoning Jewish nationalism in Prague and
60. Ibid. 61. Hugo Bergmann, Jdische Schulfragen, Revue der israelitischen Kultursgemeinden in Bhmen (October 1903): 3. 62. See Hugo Bergmann, Der jdische Nationalrat, Selbstwehr, November 1, 1918, 2.
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Altstdte; by doing so, we might comprehend the nature of the difference: Approximately one-third of the pupils in Brods class were born in the Czechspeaking areas outside Prague, compared to one-sixth in the class of Kafka and Bergmann.68 Once he had taken an independent stand and developed into one of the most productive and acclaimed writers in Pragues German literary arena, Brod openly placed himself on the same collision course with the consciousness of German cultural hegemony in Bohemia that had been staked out by his father and the sociocultural and multinational environment in which Brod himself had grown up. A decisive milestone as he made his way along this path, following which Brod, by no coincidence, turned to Zionism, was his short novel Ein tschechisches Dienstmdchen (A Czech Housemaid), written in 1909.69 Basically the story of the love of a young German clerk for a Czech girl of rural origin, this book contains first and foremost a sharp satirical sting directed ostensibly at that selfsame coma of German imperial denial of the presence of a local Czech national-cultural element in Bohemia from which his father Adolf had previously awakened. The central protagonist, a Vienna-born German by the name of William Schurhaft, suffers from a sort of emotional deficiency: Lacking the basic ability to perceive the actual reality around him and to connect to it, he is able only to comprehend the world of abstract concepts. To cure him of this deficiency, his father sends him to Prague because there, according to the father,
[H]istory is in the making, as if before your eyes, in the midst of a war between the two nations at its center. The ring of the foreign tongue will reach your ears together with the sound of the window panes shattering in the war over it. There, the sense of reality will at last rise up in you. You cant possibly continue in your ways there and fail to pay attention to the real world.70
And yet, it seems that all this is in vain: William fails to discern in Prague the slightest sign of a second culture, and he does not hear a single word of Czech. He is surrounded only by Germans: my landlady is an old German maid the owner of my office is a German as are all his clerks and even the small boy who brings me my meals.71 It is only when he comes across a young Czech servant girl, with whom he falls in love, that the protagonist is extricated from his isolation in the hermetically sealed German camp. He is then faced with the reality of the existence of another people alongside him, and thus he finds the ability to see the tangible world. While he sought to emphasize the dimensions of German blindness toward the Czech surroundings, Brod succeeded in giving the reader the impression that his hero is unaware not only of the Czechs concrete existence, but also of their images in the German cultural and public discourse. Still, once William suddenly
68. See note 56 herein. 69. Max Brod, Ein tschechisches Dienstmdchen (Leipzig: Axel Juncker Verlag, 1909). 70. Ibid., 11. 71. Ibid., 2021.
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It thus transpires that in the perception of the hero and those who share the illusion of the Germanic nature of Prague and Bohemias industrialized cities (no doubt the same illusion that enabled the members of the blister of Kafkas and Bergmanns class to imagine themselves on the banks of the Rhine), a number of welldefined character traits are attributed to the Czech residents of Bohemia. First and foremost, the Czechs constitute, according to this perception, a static population entity of sorts from a sociodemographic point of view, composed of agrarian laborers shackled forever to their rural homeland, somewhere far away from the urban, industrialized, and dynamic German Bohemia. From the beginning, the German protagonist thus fails to sense any sign of Czechness in Prague,73 as he believes that the Czechs have yet to arrive, in both senses, at the German Pragueboth from a mental point of view, as they maintain deep emotional ties to the countryside and the rural way of life, and consequently from a tangible physical point of view. However, it now becomes apparent to the protagonist of A Czech Housemaid that following the severe crisis of Czech agriculture74 namely, the grave crisis that in the 1880s beset those branches of the Czech food industry linked to agriculture following the steep decline in grain prices that resulted from the rapid development of railways and steamships75the Czech masses gained an unexpected capacity for impressive demographic
72. Ibid., 11819. 73. Ibid., 2021. 74. Ibid., 118. 75. Jan Havrnek, The Development of Czech Nationalism, Austrian History Yearbook 3 (1967): 230.
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mobility, uprooted themselves from their homes in rural areas, which in the German imagination had been intended for them for eternity, and laid siege to the German land.76 The Czechs, as the amazed German observer is made well aware, are subject to the same processes that operate in different historical moments among humanity in general. Like the Germans, they feel at home in the citys dynamic and turbulent atmosphere; as do the Germans, they create a variety of cultural artifacts in their language that will serve as an anchor and support as they experience the instability of the city; and, above all, like the Germans, they, too, appear to the German protagonist as a nation of many talents and considerable beauty.77 This recognition of the Czechs nationhood leads Brods hero, for the first time, to an awareness of the power of the national dispute between them and the Germans, and to recoil from the struggle for existence that is waged with bitterness and fury.78 And yet, at the same time, it becomes ever clearer to him that without this recognition of the Czechs national existence, and all the more so of Prague and Bohemias binational character, it will be impossible to build a bridge between the opposing camps. Without harboring any illusions as to the hope of ever bringing all the antagonism and power struggles between Czechs and Germans to an end, he thinks that it would be possible to control the conflict, reduce the friction and tensions, and wage a softer, more moderate war, if only the other Germans would recognize, as he does, that there are many children in the land, and the German lands are partitioned in an inequitable manner.79 As related in Brods autobiography, A Czech Housemaid constituted the first link in the chain of circumstances that culminated in his joining the circle of Bar Kochbaite Zionists. Leo Hermann, then chairman of the Bar Kochba Association and one of Hugo Bergmanns most prominent followers, published a critique of the novel in the Prague Selbstwehr and in the Brno/Brnn Jdisches Volksstimme, in which he disagreed with the author on the issue of the relations between the nationalities in Prague.80 This critique considerably angered Brod, who took issue in particular with what he saw as the critics simplistic attempt to attribute to him the view that intimate contact could serve as a model of sorts for the solution of the CzechGerman conflict in Bohemia. Brod initiated a meeting with Hermann to clarify matters, which he described as protracted and tempestuous, and following which he began to move ever closer to Prague Zionism. Upon reading Hermanns critique, which turned out to be more favorable than the way it was presented in Brods autobiography, one finds sharply discerned insights with regard to the novels subversive dimension and the process of the author s repositioning within Bohemias multinational arena. Hermann found in A Czech Housemaid first and foremost a commendable expression of the author s own contempt for the faithful students of the Jewish-German clique of
76. Brod, Ein tschechisches Dienstmdchen, 118. 77. Ibid., 119 (emphasis added). 78. Ibid., 118. 79. Ibid. 80. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 124.
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A Czech Housemaid above all as a sort of German Jewish colonialist fantasy expressed in Orientalist and gendered language. In his words, It is the first source to look for a clue to the morass of issues of desire and patronization, longing and disdain, in the Germano-Jewish gaze to the East.82 As the daily lives of Brod and his family were far from being led within a Germanocentric circle isolated from the influences of the local national environment, his little novel reflected first and foremost the peak of the author s own search for alternative channels of identification to that of the Germanocentric imperial one, modes that would be compatible with the picture of Pragues multinational world that had already revealed itself to his father Adolf many years before it was expressed by the protagonist of A Czech Housemaid. Brod, then, found this channel in the Zionism of Bergmann and Bar Kochba, which saw in the balancing of the Jews German educational-cultural affiliation with a deepened receptiveness toward the Czech majority an existential need for their national future, and also sought to shape the ideological dimension of Bohemian Jewish nationalism as a position from which to engage in dialogue with the local national movement.83 As in the case of Spector s analysis of A Czech Housemaid, it is likewise extremely difficult to accept his Germanocentric interpretative tendency with regard to the way in which he reads Kafkas Jackals and Arabs. Insofar as one can see the jackalsEuropean travelerArabs triangle as an encoding of Kafkas Bar Kochbaite friends view of local Prague reality (and in contrast to Spector s interpretation), it would appear that the jackals, longing for the voice of European reason in the face of the Arabs filth, rather than representing the Czechs, in fact denote the German Jews of Prague, the foremost guardians of Germanness against Czechness, according to Leo Herrmann, whose persistence in ignoring the national-cultural existence of the Czechs and whose part in fanning the flames of the CzechGerman conflict the Bar Kochba Zionists strongly criticized; the European traveler, who would not tarry for long in the region, does not represent Pragues German Jews, but rather the imperial AustroGerman establishment on which these Jews pinned their hopes, and the erosion of whose hegemony in Bohemia Kafkas Zionists had well discerned; and the proud and upright Arabs, for their part, who scorned the jackals for continuing to adhere to their baseless belief in Arab inferiority, rather than representing the Germans, in fact represent the Czechs, whose national pride had for some time been recognized by Bergmann, Brod, and, one may assume, by Kafka himself. III. J ACKALS
AND
A RABS
BETWEEN
J EWS
PALESTINE
As far as the approaches of Prague Zionism to the question of ArabJewish relations in Palestine are concerned, scholars of Zionism and the ArabZionist conflict have not failed to discern the firm stand taken by the former Bar
82. Spector, Prague Territories, 174. 83. See Dimitry Shumsky, On Ethno-Centrism and its Limits: Czecho-German Jewry in Fin-de-Sicle Prague and the Origins of Zionist Bi-Nationalism, Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 5 (2006): 18488.
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traditional Arab society to the graves of their ancestors.90 As described by Epstein, Arab society of Palestine thus takes the form of a somewhat static and petrified entity, the diametric opposite of European societies that had undergone processes of modernization, and also of the society of the Zionist settlers who hailed from these places. Indeed, Bergmann likewise pointed out that Palestinian Arab society was on the whole a premodern peasant society. At the same time, however, he identified modernization processes occurring within it that had not been noticed by the Zionists, and he sought to bring to the fore in particular the dimension of potential power contained within these processes, even if these were but the initial trappings of modernization. He utterly rejected the perception that was prevalent among broad Zionist circles, according to which Jewish settlement in the country, and it alone, could lay the foundations of modern life in the region. What Bergmann discerned was that phenomena identified with modernization, such as industrialization and the development of trade and infrastructure, had already begun among Palestines local population, and were in fact gathering considerable momentum, even if this was not yet sufficient to provide employment for the working class in the making.91 Moreover, in contrast to Epsteins assertion that the Muslim will not leave his country, will not wander afar, because the lower a mans level of development and the narrower his field of vision, the stronger the ties that bind him to his country and his region and the harder it is for him to leave his village and his field, Bergmann actually emphasized that the Arab population of Palestine and the adjacent territories had in fact lately been in a state of constant demographic movement.92 He thus clearly discerned the flow of Arab migration from the area of Lebanon to the Galilee, which he claimed had gained momentum in recent years. There was also the phenomenon of Arab migration to the United States, but when they had succeeded in saving the desired sum abroad, Bergmann noted, many of them returned to their homeland in the Middle East, purchased land in the Lebanon area and the Galilee, and in many cases eventually chose to return and lay down roots in northern Palestine.93 This is precisely the context within which Bergmann referred to the matter of the Arab residents awareness of their ties to ihre Heimat.94 Unlike Epstein, who presented the Arab residents of the country as a collective of primitive workers with an umbilical connection to the land of their ancestors, and whose sights were set only on their ancient customs, which accurately reflected, as it were, the foundations of their present life, Bergmann saw a Palestinian Arab of a different sort, closely resembling a citizen of a modern European nation in the making. Bergmanns Araba native of Lebanon or Palestineis rather exposed to modern life, wandering about the Middle East and even the wide world in
90. Ibid., 195. 91. Bergmann, Bemerkungen, 191. 92. Epstein, Sheila neelama, 195; Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2627. 93. Bergmann, Bemerkungen, 19192. 94. Ibid., 192.
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homeland.98 This state of affairs, with its increasing escalation, as Selbstwehr would warn with growing urgency in the course of 1911, compelled the Zionists, as its contributors saw it, to promote the settlement project alongside continuous negotiations with the Arab public and its representatives. Notwithstanding the correspondents somewhat intuitive sense that the ArabJewish national conflict in Palestine would become ever more severe, a situation in which a form of constructive dialogue would develop did not appear to them as an unattainable objective. Selbstwehr saw in the willingness to open up to the language and culture of the local Arab environment an essential immediate step that the Zionists should take toward the inauguration of this dialogue. First, it would be well to promote the teaching of the Arab language in Jewish schools in order to prepare Jewish youngsters for active participation in the written Arab discourse in Palestine, which for the most part displayed a suspicious and hostile tendency toward Zionism.99 In a similar vein, the paper argued that it was already time to work toward founding a Zionist newspaper in the Arab language.100 Like Bergmann, who was to make an identical proposal several months later in his Notes, Selbstwehr thus urged the Zionist settlers to take a direct stand, as Zionists writing in the Arab language, in the face of what it perceived as the Arab nationalist discourse in Palestine, in order to attempt to confront it face to face, and thereby nurture channels of bridging and mutual understanding between Zionism and the local Arab nationalism.101 Upon reviewing the voice of Bar Kochbaite Zionism on the Arab question, it is difficult not to discern a number of similarities between the ways in which Bergmann and Selbstwehr perceived the reality of Palestine and Max Brods presentation of the state of interethnic relations in contemporary Prague and Bohemia, as revealed to the protagonist of his A Czech Housemaid. In the same way that Brod sought to extricate his German and GermanJewish readers in Bohemia from long-standing blindness to the socioeconomic, political, and demographic changes that had occurred among their Czech neighbors in recent generations, and which had reshaped them as a national political collective evenly matched with the German collective as far as meeting the challenge of modern life was concerned, so, too, did Bergmann and his like-minded colleagues on the Bar Kochba weekly wish to turn the Zionist settlers attention to the initial budding of such development among the local Arab population. And as Brods Czechs had no intention of returning to the villages from which they had come, but rather sought to continue residing in the German cities while contesting the view of Bohemias industrialized regions as German land, so, too, did Bergmanns and Selbstwehr s Arabs strike roots in the ports of the Land of Israel, waging fierce anti-Zionist propaganda in their press while regarding the transfer of the ownership of land from Arab to Jewish hands, even though it was done legally, as the transfer from one national ownership to another and as evidence
98. Palstinanachrichten, Selbstwehr, December 9, 1910, 5. 99. Palstinanachrichten, Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4. 100. Palstinanachrichten, Selbstwehr, February 3, 1911, 4; and March 17, 1911, 4. 101. Palstinanachrichten, Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4.
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to say, despite his use of the first-person plural (we were blind to the Czechs), Bergmann was not referring to himself, nor to his friends in the Bar Kochba Association. For, as we remember, their Zionist activity in the Bohemian arenaand that of Bergmann himself first and foremostwas motivated largely by a wish to balance their ties to imperial German culture with a sociocultural affiliation to the local Czech national environment. He was surely referring to all those Jewish defenders of German cultural-political hegemony in Bohemia and Moravia, who were wont to ignore the importance of a local sociocultural and political element in the form of Czech nationalism, and turned their backs on the language and culture of a local neighboring population in favor of adherence to imperial cultural-political ties. The central elements of the Zionist movement in Palestine were thus, in Bergmanns assessment, suffering from the same type of blindness toward the increasingly nationalist tendencies among the local population, while turning their gaze to the capital of the British Empire, thereby closely resembling the Viennese political orientation on the part of many among the Jews of Bohemia and Prague at the end of the Habsburg era.106 It is difficult to assume that a comparison of this kind between the attitude of Jewish settlers toward the nascent Arab Palestinian nationalism and that of the Germanocentric Prague Jews toward the Czech national movement at the height of its development had not occurred to Bergmann already in 1911, when he first observed the ways of the Zionist settlement in Palestine and the reactions of the local Arabs to them. For, at the time of making his critical voice heard in Notes on the Arab Question, the example of the CzechGermanJewish triangle appeared before his eyes as part of his life experience, rather than as a past memory, as in 1921, about one year after his immigration to Palestine. But even had this not been the case, one may at least determine that the authors of Notes on the Arab Question and A Czech Housemaid, whose Jewish national awareness was shaped while they were questioning the logic of the imperial Austro-German hegemony and upon the repositioning in the Bohemian multinational arena alongside the Czech nationality, followed occurrences in Palestine and in Bohemia, respectively, from the same viewpoint, as it were, that enabled them to identify in the local environment more than one national trend, and motivated them to seek ways of bridging the neighboring nationalities. This somewhat peripheral viewpoint, located ostensibly at the margins of the imperial and at the center of the local, and which thus focuses the spotlight on the totality of national-cultural forces operating in the local space, rather than on the unnuanced imperial image of this space, was evidently shared by the author of Jackals and Arabs. Indeed, to the extent that one can regard Kafkas jackals European travelerArabs triangulation as a parable in the spirit of the Bar Kochbaite perception of the relations among the Jewish adherents of Deutschtum in Prague, the imperial Germanocentric Habsburg establishment, and the local Czech national environment, one can also discern in it Bar Kochba Zionisms clear gaze turned increasingly toward a different Jewishimperiallocal triangle,
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in recognizing an allusion to the potent and proud Prague Germans.110 Yet the Palestinian Arab, to whose actual existenceand even more so, to whose potential existence in the foreseeable futureBergmann and Selbstwehr alerted their readers, had, in truth, a European appearance, at least with regard to the nationalmodern outline of his physiognomy. Kafkas Arab is thus also like thisa man well aware of his peoples vital interests, who has no difficulty exposing the crafty scheme of his jackal neighbors to persuade hesitant European elements to harm these interests. This kind of representation of the Arab, which considerably added to the significance of the image of the Palestinian Arab presented by Kafkas close friend and by the Prague Zionist weekly that he regularly read, was diametrically opposed to the approach toward the Arab question shared by British diplomats and the leaders of political Zionism, who, in the period of the Great War, completely ignored the existence of the Arabs as an element of any political weight in the country.111 It is superfluous to note that this approach, which found its most prominent expression in Chaim Weizmanns view that the Arab residents of Palestine were at least four hundred years behind the Zionists in their self-awareness, was baseless.112 There is broad agreement among the historians who have studied the political trends in the Arab society of Palestine on the eve of the First World War that, notwithstanding the lack of an Arab Palestinian national movement in the organizational-political sense, the apprehension over Zionist policy among the strata of educated urban Arabs (the Ayaan) began in those days to take on an outright national-political dimension.113 While the strata among which such developments occurred were indeed extremely thin, Kafka observed them, as a matter of course, primarily through the magnifying glass of Bergmanns Notes on the Arab Question and of the Palstinanachrichten column in Selbstwehr, while adding to what he saw by employing his literary skills. In other words, while he was, in truth, looking only at the initial outlines of the figure of a politically upright Arab, Kafka had in fact discerned the entire portrait, and thus created the impression of a somewhat anachronistic picture, ahead of its time. Faced with the tendency of the leaders of political Zionism to deny that processes comparable to those occurring in Europe may also evolve in the local Arab Palestinian environment, and consequently their strategic diplomatic tendency to pin their political hopes on casual
110. Tismar, Kafkas Schakale und Araber; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 164; and Spector, Prague Territories, 191. 111. Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 19141918: BritishJewishArab Relations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 12, 67. 112. Joseph Heller, Emdotehem shel Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and Jabotinsky be-sheila he-aravitmekhkar hashvaati, in Idan ha-z . iyonut, ed. Anita Shapira, Jehuda Reinharz and Jay Harris (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2000), 217. 113. Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement: 19181929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974), 28; Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 22627; and Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 18811999 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 6267. On the nationalist-autonomist movements among the Palestinian Arabs on the eve of World War I, see Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 15051.
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Bar Kochba Zionisms aspiration to change the patterns of Jewish conduct vis--vis a long-armed empire on the one hand and the local sociocultural surroundings on the other was not confined to the Bohemian context. The more the Bar Kochbaites looked toward the land with which Zionisms political hopes were entwined, the more the sides of the Palestinian triangle of forces achieved clarity for them: the Zionist settlers, the great powers, and the local Arabs at the beginning of the crystallization of their national-political awareness, as a side unseen by the former two. So, the trenchant criticism that Hugo Bergmann, the leader of the Bar Kochbaites and their mouthpiece, leveled at the Jewish settlers for their refusal to contemplate the first buds of Palestinian Arab nationalism sounded like a veritable echo of the call to arms of Brod, Leo Herrmann, and Bergmann himself against the Prague German and GermanJewish discourse of hegemony that stubbornly denied the strong presence of the neighboring Czech nationalism and its political demands. The author of Jackals and Arabs was not a Zionist activist. He was not involved in the effort of his close friends to trace the ideological directions of Bar Kochbaite Zionism, but in the main observed these from a distance with considerable intellectual interest and with somewhat muted sympathy. And yet, Kafkas links to the Bar Kochba circle were not confined to intellectual curiosity and ties of friendship with some of its prominent members. Most important, he was identified with the Bar Kochba members in a deep sociocultural sense, as someone who daily experienced that erosion of the dominant status of the German affinity in the face of the Czech challenge, which honed the Bar Kochbaites Jewish national awareness, and also shaped their understanding of Zionism as a move toward the Jews self-repositioning within local multinational networks and against the identification of the Jewish minority with the imperial forces. While in Kafkas case the experience of this collision between imperial and local non-Jews did not lead him to adopt an explicit, national Jewish position, it transformed him into a sharer of the Bar Kochba Zionists criticism of what appeared to them the incredible blindness of Germanocentric Jews on the one hand and Zionist settlers on the other, toward what was occurring in their concrete local surroundings. Jackals and Arabswritten in the last days of the Habsburg state, which denied the severity of its local national problems, and in the first days of local Palestinian nationalism, whose existence had thus far been deniedthus signaled the apex of this criticism. Dimitry Shumsky Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel
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