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Kafka's German-Jewish Reception As Mirror of Modernity City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 10-2014 Kafka's German-Jewish Reception as Mirror of Modernity Abraham Ariel Rubin Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/376 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Kafka’s German-Jewish Reception as Mirror of Modernity by Abraham Rubin A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 ABRAHAM RUBIN All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Professor John Brenkman___________ ___________ _________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Professor André Aciman______________ ___________ ___________________________________ Date Executive Officer ____Professor John Brenkman_____ ____Professor Vincent Crapanzano_ ____Professor Richard Wolin______ Supervisory Committee iii THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK ABSTRACT Kafka’s German-Jewish Reception as Mirror of Modernity by Abraham Rubin Adviser: John Brenkman This study explores the diverse and contradictory ways German-Jewish intellectuals identify what they commonly refer to as Kafka’s “Jewish essence.” Focusing on the commentaries of Margarete Susman, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Gershom Scholem, and Max Brod, I claim that Kafka’s German-Jewish reception reflects a broader historical dilemma that grew out of the Jewish encounter with modernity: Are Judaism and Jewishness best defined through religious, cultural, national, or ethnic categories? It is precisely this ambiguity that forms the historical backdrop to Kafka’s Jewish interpretations. Situating the early phases of Kafka’s posthumous reception within the broader context of interwar German-Jewish culture, my dissertation examines the different ways critics conceptualize their respective notions of “Jewishness” through an encounter with Kafka’s writing and use it as a foil for the self-fashioning of their own Jewish identity. As the dissertation title is meant to suggest, my work builds on Gerson D. Cohen’s influential essay “German Jewry as Mirror of Modernity” (1975), which argues that German Jewry’s diverging responses to modernity exemplify the cultural and ideological alternatives available to any religious group faced with the challenge of redefining itself in the modern era. Extending Cohen’s thesis to Kafka’s early reception, I show how the critical response to his fiction mirrors the transformations that occurred in Jewish self-understanding throughout the first decades of the twentieth-century. On a broader level, this project seeks to iv understand the ways secular Jewish identity is reconceived in the field of cultural production, and how it is translated into modern categories of nation, culture, and ethnicity. v Acknowledgments Professors John Brenkman, Vincent Crapanzano and Richard Wolin accompanied this project from the start and guided it to its successful fruition. I am deeply indebted to them for the generosity, patience and scholarly insight they have shown me throughout the writing process. I am especially grateful to John Brenkman, my “Doktorvater,” for his mentorship and friendship over the years. Many friends and colleagues provided the intellectual companionship, moral support, editorial assistance and constructive criticism, which helped me make it through the labyrinthine process of getting a doctorate. I would like to thank Koby Oppenheim, Krystyna Michael, Mark Susman, Erica Kaufman, Caroline Block, Nicole Zeftel, Mike Lubing, Noam Ron, Gabriel Cooper, Reuven Fenton, Ayala Levin, Ginger Nolan, Yael Lavender-Smith, Justin Humphreys and Agata Kasprzyk for their help in this regard. I am much obliged to my sister Michal Rubin, who volunteered as a part-time research assistant, searching and scanning bibliographical materials for this project in the university libraries of Haifa, Ben Gurion, and CUNY. And last but not least, to the lovely Estelle Vard, who always puts my academic anxieties in the right perspective. The following institutions generously funded my research: The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (doctoral research grants for the academic years of 2012 and 2013), The Yeshiva University Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization (graduate research fellowship, 2010-2012), the Fulbright Foundation (research grant to Germany in 2012-2013), the Irmgard Coninx Foundation (summer research grant 2011), NYU/Mellon Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2012) and the CUNY Graduate Center (Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2012- 2013). I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to share and develop my research at various conferences and workshops. I presented an early version of my project at the Posen Summer Seminar on “Literatures of Jewish Secularism and Secularization” led by Naomi Seidman and Rachel Rubinstein (Amherst College, August 2011). A workshop that was instrumental in shaping my thesis at its formative stages was the Summer School for PhD students in European Jewish History and Culture, generously funded by the Leo Baeck Institute and organized by Christian Wiese at the University of Frankfurt (July 2011). I presented my chapter on Hans- Joachim Schoeps as part of the Mellon seminar on “the problem of translation,” led by Jacques Lezra and Emily Apter at the NYU department of comparative literature (June 2012). Mark Gelber invited me to present my work on Margarete Susman at a DAAD-sponsored doctoral student conference he hosted at the University of Aachen (April 2013). The following summer I was lucky enough to participate in another conference organized by Mark at Ben Gurion University that was devoted to the lifework and legacy of Max Brod. I am especially grateful to Ingo and Sabine Richter, Stefanie Schäfer and Sabine Berking for organizing the intellectually stimulating Berlin Roundtables workshops, which I had the pleasure of attending in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2014. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and lifelong teachers, Simon and Lisa Rubin, for their love, encouragement and guidance. My mother has read, edited and discussed my work with me since my freshman year at the University of Haifa. I look forward to continuing our conversation about Judaism and literature in the many years to come. vi Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgments ................................................................................................ vi 1. Introduction 1.1 In Pursuit of “Fluttering Shadows”: Kafka’s Critics as Literary Lepidopetrists ....................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 What is Jewish Criticism? Who is a Jewish Critic? ...................................... 3 1.3 German-Jewish Modernity and its Literary Refractions ............................... 6 1.4 Kafka’s Literary Reception as Ideological Battleground ............................ 16 2. Narrating the Nation: Kafka Criticism in the Mirror of Cultural Zionism 2.1 An Aesthetic “Judenfrage” .......................................................................... 23 2.2 Buber and Beyond: Cultural Zionism in fin de siècle Prague ..................... 35 2.3 New Jews, Old Stereotypes ......................................................................... 41 2.4 “The Tragedy of Assimilation” .................................................................... 49 2.5 Oriental Imaginaries: The German-Jewish Linguistic Differential ............. 57 2.6 Canonizing Kafka as “Jewish Literature” ................................................... 67 3. Denationalizing Jewish Identity: Hans-Joachim Schoeps’s Confessional Kafka 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................. 69 3.2 Max Brod and Hans-Joachim Schoeps: The Story of a Brief Friendship ... 72 3.3 Competing Commentaries on The Castle………........ ................................ 77 3.4 Reconciling Germanness and Jewishness ................................................... 92 3.5 “Between Job and Don Quixote”: Chapter Postscript ................................. 98 4. Nihilism, Modernity and the “Jewish Spirit”: Margarete Susman on Kafka’s Affinities to the Book of Job 4.1 Kafka, Job, and the Jewish Fate ................................................................ 101 4.2 Two Perspectives on “the Continuum of Jewish Literature” .................... 107 4.3 Reflections on the “German-Jewish Symbiosis” ....................................... 113 4.4 Myths and Counter-Myths of Jewish Deracination ................................... 124 vii 5. “The Theological Secret of Perfect Prose”: Gershom Scholem and the Dialectics of Jewish Secularization 5.1 Introduction ............................................................................................... 135 5.2 Reading Kafka, Debating Revelation ........................................................ 139 5.3
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