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In the dual role of writer and thinker, Franz Kafka forged new directions for the German
language as well as for world literature; he was also a Jew. Is this last fact of any
significance, or can modem Kafka criticism simply state it and move on to the task at hand?
After all, the reception of Kafka's work has demonstrated how adaptable it is to a number of
interpretative approaches, all of which were able to make their point without emphasizing
the Jewish component. More mindful of necessity than of silent scruple, critics usually kept
to their own intuition, paying little more than cursory tribute to Kafka's Jewish ness.
Fortunately, this is no longer the case in just about every modem representation of Kafka's
life and work. Hardly any scholar today would fail to emphasize the significance of the
predominantly Jewish atmosphere that surrounded Kafka, and this is essentially a sign of
respect and recognition of the enigmatic and far-reaching references Gershom Scholem
made regarding the kabalistic influences in Kafka's work. Toward the end of his article
titled "Ten Unhistorical Statements about the Kabbalah" (judaica III), Scholem writes:
"Although unaware of it himself, [Kafka's] writings are a secularized representation of the
kabalistic conception of the world. This is why many of today's readers find something of
the rigorous splendor of the canonical in them-a hint of the Absolute that breaks into pieces"
(271). In his book on Walter Benjamin, The Story of a Friendship, Scholem quotes himself:
"I said then.., that one would have to read the works of Franz Kafka before one could
understand the Kabbalah today, and particularly The Trial' (Friendship, 158). Without
intending to minimize the astuteness of Scholem's insight, the fact is that references such as
these remain extremely pale and colorless for most critics. The majority either restrict
themselves to vacuous generalities or else proceed from an image of Judaism that bears no
resemblance whatsoever to Kafka's Jewish milieu. Take, for example, the statement Bert
Nagel makes in his informative chapter on Kafka's Judaism, where he claims "that the old
commandant'' of "In the Penal Colony" represents "the God of the Old Testament," and "thus
there is undoubtedly something of the Old Testament God Yahweh in the fathers Bendemann
and Samsa and in the commandant of the penal colony" (118). Or again, when he sees in
Katica the "author of Judaism': "The fact that Kafka not only identified himself as a Jew and
took up the cause of Judaism, but, perhaps even more importantly, the fact that he still
harbored the basic ideas of ancient biblical Judaism as well, all testify to a continuation of
the Jewish heritage. Kafka's God is still the judgmental and punitive God of the Old
Testament" (123). Downright dubious is the most recent attack H. Binder made refuting a
Jewish/kabalistic element behind Kafka's thinking. Despite the extensive commonalties he
has acknowledged as existing between Kafka and this background, he now speaks of a
"contemptuous tendency" on the part of the Kabbalah vis-a-vis mankind; according to this
trend, the world is supposedly a "creation of the devil." Binder also speaks of the "occultism"
of the Kabbalah, which could not possibly have influenced Kafka. The Kabbalah is neither
contemptuous of mankind nor is it a conspiratorial "occultism" in the vein, let's say, of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is, rather, a widespread and widely read, generally
accepted mystical theology, accessible to everyone, especially among Eastern European
Jewry and Hasidism. Observations like these not only exude the prejudicial Christian Image
of Judaism; they also persist in the absolutely erroneous idea that Judaism has remained
unchanged in its Two-thousand-year post-biblical history-as if there weren't a rich and
multifaceted, philosophically diverse post-biblical body of Jewish literature and thought; as
if the philosophy and ideology of Judaism were a static monolithic block in terms of rational
thought. To talk about the Jewish religion and way of life within a philosophical-theological
context is one of the fundamental errors that grew out of an Image of Judaism based on
dogmatic or self-conceived Ignorance. Already closer to the truth are the no longer rare
references to the Influences the Yiddish theater had on Kafka. The work of Evelyn Torton
Beck did much to substantiate this fact ("Durchbruch," 204-23). In light of the entries in
Kafka's diaries on the subject, this influence can hardly be contested. The very existence of
these distinct and divergent views within Judaism forced Scholem, the Nestor of modem
research on the Kabbalah, to repeatedly emphasize Kafka's particular relation to the
Kabbalah and to Eastern European Hasidism. It also occasioned his provocative "dissident
thoughts" "that admittedly do not deal with Kafka's place in the continuum of German
literature-in which he has absolutely no place--but in that of Jewish literature" (Friendship,
212). Respect for the tremendous stature of Gershom Scholem requires just about every
modem critic to acknowledge his view. Paradoxically, however, recognition of this influence
frequently remains rather dry and sterile because many critics are unable to read the
Hebrew and Yiddish sources and thus have no choice but to resort exclusively to secondhand
Information. This is all the more regrettable since it is precisely this aspect of the Jewish
tradition that has so much to tell about Kafka, a fact one cannot fail to appreciate in light of
the diary entry serving as the introductory motto for the present work. This study proceeds
from the basic assumption that Kafka could have been influenced by the Jewish, or better
said, by a certain Jewish tradition. Is this approach justified in spite of the fact that he
himself deplored his inadequate Jewish upbringing? He did so not only in his Letter to My
Father ("But what kind of Judaism did I get from you!" [Wedding, 144]), but also In the much
quoted statement: "I was not introduced to life, like Kierkegaard, by the heavily overbearing
hand of Christianity, nor have I clutched the tip of the disappearing Jewish prayer shawl like
the Zionists. I am end or beginning" (Wedding, 89).Such laments on Kafka's part are best
measured against the claims a writer of his sensibility with an interest in philosophic
questions might make of any religious education and religious tradition. However, we should
not let this fact lead us to assume that Kafka had no knowledge or no Jewish experiences
that might have colored his thinking and his writing. All of Kafka's texts including his novels
and short stories, but primarily his diary entries and aphorisms--reveal an extraordinarily
detailed and sophisticated knowledge of things Jewish. He acquired this knowledge through
his own studies, through conversations with friends, and through family life as well as
through observations of Jewish life in Prague, especially in the synagogue. Granted, this was
not a formal knowledge of rabbinical-halakhic rules of orthodoxy and of
philosophical-theological speculation; what Kafka knew might better be described as a
popularized Kabbalah and the Jewish traditions influenced by it.
Kafka was a careful observer and evidently a very attentive listener. His diaries reproduce
what he saw and heard with an accuracy that lends his notes the authority of
religious-historical source material. A comparison of these diary entries with the Eastern
European Hebrew and Yiddish original works leaves no doubt about their reliability. One
thing is clear: Kafka knew more about Judaism than his remarks on the subject would lead
one to believe. What he gleaned from direct instruction and personal readings was
substantial, but the experience of customs, gestures and everyday behavior rooted in
various traditions cannot be overestimated. Visible objects like the mezuzah (the scroll on
doorposts of Jewish homes), the tefilltn (phylacteries or prayer boxes attached by leather
straps to the forehead and arm of the worshipper), the prayer shawl, the thoughts
accompanying acts of charity, the texts of holiday rituals practiced privately at home and
publicly in the synagogue and so easily transmitted via conversations with friends--all of
these things provided a knowledge-hungry person like Kafka with the fundamentals of
popular Jewish religion and Jewish lore, and characterize Jewish behavior and thought much
more profoundly than does a formal knowledge of ethical and philosophical works. However,
such Jewish lore also creates a culture gap for the reader who is unfamiliar with this
everyday way of life and who therefore overlooks it.
This reference to the Jewish traditions and attitudes intrinsic to Kafka must be accompanied
by a warning against falling prey to the unjustified extreme of relegating him exclusively to
this tradition. The whole of Jewish intellectual history, spanning as it does thousands of
years, is itself distinguished by the fact that the great Jewish thinkers took a creative
approach to their tradition and constantly renewed it. What's more, they did so under
the--at times profound--influence of non-Jewish cultural elements, which they absorbed,
interpreted, processed and "Judaized" to the extent that they were ultimately perceived as
a genuine part of Jewish tradition. This fact alone lends considerable support to Scholem's
extreme position. Kafka did what many Jewish thinkers and writers before him did: he
merged his Judaism with modem thinking and thus created a new form of Judaism, his own
Judaism. If a large number of Kafka readers with ties to modem Christian or non-Jewish
European cultural backgrounds feel directly addressed by Kafka and have a sense of being
"at home" in his works, their response is by no means novel in Jewish intellectual history.
Medieval Jewish philosophy with the Kabbalah in its wake, as well as Eastern European
Hasidism have been as deeply influenced as has non-Jewish mysticism by the philosophical
systems of medieval Platonism and Aristotelianism. In many respects these sources gave
rise to a number of similarities vis-fi-vis the corresponding Christian movements-one need
only think of the neoplatonism of such Christian mystics as Dionysius Areopagita on up to
Meister Eckhardt and the early Spanish Kabbalists of Gerona in the thirteenth century, the
Ijjun Kabbalah, the Zohar, Moses Cordovero and Eastern European Hasidim. The Christian
Kabbalah of the fifteenth to the eighteenth century actually believed it could best express its
own Christian religiosity with the help of the Jewish Kabbalah. To this day, Princess Antonia's
kabalistic altar-painting in the modest church of Bad Teinach in the Black Forest remains a
most impressive demonstration of this. In many respects, medieval Jewish philosophy is a
component of the broad rubric of European philosophy, and Maimonides (1135-1205) as well
as Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1020-1057) may be named here as having exerted a direct
influence on Christian scholasticism and mysticism, as well as Leone Ebreo alias Judah
Abravanel (1460-1523) with his Dialoghi d' amore. Mention should also be made of the
lasting effect Martin Buber had on the Christian churches, particularly his interpretation of
Jewish history as an attempt to modernize Judaism. All of this is sufficient admonition
against a pan-judaistic understanding of Kafka. At the same time, however, it underscores
the conviction that inattention to the Jewish side of Kafka’s work, non-appreciation of its
Jewish mots, runs the risk of misunderstanding his work. The scores of contradictory Kafka
interpretations should serve as a warning as well as food for thought in this regard.
Regardless of the way they present their material, one can no more truly understand Thomas
Mann's Joseph and His Brothers or Joseph Roth's ]ob without a knowledge of their biblical
counterparts than one can understand Kafka without a knowledge of the literary and
narrative world that provided him with the motifs, thoughts, and overarching concepts he
freely and creatively reshaped and reproduced in the western European mantle of modem
German. In each of these instances, every critical reader is faced with the task of
recognizing the New as the new and the altered against the background of the Old. Kafka is
not a Kabbalists simply because he appropriates kabalistic traditions and transforms them.
Exactly what he is, though, can only be defined by the person who accurately locates his
points of departure. The interpretation of Kafka's works will remain primarily the task of
future Germanists; my main purpose as a Judaist is merely to present the Jewish background
for such interpretations. My presentation, therefore, will concentrate on those aspects of
Kafka's works most reminiscent of the Eastern Jewish Hebrew and Yiddish traditions, and
thus most evocative for anyone familiar with them. Beyond that, any locating of Kafka's
position in the literary tradition is a task I gladly leave to the readers of this book
themselves. My main objective is to help them see the Jewish elements that lie hidden
beneath the surface of Kafka's texts. This problem applies less to the diaries, whose every
page bears a Jewish stamp, and much more to the fictional texts. And yet, as far as the
latter are concerned, one should not be misled by statements such as the one made at the
1990 Kafka Colloquium in Marbach, where one participant found great significance in the fact
that the pivotal conversation in Kafka's novel The Trial did not take place in a synagogue, but
rather in a Christian cathedral. After all, Kafka’s diary entry, dated Yom Kippur, 1911, noted:
"Altneu Synagogue yesterday. Kol Nidre... churchlike interior. Three pious, evidently Eastern
Jews. Kafka managed to divert his interpreters' attention away from the true background of
his thinking and his storytelling by means of transpositions such as this into a Christian
European setting. To what extent he did this will be shown in the following discussion of the
kabalistic parallels in The Trial. The Jewish element is obvious in the diaries, but it remains
esoterically concealed in the stories and novels. It is this dissembling strategy, the
avoidance of any concrete references, that has been observed so many times in Kafka's
work and which is ultimately responsible for its ambiguity. There are many echoes of
kabalistic elements and traditions in Kafka's works, but the Kabbalah itself, as might be
expected, is not a homogeneous whole. By Kafka's time, this mystical-religious phenomenon
already had a history of at least seven hundred years behind it. If one adds to that the
ancient talmudic Hekhalot mysticism (the mysticism of the heavenly halls or palaces) which
contributed essential presuppositions for what came to be known as medieval
Kabbalah, we
are talking about a history of eighteen hundred years. Each phase of the long history of
Jewish mysticism left its own traces in the writings of later generations--traces that evolved
in completely different cultural and intellectual worlds. Thus, in the course of the centuries,
an in part totally heterogeneous conglomerate of conceptions and thoughts came into being,
and not all authors attempted to reduce this body of thought to a more or less unified whole.
Many of the later authors evaluated the traditions they received only eclectically,
completely eliminating one aspect or another and frequently looking upon what they
preserved from a completely novel point of view. All of this must be kept in mind when
speaking of Kafka and the Kabbalah. It also explains why Kafka will always betray affinities to
one or another strand of the kabalistic tradition, and in many instances to fundamentally
different or even contradictory strands. Kafka himself was unable to study the often
extremely difficult classical kabalistic texts in the original Hebrew or Aramaic languages,
but he had to have been familiar with certain popularized basic patterns. We know this
because they played a role in the daily habits and in the popular teachings of the community.
An enormous number of folkloric morality books and collections of homilies popularized the
highly mystical theosophical, historiosophical and anthroposophical teachings of the
Kabbalah. These works were certainly available to the simple Jew, but they were studied
primarily by the preachers in the synagogues and houses of study (bet
midrash) in
preparation of their sermons. Such moral writings and folk tales actually defined the general
Jewish consciousness in middle and eastern Europe; they were the medium through which
each individual living in this milieu received a body of specifically Jewish knowledge, as well
as attitudes and world views. That being the case, we should not be surprised to discover
parallels between this popular literature and a large number of motifs in Kafka's texts. The
following pages will present a brief discussion of the basic and distinctive features of
kabalistic thought that can be shown to have left unmistakable traces in Kafka's own
thinking and writing. One central, basic principle of the Kabbalah is the belief in the unity of
all being. The visible world is linked to the invisible worlds of the divine and the celestial in
the neo platonic sense of a single chain of being, all tied together by means of the outflow of
the emanation of divine light and life that produced and maintains all these worlds. However,
whereas the neo platonic and even the Aristotelian systems of the Middle Ages always
represent the ideal world in some less tangible intelligible substances like the intellect, the
world soul (sometimes represented by a trinity) and nature (as with the neo
Platonists), or in
the ten separate intelligences which are occasionally identified with the ten classes of angels
in the ancient rabbinic literature (as with the Aristotelians), the intelligible world of the
Kabbalists is pictured as consisting of a vast number of my theologically
conceived divine and
celestial quintessence's. At the apex stand the ten spiritual forces, lights, words or
seflrot,
frequently depicted in the shape of a tree but which are inextricably intertwined through the
reflection of the ten in each individual one. Like the neo platonic world of ideals, these ten
spiritual forces form the basic pattern of all being, while at the same time they are depicted
an thropomorphically, as it were, as a celestial family consisting of a father, a mother, a son
and a daughter--with male and female components and loving and chastising aspects. The
structure of the ten seflrot is repeated through the four stages of cosmic construction: the
seflrotic world itself (this is the revealed God), the world of the Divine Throne, the world of
the celestial angels and finally the terrestrial, material world called earth. With reference to
the biblical passage in Isaiah 43:7, these four are called the worlds of Atsiluth (emanation),
Bet/ah (creation), Yetsirah (formation) and Asiyah (the world of making, or concretizing
action). In their articulation they accord with the medieval philosophical interconnectedness
of all being: the world of absolute intelligences, the world of the celestial spheres and the
sub-lunar terrestrial world among the Aristotelians, or intellect, psyche, nature, and the
sub-lunar world among the neo Platonists. The Kabbalah took these basic rudiments of the
medieval philosophical world picture and synthesized them in various ways with the ancient
Jewish cosmological tradition as well as with Gnostic elements. The result was often an
opalescent, encyclopedic composite expressed on differing linguistic levels. The same idea
might be depicted at one time in the traditional language and Imagery of the Bible, at
another with the imagery of ancient talmudic homiletics and mystical tractates, yet again in
an anthropomorphic style quite Gnostic in outlook, or else in verbal-on metrological, or
linguistic, expressions. The most common descriptions relied upon a combination of all these
approaches. At its base remains the one fundamental idea that every single phenomenon of
this world-nature, heaven, the human form, language and biblical literature-of everything
that exists in this world, in other words, derives from the one divine pattern. That this
pattern, in turn, can be recognized in everything means that it can be described by
everything. Another essential aspect of the Kabbalah is the fact that knowledge of the world
and of God as well as the description of all the phenomena of being is not an academic
acquisition; it has Its own practical side and practical application. Knowledge of the essence
of being enables humans to orient themselves and to intervene on their own behalf. Such
intervention is considered at once as being of use to the Godhead as well as to the whole
world. The entire kabalistic system thus ultimately serves to assign man's place in this
composite, to show him the potentials as well as the responsibilities of his actions and
behavior in this universe and to place at his disposal the means to affect it. This is
theory,
the ability to affect the roots of all being in order to release a flood of blessings over the
earth. By means of his contemplative practices and the actions that grow out of them, man
is in the position to exert¢test a direct influence. on the divine world. The ontological basis Of
this ability is the structural and fundamental unity of being, which directly and dynamically
connects man to the divine worlds. Praying, studying the Torah, obeying the commandments
and a person's every earthly activity are seen in this all-encompassing connection of
reciprocal influence; a person's total behavior is an action sub specie
ceternitatis. In this
network, man Is both actor and actum. His actions always have consequences in the world
above and, sooner or later, they will elicit specific reactions from that realm.
Once we accept the assumption that Kafka was influenced by the kabalistic ideas outlined
above, we can look upon Josef K. and the surveyor in Kafka's Castle as men who know of the
interconnected nature of the hidden and the revealed worlds and who try their hands at
theory in order to intervene in the divine direction of things. The justification of a statement
such as this will become evident only at the end of this book, after the reader has recognized
the extent of the correspondence between Kafka's works and this aspect of Jewish thought.
All the same, these chemurgical attempts on the part of Kafka's heroes turn out to be failures.
They run amok or become entangled in vicious circles on a low level, with the result that they
are unable to attain their intended higher goal. The Kabbalah also knows this problem of
futile theurgy and describes it in terms of prayers whose ascent is cut off. Such prayers
remain hanging somewhere in the Iow levels of the ontological hierarchy and may even
become imprisoned in celestial "attics" provided for this very purpose. These prayers share
the fate of the man from the country in Kafka's parable of the same name. He had already
failed to pass the test at one of the lower gates and thus could not continue his journey.
Like medieval neoplatonism, the Kabbalah understands the different levels of the world as a
qualitative hierarchy. The celestial levels closest to the human world are that much closer to
the qualit¥°f the terrestrial world than are the higher levels situated above them, and woe to
the prayer and woe to the soul that do not penetrate to higher levels, for what happens to
them Is what happened to Kafka's Twoheroes, Josef K. and the surveyor K. They both have
responsibilities, of course, the one with the court and the other with the castle, but what
they see there is hardly different from their own miserable world. From a kabalistic
viewpoint, what Kafka depicts in these Twogreat novels, The Trial and The Castle, is the
crisis of the Kabbalah, the failure of theurgy, the inability of the individual to employ his
actions to gain access to the ultimate authority.
A very similar but by no means so pessimistic a turn in the Kabbalah occurred in the
mysticism of Hasidism; its formulation goes back to one of this movement's most prominent
figures, Dry Bet, the Maggid (Preacher) of Mezhirich (1710-1772). As the chapter on Kafka's
aphorisms will show, Dov ber turned away from the activism of the theurgists and believed
that a solution to the suffering in this world is to be sought in the exact opposite of activism:
in the individual's renunciation of the desire to effect a change on his own. For Dry
Ber, the
highest form of humanity is the complete renunciation of human independence and human
ego-consciousness. His is an understanding of the self that sees itself only as a vessel of the
Godhead which, in absolute quietism, surrenders itself via self-annihilation in the
nothingness of the Oneness of God--an attitude, by the way, that increasingly comes to
characterize Josef K.
A variation of this Hasidic renunciation of theurgy is its transference to the
rebbe, the
tzaddik. According to this, no longer is each individual called to
theurgy; instead, the
Hasidic
rebbe takes on the role of intercessor for his community. For Kafka, these are the advocates
and the various other standbys in the court or the village. Josephine the Singer plays this
role in Kafka's story of the same name (Stories, 186). Once again Kafka demonstrates the
crisis, the inability of the helper to really be of any help; even though, on the lower level, the
illusion of help is already helpful.
A further similarity between Kafka and the mythological cosmology of the Kabbalah is the
idea that the invisible hierarchies not only extend into the already less attractive lower
levels, but that this hierarchy reaches down into everyday life, into its most banal and even
its dirtiest aspects. Every one of the different strands of the Kabbalah view the evil in the
world as part of the one world that emanates from God and stands in His service. The only
difference is that Kafka, more so than the mythological descriptions presented below, depicts
the hierarchy of the worlds primarily on its lowest level. One could also say that Kafka
relegates the kabalistic descriptions of the hierarchy, be they of the courts or of the castle,
completely to the human sphere. Even so, as a type of sociomorphic and anthropomorphic
myth of world hierarchy--a myth, moreover, that never completely loses sight of the
transcendent--they maintain a mythological language. An additional distinctive feature
common to both Kafka and the Kabbalah is the idea that the court and the authorities before
which human life in its totality must answer are part of the hierarchies of being that
permeate the world. They do not represent a single court of justice before the Throne of God.
History is also understood against this background. Within this structural frame, history
exists only as a cyclical oscillation between the divine poles of mercy and judgment. These
Twopoles determine the whole of being from its highest level right on down to life on earth.
Everything that happens on earth is a direct consequence of this cycle of justice and grace or
of the suspension of judgment in mercy (the divine union) and of the reign of the court
(separation). Human life and history, therefore, are nothing more than a pendulum swing
between acquittal and judgment, between arrest and its postponement. Where theurgy
succeeds, it exerts an influence upon the union and thus upon the well-being of this world. In
this case the world escapes judgment via grace or arches over justice via love and an
abundance of blessings. In the Hasidic variant mentioned above, the hallowed state can only
be attained through renunication of the self, for the continued existence of individuality is
separation, is judgment. Here history is viewed as a pendulum swinging between separation
and union, between ego and its sublimation in the Oneness of God. Another branch of the
Kabbalah that is important for Kafka but which contradicts much of the Hasidic
version is the
one promulgated by Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century. Kafka took from it the inclusion of
inanimate nature, of plants and animals, into the scope of human life. In this late form of
Kabbalah, theurgy is understood primarily as a process of the purification of the soul. The
soul of the First Man, Adam, was shattered during the Fall into untold thousands of divine
sparks. Now, after its break, it must bring about collectively that which was actually the task
of the First Man with his macro-soul--namely, to reunite these sparks with their divine
source and repair the cosmic break. This task can only be accomplished within the frame of
an all-encompassing purification of souls, which every divine spark of the initial soul has to
attain for itself via the route of transmigration, or reincarnation, in humans, animals, plants,
and minerals. Only after this has succeeded will the individual souls return to Adam, who will
then be able to complete the task he was once assigned. Thanks to this theory, non-human
nature, too, becomes part of the course of human redemption, with the result that animals
and "dead" things are looked upon in a totally different way. This doctrine produced a great
number of folk tales that articulated the new relation to the human environment and which,
as we shall see, are closely related in many respects to Kafka's animal figures and inanimate
life. Animals and other things are now no longer objects, but people dwelling in animals and
in things. Lurianic Kabbalah fully developed the ideas of animating nature and granting it a
soul already well-known in earlier forms, and it culminated these ideas with the belief that
the whole world is full of wandering souls and demons. The cause of all this wandering about
is sin; to keep oneself away from sin becomes the dominant motif of this
Kabbalah, and it has
engendered a Judaism that, in contrast to the otherwise predominant Jewish attitude, was
very pessimistic. Fear of the power of evil forces and an ever-present awareness of sin
produced forms of asceticism and rerun
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