Schumsky PDF

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews: Franz Kafka's "Jackals and Arabs" between Bohemia and
Palestine
Author(s): Dimitry Shumsky
Source: AJS Review, Vol. 33, No. 1 (APRIL 2009), pp. 71-100
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies
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AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 71-100

? 2009 Association for Jewish Studies
doi: 10.1017/S036400940900004X
Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews: Franz Kafka's

"Jackals and Arabs" between Bohemia
and Palestine
by
Dimitry Shumsky
I. "Jackals and Arabs" between Jews and non-Jews
Franz Kafka's 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 alone?a man hailing from
those countries in which reason reigns supreme, which is not the case among
the Arabs?is capable of doing so. Once the jackal elder has related to the Euro
pean traveler the story of his tribe's tribulations, and how they have been com
pelled 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 Kafka's, "Ein Bericht
fur 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
(1917-18): 488-90. The notations that follow refer to Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josi
povici (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
2. Kafka, Collected Stories, 176.
3. Ibid., 175.
4. Ibid., 177, 178.
71
Dimitry Shumsky
not only was the Arab awake while the jackal elder sought to persuade the Euro
pean man to undertake the salvation project and listening attentively to the jackal's
words, but in fact, he has been well aware of the jackals' intentions for a long time:
It's common knowledge; so long as Arabs exist, that pair of scissors goes wan
dering 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; they're just fools, utter fools.5
It appears, though, that the jackals' continual attempts to outwit the Arabs by elim
inating 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 Arab's 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 Arab's arm as the
latter once more wields his whip.7 Although the jackals have not won the longed
for 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 confronta
tion at its peak. Indeed, the Arab is eventually convinced of the futility of whip
ping 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 lit

erary criticism precisely at the time Kafka's 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 irnmediate historical background, attempting
instead to interpret it "from within." It is hardly surprising, therefore, that interpret
ations of this sort ignored an "external" fact?the Jewish national orientation of
the periodical in which "Jackals and Arabs" first appeared?and 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 [humanity's] 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., 178-79.
7. Ibid., 179.
8. Ibid.
9. Helen Milful, "Kafka?The Jewish Context," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 (1978): 227.
10. On DerJude's 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), 33-35.
72
Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews

of light and cleanliness."11 To Charles Neider, the jackal-Arab dichotomy hints at
"the incommensurability between nature and spirit," respectively.12 Walter Sokel
was convinced that the story illustrates aspects of Kafka's relationship with the
writer's father: the parasitic yet rebellious jackals representing Franz Kafka,
himself pitted against the powerful and self-confident Arab, who stands for
Hermann Kafka, the father, the prototypical "self-made man."13 Andre Nemeth,
for his part, saw the jackals as European Jews and the whole story as a description
of Jewish-Gentile relationships with their alternations of tolerance and intoler
ance, thereby marking an interpretative direction that became the dominant
reading of "Jackals and Arabs" from the late 1960s on.14
Indeed, following the first methodical and detailed analysis of "Jackals and
Arabs" by William C. Rubinstein, an agreement in principle among scholars began
to take shape with regard to the story's "Jewish" context.15 The main direction of
interpretation that emerged held that the pairing of "jackals" and "Arabs" rep
resents the dichotomy of the Jews and the non-Jewish world, respectively. For
Rubinstein, that which clearly indicates the "Jewishness" of Kafka's jackals is

their zealous adherence to the idea of "purity" (Reinheit in the original), to
which they contrast the "filth" of their eternal neighbors the Arabs, alluding to
the Jewish customs of kashrut and bodily purity.16 The scissors that the jackals
ceremoniously present to the man "from the North" so that he will cut the
throats of the hated Arabs allude, in Rubinstein's view, to the "Covenant
between the Pieces" concluded between God and Abraham as related in
Genesis 15:1-21, or, alternatively, to the rite of circumcision.17 But most import
ant of all, according to Rubenstein, is the figure of the narrator, in whom he saw
none other than the personification of the biblical Messiah, whose task is to deliver
the people of Israel (the jackals) from their Gentile oppressors (the Arabs).18
Unlike Rubinstein, Jens Tismar found in "Jackals and Arabs" a more

concrete intellectual and sociopolitical dimension. In his understanding, this
story reflects the author's critical perception of Jewish existence in the Diaspora,
which was influenced by Zionist criticism on this matter. The jackals?the

parasites residing in an "Arab" country, whose physical existence is completely
dependent on the masters of the land?symbolize, according to Tismar, the

Jews of the Diaspora in general, and Western Jews in particular, while the
11. Herbert Tauber, Franz Kafka: An Interpretation of His Works (London: Seeker & Warburg,
1948), 70.
12. Charles Neider, Kafka: His Mind and Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 81.
13. Walter H. Sokel, Franz Kafka?Tragik und Ironie; Zur Struktur seiner Kunst (Munich:
Albert Langen, 1964), 146.
14. Andre Nemeth, Kafka ou le mystere juif (Paris: J. Vigneau, 1947), 35-38.
15. William C. Rubinstein, "Kafka's 'Jackals and Arabs,'" Monatshefte fur deutschen Unter
richt 59, no. 1 (1967): 13-18.

16. Ibid., 16.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 14?15.
73
Dimitry Shumsky
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
Rubinstein's theological-messianic interpretation was combined with

Tismar's "Zionist" interpretation by Hartmut Binder in his Kajka-Handbuch,20
and by Ritchie Robertson in his thorough research on the Jewish political

aspects of Kafka's 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 Kafka's 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 (1884-1968) as to Kafka's deep inner commitment to the Zionist idea,
more recent research has generally acknowledged Kafka's complex position on

Zionism, which cannot be described in one-dimensional terms as "pro-" or "anti
Zionist."23 Without agreeing with Brod's 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 rejection-attrac
tion 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 Kafka's outright manifestations
of interest in national Jewish culture?such as his admiration for the performances
19. Jens Tismar, "Kafkas 'Schakale und Araber' im zionistischen Kontext betrachtet," Jahrbuch
der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 19 (1975): 311-13.

20. Hartmut Binder, Kafka-Handbuch (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner 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 Kafka's 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), 150-53.

23. On this point see Milful, "Kafka?The Jewish Context," 227, 230.
24. Max Brod, Uber Franz Kafka (Frankfurt: Fischer Biicherei, 1966), 271; see also Felix
Weltsch, Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas (Berlin-Grunewald: F. A. Herbig,
1957), 38.
74

of the Galician Yiddish theater in Prague in 1910?1225 and his later (and rather
successful) efforts in the years 1917-23 at mastering the Hebrew language26?

an additional significant aspect is frequently mentioned in the recent scholarship
on Kafka and Zionism/Jewish nationalism: the "Bar Kochba" connection, a refer
ence to the Prague Bar Kochba Association, which was the focus of Zionist
activity in Kafka's hometown from 1900 to 1914. Indeed, the "Zionism" toward
which Kafka took his measured steps from 1910 on was first and foremost a
local Prague Zionism, represented above all by the Bar Kochba circle. Two of
its chief "agents of Zionism," with whom Kafka maintained close intellectual
and personal ties?despite strains and reconciliations?were clearly identified
with this Zionist group: Hugo Bergmann (1883-1975), Kafka's classmate from
the Altstadte German gymnasium and the association's spiritual leader in the
decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War, and Max Brod, who,
though he never officially joined Bar Kochba, was a full participant in its intellec
tual and cultural activity after becoming a declared Zionist around 1910.27 The
principal channel along which Kafka came to be exposed to Zionist discourse at
the beginning of the second decade of the last century were the gatherings of
this group, which he regularly attended with Bergmann and Brod, and in which
he even participated in discussions of Zionist issues.28 And the journal that was
mentioned in his diaries and letters more frequently than any other printed item,
and which he read regularly from 1911 on, was none other than the weekly Selbst
wehr, the organ of Prague Zionism, which from 1910 on was exclusively con
trolled by associates of Bar Kochba.29 Furthermore, the Zionists of the Bar
25. Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: Uni
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 12-30; Anne Oppenheimer, "Franz Kafka's Relation to Judaism"
(PhD diss., Oxford University, 1977), 42-46; Vivian Liska, "Neighbors, Foes, and Other Communities:
Kafka and Zionism," Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 348-^9; Niels Bokhove, '"The
Entrance to the More Important': Kafka's Personal Zionism," in Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, ed.
Mark H. Gelber (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), 26-27; and see also Klaus Wagenbach,
Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958), 176-81.
26. See, e.g., Hartmut Binder, "Kafkas Hebraischstudien: ein biographisch-interpretatorischer
Versuch," Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967): 530-33; 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, 224-25; Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in
Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 41-42; and Alfred
Bodenheimer, "A Sign of Sickness and a Symbol of Health: Kafka's Hebrew Notebooks," in Gelber,
Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, 259-70.
27. Christoph Stolzl, Kafkas boses Bohmen (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1975), 134-36;
Milful, "Kafka?The Jewish Context," 230; Binder, Kafka-Handbuch, 1:375; Pawel, The Nightmare
of Reason, 63-70, 290; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 13-14, 141-42; Hillel
J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870
1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 99-100, 138-41; Alter, Necessary Angels, 39^2;
and see also Ritchie Robertson, "The Creative Dialogue between Brod and Kafka," in Gelber,
Kafka, Zionism, and Beyond, 283-96.
28. Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend, 181-82.
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.
75
Dimitry Shumsky
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 1909-10, 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 Kafka's "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 Zionism's 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 perceived?in his understanding, to be discussed

later?by Kafka and the Prague Jewish intellectuals nurtured on German
culture, among them the Bar Kochbaites.31 Notwithstanding Kafka's deliberate
use of the term "Arabs," Spector did not consider the relevance of the contempor
ary Palestinian context of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in unravel
ing Kafka's 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 Zionism's ultimate goal.32 In her doctoral disser
tation, Anne Oppenheimer noted somewhat more explicitly that the story "has a
comment to make on the Arab-Jewish 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 Kafka's "Arab" quite literally. But as Atef Botros recently
and convincingly showed, these anti-Zionist interpretations altogether tear

Kafka's story from its historical context, viewing it as an early reflection of the
30. Arthur A. Cohen, introduction to The Jew: Essays from Martin Buber's Journal "Der Jude,"
1916-1928, ed. Arthur A. Cohen (University: Alabama University Press, 1980), 10-11.
31. Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz
Kafkas Fin de Siecle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 191-94.
32. Tismar, "Kafkas 'Schakale und Araber,'" 314.
33. Oppenheimer, "Kafka's Relation to Judaism," 268.
76

wars between Israel and the Arab countries.34 Botros identified in the story an
echo of the deep apprehension among Prague Zionists, especially Bergmann,

about the fate of the Zionist minority in Palestine, which in their view had an exag
gerated estimation of its strength in the face of the hostile Arab majority.35 And
just as Spector interpreted Kafka's story as a depiction of the relations between
Jews and non-Jews restricted to a single, concrete, local context?Bohemia?

without looking into its possible link to the Palestinian realm of relations,
which aroused undeniable interest among the readers of Der Jude, its editors,
and particularly among the Bar Kochba contributors to the journal,36 Botros,
too, restricted his interpretation to a single Jewish-Gentile arena?Palestine?

without considering that this arena was viewed by them from the perspective of
a different Jewish-Gentile arena, namely Bohemia, where events occurred with
which they were required to contend in the most direct manner. In her recent
book Kafka and Cultural Zionism, Iris Bruce offered a twofold interpretation of
the story, viewing "Jackals and Arabs" as both a Zionist satire of Jewish life in
the Diaspora and a critique of some contemporary Zionists' derogatory descrip
tions of Palestine's Arabs as uneducated and uncivilized.37 Still, she did not
address an assumable Bohemian background of the story, other than to briefly

refer to Spector's work.38
The goal of this article is to demonstrate that "Jackals and Arabs" incorpor
ates a dual reference to the relations between Jews and non-Jews in both Bohemia
and Palestine, compatible with the manner in which these multinational arenas
were analyzed in the views of the Zionists of the Bar Kochba circle who were
close to Kafka, first and foremost Hugo Bergmann and Max Brod. The develop
ment of this interpretation will entail grappling with a number of issues that
directly touch upon some of the central aspects of this circle's sociocultural pos
ition and national perception, a few of which have been discussed in scholarship
from a tendentious point of view, and thus are due for reevaluation, while the
majority have yet to be adequately studied: What was the position of the intellec
tuals identified with the Bar Kochba Association within, and in regard to, the
triangular Czech-German-Jewish relations in Habsburg Prague? What was their
34. Atef Botros, "Literarische 'Reterritorialisierung' und historische Rekonstruktierung?Zur

europaischen und arabischen Rezeption von Kafkas Schakale und Araber," Leipziger Beitrage zur
judischen Geschichte und Kultur 3 (2005): 229-30.
35. Ibid., 230-38.

36. It is sufficient to mention in this context Hugo Bergmann's article "The Genuine Auton
omy," in which he particularly emphasized the centrality of the issue of Arab-Jewish relations for
the future of the Yishuv, and also traced the first outlines of its solution by way of the binational
arrangement, and the article "On the Arab Question" by Hans Kohn, also one of the leading
members of Bar Kochba in the prewar period, who for the first time in the Zionist movement raised
the Nationalitatenstaat model (i.e., a binational state), in reference to the political future of Palestine.
See Hugo Bergmann, "Die wahre Autonomic," DerJude 3 (1918-19): 368-73; and Hans Kohn, "Zur
Araberfrage," DerJude 4 (1919-20): 567-69.

37. Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2007), 154-57, 185-88.
38. Ibid., 154.
77
Dimitry Shumsky
view on the state of ethnic relations in Palestine in the face of the Zionist settle
ment there? And above all, is it possible to discern any connection between the
Bar Kochbaites' approach to the Czech-German-Jewish question in Bohemia

and the Arab-Jewish question in Palestine?
II. "Jackals and Arabs" between Jews and non-Jews in Bohemia

Spector, whose Prague Territories is without doubt an original and fascinat
ing combination of scrupulous textual analysis and innovative theoretical perspec
tive on fin-de-siecle Prague's 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 jackals-Arabs-narrator as a parable
of the Czech-German-Jewish 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 himself?the 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 Kafka's 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 cul
tural 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 com
prehensive 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 "every
day language" as a criterion for defining one's national affiliation, Prague's population in 1900 num
bered 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 groups?55 percent Czech speakers as an everyday language, and 45
percent German speakers.
40. Spector, Prague Territories, 191-92.
41. Ibid., 20.

42. Ibid.
78

of staking out a spiritual space between the two surrounding cultures, the Czech and
the German, a space that would provide this group a kind of shelter to escape the
realities of modem nationalism.43 Despite its dimension of intercultural bridging,
and alongside the considerable sympathy for the Czech people on the part of indi
viduals such as Brod and Kafka, Spector argued, their view of the Czechs and their
culture was not devoid of a certain Orientalist imagery, characteristic of the contem
porary German culture's hegemonic discourse on the "essence" of "Slavness." One
of this discourse's prominent features was its tendency to identify Slavs with their
physical element, with special emphasis placed on the fairer of their number, a
factor that provided the logic for Spector's identification of Kafka's pack of
jackals with the masses of the Czech people 44
Spector's perception of the origins and the sociocultural patterns of behavior
among Jewish Prague's intellectual elite surely constitutes a renewed version of
the Germanocentric approach to the study of Prague and Bohemian Jewry at the
end of the long nineteenth century, a perspective that retains its relatively dominant
position in the historiography despite important research developments in the
direction of a more balanced presentation of the relations between Jews and

non-Jews in this region. This school, which regards the German-Jewish axis as
the primary, relevant context for understanding the nature of relations between
Jews and their Bohemian and Prague sociocultural surroundings, reigned

supreme in scholarship until some two decades ago 45 In the eyes of its adherents,
the history of the modernization of Jews in Czech lands is confined to the story of
their economic, social, cultural, and political integration with the German com
ponent of their environment. To the extent that research guided by the Germano
centric approach addressed the phenomenon of Bohemian Zionism in general, and

the Bar Kochba Association in particular, it tended, unsurprisingly, to emphasize
almost exclusively its German Jewish context. Thus, the members of the Bar
Kochba circle, including Kafka's friends Bergmann and Brod, were presented
as former German assimilationists or acculturationists who, even after becoming
Zionists, maintained their deep involvement in the social and cultural life of
Prague's liberal German community, remained constant in their unreserved com
mitment to the Germanocentric Habsburg establishment, and persisted with their
inner struggle between Jewishness and Germanness.46
43. Ibid., 17-20, 234-40.
44. Ibid., 176.
45. Hans Tramer, "Prague?City of Three Peoples," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 9 (1964):
305; Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein, "The Jews between Czechs and Germans," in The Jews of Czechoslo
vakia: Historical Studies and Surveys (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968),
1:32-33; Stolzl, Kafkas boses Bohmen; Michael A. Riff, "Czech Antisemitism and the Jewish
Response before 1914," Wiener Library Bulletin 29, nos. 39-40 (1976): 8-20; Gary B. Cohen,
"Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860-1914," Central European History 10 (March 1977): 28-54;
idem, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1981); and idem, "Jews in German Liberal Politics: Prague, 1880-1914," Jewish History
1, no. 1 (1986): 55-74.
46. Stuart Borman, "The Prague Student Zionist Movement: 1896-1914" (PhD diss., Univer
sity of Chicago, 1972), 28-29, 157; Michael A. Riff, "The Assimilation of the Jews of Bohemia and the
79
Dimitry Shumsky
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 Bohe
mian 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 sig
nificant 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
Jewry's German orientation at the turn of the century. In contrast to the Germano
centric 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 1848^9, 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 pro
vincial 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 devel
opment, 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 com
munication among Prague Jews, and, above all, in the growing reservations of
Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 1848-1918" (PhD diss., University of London, 1974), 189-90; Stolzl,
Kafkas boses Bohmen, 93; Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival, 262; Zohar Maor, "Mistika, yetsira
u-sheiva el ha-yahadut: 'Chug Prag' be-tehilat ha-mea ha-esrim" (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jer
usalem, 2005), 79, 150, 172-74, 247, 275-77; 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 (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & 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., 10-12.

49. Ibid., 25-27.
50. Ibid., 4, 198-200.
80

more and more Jews about the traditional and blind reliance upon the Germano
centric Habsburg establishment.51
Of particular importance to our discussion is Kieval's challenging of the

Germanocentric view of the phenomenon of Prague Zionism in general, and
that of the Bar Kochbaites in particular, which is one of his book's central foci
of study. First, in speaking specifically of Bergmann, Bar Kochba's moving

spirit, Kieval was the first to discern a number of significant rifts in Bergmann's
German cultural exterior. It becomes apparent that, alongside his studies at the Alt
stadte high school in Prague, the young Hugo maintained rather close sociocul
tural ties with the Czech-speaking environment during frequent family visits to
the village of Chrastice in central Bohemia, the birthplace of his father Sieg
mund/Zikmund.52 Kieval, moreover, questioned the Germanocentric represen
tation of Bar Kochba Zionism at a more abstract level. He asserted that one
should place Bar Kochba and the Prague and Bohemian Zionists in the wide socio
political context in which the Czech Jewish assimilationist movement developed.
Notwithstanding the obvious differences between the Czech Jewish assimilation
ists and the Zionists with regard to national issues, we are speaking, Kieval
claimed, of two phenomena of a similar type as far as the conceptual frame is con
cerned. For, in a similar fashion to the Czech Jewish movement, Prague Zionism
and the Bar Kochbaites presented Bohemian Jewry with an innovative national
alternative, while challenging the anachronistic path taken by the liberal

German Jewish bourgeoisie.53
It would seem, however, that in the context of a discussion of the Bar
Kochba Zionists, Kieval's critique of the Germanocentric approach is still too cir
cumscribed. In attempting to include in his Bohemian Jewish narrative first and
foremost those with a clear Czech Jewish affinity, whose existence had been
almost completely ignored by Germanocentric historiography, he naturally
turned his sights on the followers of the Czech Jewish movement and the
Prague Zionists who originated from Czech provincial towns. On the other
hand, in speaking of the Prague-born members of the Bar Kochba circle who
had been nurtured on German culture, such as Max Brod and the leaders of the
association on the eve of the First World War, Hans Kohn and Robert Weltsch,
the impression gained from Kieval's book is that these were basically monocul
tured German Jewish figures, while the extent to which they were actually influ
enced by the surrounding Czech majority is insufficiently clear. It is only in the
case of Bergmann that Kieval, as mentioned, clearly indicated the centrality of
the meeting with the Czech language and culture in Bergmann's everyday experi
ence, alongside his German education and intellectual activity in the German
language. But because the traditional Germanocentric representation of the socio
cultural portrait of Bar Kochbaite Zionism essentially remains outside the realm of
criticism in Kieval's book, the Czech-German Bergmann appears instead as
51. Ibid., 48-58, 60-63, 198-99.

52. Ibid., 100.
53. Ibid., 113, 198-203.
81
Dimitry Shumsky
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 Prague's 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. Neverthe
less, in everyday life, they and their families were exposed to the Czech environ
ment, language, and culture. They grew up in buildings with ethnically mixed
populations who spoke different languages, in which the Czech component was
prominent?Bergmann 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 inti
mate 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 school
mates in the German high school, who throughout their schooling boycotted the
study of the Czech language (apart from Weltsch's 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 "Kafka's" 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 hlavniho mesta
Prahy (AHMP), fond scitaci operaty, 1-131, 1900; AHMP, fond sdttaci operaty, 1-602, 1900;
AHMP, fond scitaci operaty, 1-527, 1900; AHMP, fond scitaci operaty, 1-349, 1911; and AHMP,
fond scitaci operaty, V-125, 1901-10.
55. Cohen, "Jews in German Society," 49-51.
56. For Bergmann and Kafka, see AHMP, fond skolni katalogy, Nemecke st. gymnasium, Stare
Mesto, 1-8 tfida, 1893-1901/K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 1893-1901, Klassen
Katalog, I-VIII Klasse; for Brod, see AHMP, fond skolni katalogy, Gymnasium nemecke statni, Ste
panskaul., 1-8 trida, 1894?1902/K. k. Staatsgymnasium, Prag Neustadt, Stephansgasse Hauptkatalog,
1894-1902,1-VIII Klasse; for Kohn, see AHMP, fond skolni katalogy, Nemecke st. gymnasium, Stare
Mesto,l-8 tfida, 1902-10, K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 1902-10, Klassen

Katalog, I-VIII; for Weltsch, see AHMP, fond skolni katalogy, Nemecke st. gymnasium, Stare
Mesto,l-8 tfida, 1901-1909/K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 1901-1909, Klassen
Katalog, I-VIII.
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 dreif
aches 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 Bohmen im Schul
jahre 1906-07," Deutsche Arbeit 7, no. 4 (January 1908): 244.
82

note that their day-to-day exposure to the Czech environment, language, and
culture was consistent with their genuine reservations about the hegemonic
German cultural discourse on "Czechness" in Bohemia, which fluctuated

between denying the Czechs' very national existence and labeling them with
the same derogatory colonialist terms used by Europeans to describe the natives
of Africa.57 Moreover, one can clearly establish that a receptiveness toward the
neighboring national culture that was different from that on which they had
been nurtured, and a challenging of the German discourse on Czechs, constituted
a fundamental component of the immediate sociocultural background of both

these men's approach to Zionism, and made their significant mark on shaping
the substantive dimension of their politics.
Bergmann's memoirs of his friendship with Kafka in the Altstadte high
school reveal the complexity of the two friends' sociocultural location relative
to the binational non-Jewish Prague environment. It rums out that what first
brought them together was, above all, their families' common rural Czech back
ground.58 In light of this, they both felt fairly alienated in the company of those
Jewish classmates who, toward the end of their studies, began to emulate the
customs of nationalistic German students. Around 1899, the two friends

plucked up some courage and decided to discard the anti-Slav discourse that
had completely taken hold of their classmates. This was, related Bergmann,
shortly after Kafka and he had joined the class "blister" (Blase), as the German
high school students termed the secret student associations. This association,
which was composed almost entirely of Jewish students, was built on the model
of a fraternity (Verbindung), an organizational pattern characteristic of nationalis
tic German students. Members of the "blister" were supposed to wear the blue
ribbon when not in school and got together each week for a ceremonial banquet
(Kneipe), as was customary among the "grown-up" students. One of the

Kneipe's symbolic high points was the singing of nationalistic German songs,
first and foremost "The Watch on the Rhine" (Wacht am Rheiri), which the
German students regularly sang when gathering at the "German casino" on the
"German" promenade Am Graben/Na pfikope, with the declared intention of pro
voking the Czech population and initiating a violent confrontation with it. The
singing of "The Watch on the Rhine" during the banquet of his "blister" classmates
had, according to Bergmann, the selfsame anti-Slav connotations. And thus, when
the long-awaited singing began toward the conclusion of this German Jewish fra
ternity's Kneipe, and all the young men stood up enthusiastically, Bergmann and
Kafka were the only ones to remain demonstratively seated. To the great relief of
both, they were expelled from the "blister," with its hostility toward their Czech
neighbors and their culture.59
57. Pieter M. Judson, "Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality and Colonial Fantasy at the
Margins of Hapsburg Monarchy," Social Analysis 33 (September 1993): 47-48.
58. Shmuel Hugo Bergmann Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Arc 4? 1502/156.
59. Ibid.
83
Dimitry Shumsky
It was not by chance that Bergmann remembered this confrontation with the
discourse of Deutschtum in Prague as a most significant milestone in the develop
ment 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 Germano

centric 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 Berg
mann 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 mul
ticultural realities in this region. On the other hand, the more Bergmann became
exposed to the opposing influences of the local multicultural and, indeed, multi
national 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 Bohe
mian landscape's national-cultural character, which was denied by the Germano
centric 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 edu
cational 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 multi
national 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 linguistic
cultural surroundings, in the aspiration of establishing Zionism?the third local
nationalism?as 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, "Jiidische Schulfragen," Revue der israelitischen Kultursgemeinden in
Bohmen (October 1903): 3.

62. See Hugo Bergmann, "Der jiidische Nationalrat," Selbstwehr, November 1, 1918, 2.
84

Bohemia, the imperial Austro-German element, and the Czech national move
ment. In his opinion, Bohemian Zionism's most tangible objectives should be per
ceived in light of a highly significant sociocultural process that was gradually
evolving among the Jews of his country?the process of "Czechification" (Die

Tschechisierung).63 It should be noted here that by this term, Bergmann does
not mean to indicate a process of assimilation with the Czech nation, nor is he
referring to "the Czech transformation" in the sense of "the second acculturation,"
as Kieval believed.64 Nonetheless, his sentiments were expressed upon observing
a trend toward greater exposure to and awareness of Czech national culture on the
part of Jews, a trend that he welcomed and thought that Zionists should strive to
promote. He believed that Jews educated in German culture could harness this
trend to extricate themselves from the ghetto-like hermetic circle of "German
ness," and could find themselves in a dynamic and vibrant cultural experience
that would motivate them to seek meaning in a particularistic Jewish existence
in their concrete local environment.65
Unlike Bergmann, Kafka's other Jewish friend, Max Brod, had no family
ties to a Czech rural background. His mother Fannie hailed from the German
region of Gablonz/Jablonec in northwestern Bohemia, while his father Adolf,
the manager of the United Bohemian Bank, could have served as an example of
successful Jewish integration into the German-speaking Prague bourgeoisie.
Indeed, the father's principled stand against the tradition whereby Germans
ignored the Czech environment is particularly noteworthy, as is his consistent
aspiration to raise his children in the spirit of receptiveness toward the national
Czech culture, of which we learn from the son's memoirs. Through the father's
personal story of his sudden realization "that there indeed does exist another
people in Prague that also has a high culture and great ability," a story not
devoid of self-irony, the young Brod learned how the ephemeral sense of
German cultural superiority had gradually eroded already in his father's generation
among considerable parts of the city's Jewish population.66 In light of his father's
early awakening from the blindness toward Czech national existence that was
still prevalent among a great many ethnic Germans and Jews brought up on
Deutschtum in Prague, it is not surprising that, unlike many of his primary
school friends, the young Max was not sent to the German Altstadte high
school but to the German high school on Stephan Street. In his autobiography,
Brod noted obscurely that these were "two different high schools ... two worlds
far apart, with no contact between them."67 Indeed, it suffices to look at the com
position of the pupils in Brod's class according to the criterion of their geocultural
origin and to compare it to that of the pupils in Bergmann and Kafka's class in the
63. Hugo Bergmann, "Prager Brief," Judische Volksstimme, January 15, 1904, 5.
65. Bergmann, "Prager Brief," 4-5.

66. Max Brod, "Zikhronot mi-tekufat ha-hitbolelut," in Prag vi-Yerushalayim, ed. Felix Weltsch
(Jerusalem: Keren ha-Yesod, 1954), 53-54; see also idem, Streitbares Leben: Autobiographic (Munich:
Kindler Verlag, 1960), 178.

67. Brod, Streitbares Leben, 234.
85
Dimitry Shumsky
Altstadte; by doing so, we might comprehend the nature of the difference:
Approximately one-third of the pupils in Brod's class were bom in the Czech
speaking 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 Prague's German literary arena, Brod openly
placed himself on the same collision course with the consciousness of German cul
tural hegemony in Bohemia that had been staked out by his father and the socio
cultural 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

Dienstmddchen (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 con
tains 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-bom 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 can't possibly con
tinue 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 extri
cated 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 Dienstmadchen (Leipzig: Axel Juncker Verlag, 1909).
70. Ibid., 11.

71. Ibid., 20-21.
86

"discovers" that the majority of "German" Prague's residents speak Czech, and
once he understands the essential demographic and socioeconomic processes

that led to the change in Prague's linguistic-cultural profile from the end of the
nineteenth century, it becomes apparent to the reader that at the core of his blind
ness toward the Czech neighbors rests a firm opinion of the nature of the Czech
people, which to him and to other Germans is regarded as certain, indisputable
knowledge. After hearing from his beloved the story of the economic crisis that
beset her village and led to a mass exodus of its inhabitants, some of whom ven
tured abroad while others turned to the industrialized "German" cities, thereby
joining the internal Czech wave of migration toward "German Bohemia" that
incessantly undermined its "Germanness," the protagonist admits that his previous
perception of Czechs was unfounded, and thereby reveals to us its main element:
The Czechs do not want to return to the village, they no longer believe in
fables, the city, with its adventures and experiences, they like it... how differ
ent, otherwise, things are in reality from that which we imagine when we say
"a people." One attaches to them on the outside labels of the sorts of things
that we only guess at, or about which we have some kind of feeling; one
talks of longing for some homeland, and here we have a gray-haired man
going off gaily to America.72
It thus transpires that in the perception of the hero and those who share the illusion
of the "Germanic" nature of Prague and Bohemia's industrialized cities (no doubt
the same illusion that enabled the members of the "blister" of Kafka's and Berg
mann's class to imagine themselves on the banks of the Rhine), a number of well
defined 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
Prague"?both 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 agriculture"74?

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 steamships75?the

Czech masses gained an unexpected capacity for impressive demographic
72. Ibid., 118-19.
73. Ibid., 20-21.
74. Ibid., 118.
75. Jan Havranek, "The Development of Czech Nationalism," Austrian History Yearbook 3
(1967): 230.
87
Dimitry Shumsky
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 city's 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 Brod's 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 Bohemia's 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 Brod's 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 Bergmann's most prominent followers, published a critique of
the novel in the Prague Selbstwehr and in the Bmo/Briinn Judisches 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 critic's simplistic attempt to attribute
to him the view that intimate contact could serve as a model of sorts for the sol
ution of the Czech-German 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 Hermann's critique, which turned out to be more favorable
than the way it was presented in Brod's autobiography, one finds sharply discerned
insights with regard to the novel's subversive dimension and the process of the
author's repositioning within Bohemia's 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 Dienstmddchen, 118.
77. Ibid., 119 (emphasis added).
78. Ibid., 118.
79. Ibid.
88

journalists" (getreuer Schiller der israelitisch-deutschen Journalistenclique), who
presented themselves as the primary guardians of "Germanness" against "Czech
ness," thereby further inflaming the passions of those involved in the national con
flict. But in seeking "the basis for understanding" (Verstandigungsbasis) between
Germans and Czechs, Brod, in Hermann's opinion, stopped halfway. A Jew

writing in German in Prague, whose protagonist undermined the position
typical of the Prague German Jewish elite and sought a solution to the national
problem in Prague that concerned above all ordinary Jews, nevertheless failed
even to mention the Jews in his novel. But it is impossible, according to

Hermann, to speak of Deutschtum in Prague, and certainly not of ordering the
relations between the nationalities in Prague, without considering the conduct of
the local Jewish component. Because he ultimately chose not to confront the
local national-cultural reality in all its complexity, Brod was content to provide
a rather imaginary literary solution to the Prague national conflict (the feeling
of love transcending the boundaries between the nationalities), the validity of
which in Prague's polarized reality was questionable. On the other hand,
Hermann hinted, there certainly were circles among Prague Jewry, to which the
critic himself belonged, that were promoting a more effective approach toward
the local problem of nationalities. And perhaps the author, who had already
taken his first essential step toward a new perception of the local scene when he
took issue with the support provided by Jewish power to Prague's "Germanness,"
would eventually formulate the foundation for a bridge between Prague's nation
alities rather more stable than the hotel bed on which the novel's protagonists were
united.81
Hermann thus saw in Brod's short novel the work of a Zionist in the making,
to the extent that the author approached the salient points of the same basic view of
the complexity of Prague's national-cultural existence that had guided the path of
Bar Kochbaite Zionism since the days of Bergmann's leadership. Because Brod
had resolutely rejected the Germanocentric representation of Bohemia as affiliated
with a hegemonic, imperial meta-entity, while pointing out its bicultural and bina
tional character, all that was left for him to do in order to complete his personal
subversion of the discourse of denial of Bohemia's cultural and national diversity
was, in Hermann's implied opinion, to recognize the Jews' own national existence
as an additional cultural-national entity to those of the Germans and Czechs.
In referring to A Czech Housemaid, Spector claimed, with some justifica
tion, that in Brod's description of the relations between "Germanness" and

"Czechness" in dichotomous gender-based terms of a "Western," cerebral, and
emotionally and spiritually mature German man against an "Eastern," "primitive,"
"childish," and unstable Czech woman, there was an echo of the contemporary
German-Bohemian gender and nationality discourse. And yet, faithful to the rep
resentation of the German-writing Jewish intellectuals of Kafka's Prague as a
German Jewish "island" somewhat cut off from the concrete sociocultural
reality of their environment, Spector appears to have gone too far in regarding
81. Leo Herrmann, "Ein tschechisches Dienstmadchen," Judische Volksstimme, April 20, 1909, 9.
89
Dimitry Shumsky
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 alterna
tive channels of identification to that of the Germanocentric imperial one, modes
that would be compatible with the picture of Prague's 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 Kafka's "Jackals and Arabs." Insofar as
one can see the jackals-European traveler-Arabs triangle as an encoding of
Kafka's 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 persist

ence in ignoring the national-cultural existence of the Czechs and whose part in
fanning the flames of the Czech-German conflict the Bar Kochba Zionists
strongly criticized; the European traveler, who would not tarry for long in the
region, does not represent Prague's German Jews, but rather the imperial Austro
German establishment on which these Jews pinned their hopes, and the erosion of
whose hegemony in Bohemia "Kafka's" 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. "Jackals and Arabs" between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine

As far as the approaches of Prague Zionism to the question of Arab-Jewish
relations in Palestine are concerned, scholars of Zionism and the Arab-Zionist
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-Siecle Prague and the Origins of Zionist Bi-Nationalism," Jahrbuch des

Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 5 (2006): 184-88.
90

Kochba leaders on this issue during the period of the British mandate, at a time
when Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, and Robert Weltsch became known as the
Zionist movement's most consistent spokesmen for the idea of an Arab-Jewish
binational state.84 And yet, neither these historians nor the students of the
Zionist movement in Habsburg Prague have considered the early voice of Bar
Kochba Zionism prior to the First World War on this matter. It was none other
than Bergmann, who, in 1911, about a year after his return from a visit to Palestine
(August-September 1910), presented his "Notes on the Arab Question" in the

Viennese Zionist journal Paldstina.85 In this article, Bergmann leveled trenchant
criticism at the Zionist policy of ignoring the needs of the Arab residents of the
country, both with respect to the accelerated purchase of land and the separate
management of the economy, and above all at what seemed to him the Zionist set
tlers' palpable blindness toward the very fact of the existence of Arabs in Pales
tine. In truth, there was nothing new in the actual criticism of the modes of
Zionist settlement and of the immigrants' dismissive attitude toward the natives.
Yitzhak Epstein (1862-1943), one of the pioneers of the teaching of the

Hebrew language in the Yishuv, had already castigated these phenomena in
1907 in his famous article "She'ela ne'elma" (Hidden Question).86 As a veteran
of the Jewish Yishuv, rather than as a visitor from abroad, he leveled wide-ranging
and serious accusations against his Zionist associates for neglecting the question
of the relations with the majority population of the country, a problem that encap
sulated, in his opinion, the seeds of future calamity. And yet, precisely against the
backdrop of Epstein's "Hidden Question," to which Bergmann's article was, to a
certain extent, written as a response, one can appreciate the special point of
view on the Arab-Jewish question of the visitor from Czech-German-Jewish
Prague.87
In referring to the question of the national awareness of the Arabs of Pales

tine, Epstein categorically concluded that "In Palestine there is as yet no Arab
movement in the national sense ...of this concept."** He emphasized how great
were the extent and depth of the ties that the local Arabs felt toward their home
land, in which their fathers and forefathers had lived for "twenty jubilees."89 Yet
he was first and foremost alluding to the "natural" ties of the Arab peasants to the
property on which they had worked for generations, and to the primordial bond of
84. See, e.g., Aharon Kedar, "Brith Shalom [1925-1933]," Jerusalem Quarterly 18 (1981): 56;
Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987), 122-25; Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 164-69; Hagit Lavsky, Before Catastrophe: The Distinc
tive Path of German Zionism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 141; Shalom Ratzabi,
Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom, 1925-1933 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
85. Schmuel Hugo Bergmann, Tagebiicher und Briefe, ed. Miriam Sambursky (K6nigstein/Ts.:
Jiidische Verlag, 1985), 1:27-38; and Hugo Bergmann, "Bemerkungen zur arabischen Frage," Palds
tina 8 (1911): 190-95.

86. Yitzhak Epstein, "She'ela ne'elma," Ha-shiloah 17 (1907-1908): 193-206.
87. Bergmann, "Bemerkungen," 195.
88. Epstein, "She'ela ne'elma," 196.
89. Ibid., 194-95.
91
Dimitry Shumsky
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 Zio
nists, 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 industrial
ization and the development of trade and infrastructure, had already begun
among Palestine's 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 Epstein's assertion that
"the Muslim will not leave his country, will not wander afar," because "the
lower a man's level of development and the narrower his field of vision, the stron
ger 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 popu
lation 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 pre
sented 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 foun
dations 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.
Bergmann's Arab?a native of Lebanon or Palestine?is 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, "She'ila neelama," 195; Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian
People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 26-27.
93. Bergmann, "Bemerkungen," 191-92.
94. Ibid., 192.
92

search of fresh economic opportunities. At the end of his peregrinations he finds
himself in Palestine, and, faced with this dynamic experience, the awareness of his
attachment to Palastina is reshaped as a consciousness with an outright national
secular flavor, which collides with the national consciousness of the Zionist settlers.95
Thus, at so early a stage did the visitor from Prague point out nothing less
than the beginnings of the conflict between two local modem nationalisms in
Palestine, the Jewish and the Arab. To him, a resolution of this conflict was not
impossible, if only the Zionists would adopt a position of open dialogue with
the local national environment. As an immediate and concrete means of promoting
this position, Bergmann proposed the establishment of a local Zionist newspaper
in the Arab language, with the aim of clarifying to the new neighbors the ultimate
goal of Zionism, which was, as Bergmann understood it, to create the fabric of
Arab-Jewish cooperation in the country, all the while emphasizing both

peoples' attachment to Palastina?6 But the basic prerequisite for the adoption
of such a mode of conduct on the part of the Zionists was their recognition of
the very foundation of Arab nationalism?embryonic as it might be?in Palestine,
and this is the foremost of Bergmann's "Notes on the Arab Question."
It is perhaps no coincidence that from the end of 1910 on, a few months after
the leader of the Bar Kochba circle had visited Palestine and shortly before the
appearance of his "Notes on the Arab Question," the Bar Kochba organ Selbst
wehr began to pay increasing attention to the Arab national challenge in Palastina.
Up to this time, indeed, there had been virtually no mention of the local Arabs'
tangible existence in the weekly's few references to the situation in Palestine.
At most, we find intellectual discussions on Muslim influences in Palestinian folk
tales, and the rare representations of the local population appear only in religious
(Christen und Moslems) and anthropological (Beduinen) terms.97 Now, beginning
in December 1910, Selbstwehr began publishing with some regularity the "Palas
tinanachrichten" column, which for the first time presented the Araber to its
readers as a collective entity with national traits and intentions, destined to

compete with the Zionist Jewish element in the country. It appears at times as
though the anonymous journalist who penned this column was none other than
the author of "Notes on the Arab Question" himself. Thus, the weekly paper
reported on the accelerating pace of growth of the upper Galilee, while placing
particular emphasis on the "tremendous impetus" of the local Arab population.
Many of the prosperous Arabs were, according to this report, designing their
houses in the European style. Furthermore, numerous peasants were traveling to
the United States for several years, and once they had accumulated sufficient
funds there for the purchase of a house and land in Palestine, they returned
to their homeland. Thus, one could discern the national confrontation
between them and the Zionist settlers, who were likewise returning to their
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., 195; see also idem., Tagebiicher und Briefe, 1:35.
97. See, respectively, "Volkssagen im heutigen Palastina," Selbstwehr, July 22,1910,1-2; "Von
der deutschen und der judischen Palastina-Bank," Selbstwehr, May 13, 1910, 2; and "Zur Lage der
judischen Kolonien in Galilaa," Selbstwehr, September 16, 1910, 4.
93
Dimitry Shumsky
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 cor
respondents' somewhat intuitive sense that the Arab-Jewish national conflict in
Palestine would become ever more severe, a situation in which a form of construc
tive 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 dis
played 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 con
front it face to face, and thereby nurture channels of bridging and mutual understand
ing between Zionism and the local Arab nationalism.101
Upon reviewing the voice of Bar Kochbaite Zionism on "the Arab ques
tion," 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
Brod's 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 German-Jewish 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 Brod's
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 Bohemia's industrialized regions as "German land," so, too, did Berg
mann's 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. "Palastinanachrichten," Selbstwehr, December 9, 1910, 5.

99. "Palastinanachrichten," Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4.
100. "Palastinanachrichten," Selbstwehr, February 3, 1911, 4; and March 17, 1911, 4.

101. "Palastinanachrichten," Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4.
94

of the Zionist quest for Jewish national hegemony over the country. And as Brod
thought that, in order to promote a solution to the Czech-German conflict at its
peak, the German minority must cease to ignore the national existence, material
distress, and cultural-spiritual reality of their Czech neighbors, and relinquish
the remnants of their political hegemony in Bohemia, so were Bergmann and

the Selbstwehr journalists convinced that in order to prevent the outbreak of the
Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine, the Jewish minority had to recognize fully
the local ethnonational characteristics of "the Land of Israel," withdraw from
the hegemonic political intention to achieve a Jewish majority in the country,

and put a stop to their autarchic economic and cultural deportment while demon
strating a willingness to engage in negotiations with the emerging local national
ism over the possibilities of Arab-Jewish coexistence in a shared land.102 It is
interesting to note that the means that Bar Kochbaite Zionism proposed in order
to pave the way for dialogue with the Arab nation in the making were very
similar to the path that Bergmann and the Bar Kochba leadership urged the
Prague community establishment to adopt in relation to the Czech surroundings,
namely, acquiring knowledge of the language of a neighboring local nationality.
As Bergmann had in 1903 wished for the inclusion of the Czech language in a
new curriculum in Prague's Jewish schools, so did Selbstwehr in 1911 propose
the teaching of the Arab language in Jewish schools in Palestine.103
Bergmann's Palestinian Arabs thus resemble Brod's Czechs in that the

national existence of both is unrecognized by their neighbors, who became
exposed to the trends of modernization at an earlier stage; Bergmann's Zionist set
tlers thus closely resemble Brod's Germans, and, in fact, also the Jewish propo
nents of German hegemony in Bohemia, against whom Bergmann himself had
railed when still chairman of Bar Kochba in the years 1903-1904. We have,
indeed, no way of establishing conclusively whether Bergmann was influenced
by the novel of one of his close friends when he wrote his "Notes on the Arab
Question." It can, at most, be determined that the "Arab question" was discussed
by Bergmann and Brod between the end of 1915 and early 1916 in the correspon
dence between them, but this provides no clue to the dual comparison between
Bohemian Germans/German Jews and Zionist settlers on the one hand, and
between the Czechs and Arabs on the other.104 And yet, Bergmann explicitly
used this precise comparison as late as 1921, when he sought to illustrate to his
former Bar Kochba colleague Robert Weltsch the dimensions of Jewish ignorance
of the existence of the Palestinian Arabs as an entity with a genuine national
political awareness: "We are blind to the Arabs, precisely as we in Bohemia

were blind to the Czechs, and only saw Vienna and the Germans."105 Needless
102. Bergmann, "Bemerkungen," 192, 190, 195; and "Palastinanachrichten," Selbstwehr, July
14, 1911,4.
103. Bergmann, "Schulfragen," 3; "Palastinanachrichten," Selbstwehr, July 14, 1911, 4.

104. "Matai ha-milhamah hi ha-hekhrah: halifat ha-mikhtavim ben Hugo Bergmann le-ven Max
Brod," Molad 3, no. 26 (1970-71): 268-72.
1:162.
105. Letter from Hugo Bergmann to Robert Weltsch, May 30, 1921, in Tagebucher und Briefe,
95
Dimitry Shumsky
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

arena?and that of Bergmann himself first and foremost?was motivated
largely by a wish to balance their ties to imperial German culture with a sociocul
tural 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 Bergmann's assessment, suffering from the same type of
blindness toward the increasingly nationalist tendencies among the local popu
lation, 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 Czech-German-Jewish 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 multina

tional 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 motiv
ated 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 Kafka's jackals
European traveler-Arabs triangulation as a parable in the spirit of the Bar Koch
baite 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 Zionism's
clear gaze turned increasingly toward a different Jewish-imperial-local triangle,
106. Ibid., 161.
96

namely, the one that was emerging in the Middle East. According to this reading,
the jackals represent the Zionist settlers in Bergmann's "Notes on the Arab Ques
tion," entrenched in their position of Eurocentric alienation in relation to the local
Arab environment; the European traveler represents the European powers pursu
ing an imperial interest in Palestine and the Middle East, upon whose support pol
itical Zionism relied blindly, a dependence compared by Bergmann in his letter to
Robert Weltsch to the conduct of the Germanocentric Jews of Habsburg Bohemia;
and the Arabs represent the Palestinian Arabs, or at least those elements manifest
ing a national awareness, on whom Bergmann and Selbstwehr focused their

readers' attention. As an aside, someone who would have been likely to support
an interpretation of this sort to some degree was none other than Kafka himself.
We know that Martin Buber, who upon reading "Jackals and Arabs" and "A
Report to an Academy" was very eager to see these two stories appear in his
journal, suggested to Kafka that they be published under the common title of
Gleichnisse (Parables). Kafka, however, rejected this proposal politely yet

firmly: "May I ask you not to call the pieces parables; they are not really parables.
If they are to have any overall title at all, the best might be: 'Two Animal
Stories.'"107
In my view, this resistance on Kafka's part, accompanied by an assertion that
rejected a priori any sweeping allegorical interpretation of the two stories, tells us
that some of the figures he created in them represented no more and no less than
themselves, as they existed only in the reality of the author's imagination. And as
far as "Jackals and Arabs" is concerned, both the "Arab" and the "European tra
veler" are precisely this type of figure.
Did Kafka read the "notes" of his classmate in Palastina, a journal of which
he had at least one issue in his possession in October 1912, when he offered it to
his fiancee Felice Bauer?108 Or was he perhaps exposed to the Arabs' national rep
resentation through the Bar Kochba weekly, which he had, one remembers, begun
reading regularly in 1911, the same year in which Selbstwehr first drew for its
readers the figure of the Palestinian Arab with a striking resemblance to the
man of a European nation?109 Or did he even directly hear Bergmann's

impressions of the latter's visit to Palestine, as we are, after all, speaking of two
long-standing childhood friends? It is reasonable to assume that it was not delib
eration over these questions that prevented Western scholars from reading Kafka's
"Arab" literally, but rather the author's description of the Arab as "white," and also
as upright?not only regarding his carriage, but also in relation to his self
perception and self-confidence. On the strength of this description, no doubt,
those scholars who addressed the specific identification of Kafka's "Arab" saw
him as an unmistakable European: Tismar and Robertson assumed that this was
a general representation of "Western" non-Jews, while Spector was more specific
107. Emphasis added. Franz Kafka to Martin Buber, May 12, 1917, in Letters to Friends,
Family, Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 132.
108. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born, trans. James Stern and
Elisabeth Duckworth (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1974), 16.
109. Binder, "Kafka and the Weekly Paper 'Selbstwehr.'"
97
Dimitry Shumsky
in recognizing an allusion to the "potent and proud" Prague Germans.110 Yet the
Palestinian Arab, to whose actual existence?and even more so, to whose potential
existence in the foreseeable future?Bergmann and Selbstwehr alerted their

readers, had, in truth, a "European" appearance, at least with regard to the national
modern outline of his physiognomy.
Kafka's Arab is thus also like this?a man well aware of his people's 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 rep
resentation of the Arab, which considerably added to the significance of the image
of the Palestinian Arab presented by Kafka's 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 superflu
ous to note that this approach, which found its most prominent expression in
Chaim Weizmann's 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, not
withstanding 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 out
right national-political dimension.113 While the strata among which such develop
ments occurred were indeed extremely thin, Kafka observed them, as a matter of
course, primarily through the magnifying glass of Bergmann's "Notes on the Arab
Question" and of the "Palastinanachrichten" 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 conse
quently their strategic diplomatic tendency to pin their political hopes on casual
110. Tismar, "Kafkas 'Schakale und Araber"'; Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Litera
ture, 164; and Spector, Prague Territories, 191.
111. Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914-1918: British-Jewish-Arab Relations
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 12, 67.

112. Joseph Heller, "Emdotehem shel Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and Jabotinsky be-sheila
he-aravit?mekhkar hashva'ati," in Idan ha-ziyonut, 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: 1918-1929
(London: Frank Cass, 1974), 28; Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War /(Ber
keley: University of California Press, 1976), 226-27; and Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History
of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 62-67. 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), 150-51.
98

European visitors, a rather ominous scenario took shape in Kafka's perception:
The jackals fail to convince the man "from the North" of the inferiority of the
Arabs, and the most that the European is prepared to do is to take hold of the
Arab's arm to prevent him from flaying them with his whip.114 But it is even
worse than this: The visitor from Europe, who, according to the jackals, has
"the kind of intelligence that is not to be found among Arabs," "[is] making
only a short tour of [the jackals' and Arabs'] country,"115 while it is the Arabs
who, it turns out, are no less intelligent than he, will remain forever, and will
continue to constitute a permanent challenge to the jackals' existence.
IV. Conclusions
The name of the Prague Zionist association with which Franz Kafka's
Zionist friends were identified may be misleading. Shimon Bar Kochba was,
after all, the man who led the last bloody rebellion of Jews against Rome, and
it follows that the association's adoption of this name should ostensibly allude
to a suspicious, nationalistic, and even militant standpoint toward the non-Jewish
surroundings. Yet the choice of the name Bar Kochba almost certainly resulted
first and foremost from the influence of the play of the same name written in
1897 by Jaroslav Vrchlicky (1853-1912), the renowned Czech poet and play
wright, who, on his part, showed considerable interest in the history of the Jews
and their culture, translated the works of the American Yiddish poet Moritz Rosen
feld into the Czech language, and maintained close intellectual ties with the foun
ders of Prague Zionism.116 This is to say that in the contemporary Bohemian

Jewish context, the name Bar Kochba furnished evidence of the dimension of
Jewish receptiveness toward the Czech environment, language, and culture,

rather than of a narrow, ethnocentric perception of Jewish existence.
The aims of the Bar Kochba Association as a Jewish national movement
were thus not confined to nurturing particularistic Jewish national content in
Bohemian Jewish life, such as Hugo Bergmann's aspiration to revive the

Hebrew language in a concrete manner among his comrades in the association;
of no less importance to them was the mission of reshaping relations between
the Jews and their local (multi)national environment.117 In itself an indirect con
sequence of the initial questioning of the imperial Germanocentric link among
Bohemian and Prague Jewry in the face of the challenge of Czech nationalism,
Bar Kochbaite Zionism sought to impart added validity to the final dismantling
of Austro-German political hegemony in the Czech lands, to which the German
Jewish alliance served as a central pillar, and thereby to contribute to transforming
Bohemia and Moravia into a common multinational framework, in which legiti
macy would be granted to the particular development of all local nationalities,
including the Jewish one.
114. Kafka, Collected Stories, 179.
115. Ibid., 176.
117. Ibid., 101.
99
Dimitry Shumsky
Bar Kochba Zionism's aspiration to change the patterns of Jewish conduct
vis-a-vis a long-armed empire on the one hand and the local sociocultural sur
roundings on the other was not confined to the Bohemian context. The more
the Bar Kochbaites looked toward the land with which Zionism's 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 Berg
mann, 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 Herr
mann, and Bergmann himself against the Prague German and German-Jewish
discourse of hegemony that stubbornly denied the strong presence of the neighbor
ing 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 con
siderable intellectual interest and with somewhat muted sympathy. And yet,
Kafka's 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 Koch
baites' 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 Kafka's 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 Arabs"?written 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 denied?thus
signaled the apex of this criticism.
Dimitry Shumsky
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Israel
100

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Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews: Franz Kafka's "Jackals and Arabs" between Bohemia and

AJS Review 33:1 (2009), 71-100

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews: Franz Kafka's

desert, makes a stop at an oasis in an Arab area. The circumstances of his

narrator finds himself completely surrounded by a pack of jackals.3 One of

another jackal produces a pair of scissors, which, according to the jackals'

Largely influenced by the "text-immanent" approach that emerged in lit

ations of this sort ignored an "external" fact?the Jewish national orientation of

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews

Rubinstein, that which clearly indicates the "Jewishness" of Kafka's jackals is

between the Pieces" concluded between God and Abraham as related in

Unlike Rubinstein, Jens Tismar found in "Jackals and Arabs" a more

which was influenced by Zionist criticism on this matter. The jackals?the

dependent on the masters of the land?symbolize, according to Tismar, the

Albert Langen, 1964), 146.

richt 59, no. 1 (1967): 13-18.

Rubinstein's theological-messianic interpretation was combined with

and by Ritchie Robertson in his thorough research on the Jewish political

The trend toward reading "Jackals and Arabs" within a Jewish-Zionist

more recent research has generally acknowledged Kafka's complex position on

der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 19 (1975): 311-13.

Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 150-53.

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews

successful) efforts in the years 1917-23 at mastering the Hebrew language26?

and Arabs" against the background of the multinational Prague experience of

in Prague and Bohemia, as perceived?in his understanding, to be discussed

The anti-Zionist propaganda discourse among intellectuals in the Arab

and convincingly showed, these anti-Zionist interpretations altogether tear

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews

echo of the deep apprehension among Prague Zionists, especially Bergmann,

Jews and non-Jews restricted to a single, concrete, local context?Bohemia?

too, restricted his interpretation to a single Jewish-Gentile arena?Palestine?

address an assumable Bohemian background of the story, other than to briefly

34. Atef Botros, "Literarische 'Reterritorialisierung' und historische Rekonstruktierung?Zur

35. Ibid., 230-38.

Araberfrage," DerJude 4 (1919-20): 567-69.

Bar Kochbaites' approach to the Czech-German-Jewish question in Bohemia

II. "Jackals and Arabs" between Jews and non-Jews in Bohemia

author's local experience in his multicultural and multinational hometown.39

thinkers of Kafka's generation and background. The German-writing Prague

41. Ibid., 20.

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews

position in the historiography despite important research developments in the

direction of a more balanced presentation of the relations between Jews and

Jews and their Bohemian and Prague sociocultural surroundings, reigned

centric approach addressed the phenomenon of Bohemian Zionism in general, and

1, no. 1 (1986): 55-74.

preemancipation period, during which most Bohemian Jews were continually

capital at the beginning of the twentieth century: from "German Jewry" to

48. Ibid., 10-12.

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews

Of particular importance to our discussion is Kieval's challenging of the

of study. First, in speaking specifically of Bergmann, Bar Kochba's moving

alternative, while challenging the anachronistic path taken by the liberal

It would seem, however, that in the context of a discussion of the Bar

criticism in Kieval's book, the Czech-German Bergmann appears instead as

51. Ibid., 48-58, 60-63, 198-99.

historiography of Prague's Jews and Zionists, it is worth clarifying that

prominent?Bergmann and Kafka in "Czech Jewish" buildings, Brod, Kohn,

Mesto,l-8 tfida, 1902-10, K. k. deutsches Staats-Gymnasium Prag, Altstadt, 1902-10, Klassen

Czechs, Germans, Arabs, Jews

German cultural discourse on "Czechness" in Bohemia, which fluctuated

a fundamental component of the immediate sociocultural background of both