Th “ r n J h D l nd t L t r r R fr t n :Th f r r t n nd r h h l

br h R b n

Modern Judaism, Volume 35, Number 1, February 2015, pp. 1-17 (Article)

P bl h d b xf rd n v r t Pr

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Lawrence University (28 Jan 2015 17:03 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mj/summary/v035/35.1.rubin.html

Abraham Rubin

THE ‘‘GERMAN-JEWISH DIALOGUE’’ AND ITSLITERARY REFRACTIONS: THE CASE OF

MARGARETE SUSMAN AND GERSHOMSCHOLEM

‘‘What have I in common with Jews?’’ muses Kafka in a diary entryfrom January 1914. ‘‘I have hardly anything in common with myselfand should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.’’1

Despite Kafka’s ambivalence, many of his early Jewish readers believedhis writing bore a distinctly Jewish testimony. Beginning withMax Brod, Kafka’s first biographer and the executor of his literaryestate, German-Jewish critics have made imaginative, diverse, andcontradictory attempts to pinpoint the Jewish character of hisprose.2 Figures such as the poet and essayist Margarete Susman, reli-gious philosopher Hans-Joachim Schoeps, and renowned scholarof the Kabbalah Gershom Scholem, all chose to take Kafka out ofhis corner and place him at the center of their meditations onJewish identity in the modern-secular age. While these thinkers alldetected something ‘‘essentially’’ Jewish in his writing, they each hada very different idea of what it was that determined its status as‘‘Jewish literature.’’ As such, the various claims made upon Kafka’sever-elusive Jewishness reflect the diverse ideological positions heldby his readers.

The following article focuses on Margarete Susman and GershomScholem’s respective readings of Kafka and reconstructs their diver-gent conceptions of what Scholem called Kafka’s place on the ‘‘con-tinuum of Jewish literature.’’3 I show how Scholem’s Zionism andSusman’s affirmation of Jewish diasporic existence inform their respec-tive interpretations of Kafka and what it is that constitutes hisJewishness. In their reflections on Kafka and Judaism, bothScholem and Susman implicate Kafka’s writing in an ideologicallyheated debate concerning the historical and cultural dynamics ofGerman–Jewish relations. Their interpretations correspond to theiropposing ideological positions regarding the vexed question of theGerman-Jewish ‘‘dialogue’’ or ‘‘symbiosis.’’ Ultimately, I argue thatScholem and Susman’s literary interpretations mirror their divergent

doi:10.1093/mj/kju021 Advance Access publication December 30, 2014

� The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,

please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

conceptions of modern Jewish identity and the historical legacy of theJewish participation in German culture since the 1800s.

KAFKA, JOB AND THE ‘‘CONTINUUM OF JEWISH LITERATURE’’

In her 1929 essay, ‘‘Das Hiob-Problem bei Franz Kafka,’’ MargareteSusman proclaimed, ‘‘Franz Kafka has achieved the task of counter-posing the truth of his own time to the eternal truth of Judaism.’’4

Conceding that Kafka’s prose was profoundly secular, Susman never-theless believed it formed part of a longstanding literary tradition thatbegan with the Book of Job. This tradition addressed the metaphysicaland theological questions first raised by Job in his effort to compre-hend his divinely-ordained fate, and the relationship between goodand evil, crime and punishment. Job’s predicament, his inability tomake sense of the catastrophes that befell him, anticipated the exis-tential absurdity and meaningless suffering portrayed in Kafka’snovels. Kafka’s fiction, despite its apparent secularity, emerged outof the Jews’ longstanding quarrel with God [Hader mit Gott], through-out their years in exile.5 Susman argued that even if God’s name wasnever mentioned in Kafka’s fiction, he was ultimately its sole ad-dressee. Thus, despite the profound theological sensibilities that setthe two apart, Kafka’s fiction and the Book of Job belonged to thesame theodical tradition, which expressed the Jews’ enduring effort tocomprehend the meaning of their suffering in exile.6

The Kafka-Job analogy that stood at the center of Susman’s influ-ential essay was also crucial to Gershom Scholem’s understanding ofKafka’s ‘‘central Jewish nerve’’ [judischen Zentralnerv].7 Upon readingThe Trial in 1926, Scholem noted to himself:

After millennia, there has been attained anew, from an unexpectedpoint of view, the linguistic world of expression of the Book of Job.Essentially, this work is without parallel, apart from the Book of Job.The situation of the hidden trial, within the framework of whoserules human life occurs, is developed in these two works to thevery highest level. One may conjecture that never did any Jewattain such a fashioning of his world from such an inner and pro-found center of Judaism.8

The similarities between Scholem and Susman’s interpretations areunmistakable. Both perceive an inherently canonical dimension inKafka’s work that they associate with the Book of Job. They alsoboth believe that the ‘‘Jewishness’’ of his fiction can only be charac-terized in negative theological terms. Despite this superficial resem-blance, the two thinkers arrive at antipodal conceptions of Kafka’s‘‘Jewish essence.’’ Interestingly, it is in their respective accounts of

2 Abraham Rubin

Kafka’s affinities to the Book of Job that their irreconcilable ideolog-ical positions and conflicting conceptions of ‘‘Jewish literature’’ cometo light.

On first glance, Susman’s 1929 Kafka essay gives the impressionthat she, much like Max Brod, read Kafka in the post-assimilatorytenor of cultural Zionism. By associating Kafka with what she alterna-tively refers to as ‘‘the Jewish spirit’’ and ‘‘the eternal truth ofJudaism,’’ Susman ostensibly adopts the rhetoric of Jewish-nationalself-determination characteristic of Buberian cultural Zionism. Eventhe correspondence she draws between Kafka’s prose and the Bookof Job resembles the methods of Zionist-oriented literary critics, whooften alluded to a work’s biblical themes as a sign of its author’s Jewishsensibilities. By linking Kafka’s writings to the Book of Job, Susmanseems to be arguing that despite the progressive secularization ofWestern European Jewry, certain biblical echoes continue to reso-nate in the literature produced by Jews in the German-speakingworld. Such a reading would conclude that Susman’s Kafka-essaycelebrates Jewish historical continuity, and uses the Kafka–Job nexusin order to demonstrate how modern European Jewry had preservedits religious heritage and collective identity. It was, however, preciselythis conception of Jewish continuity that Susman’s essay sought tochallenge.

For Susman, Kafka’s narratives form part of a Jewish theodicaltradition that began with the Book of Job. Yet whereas thistheodicy had, in previous centuries, reflected the Jews’ historicalself-consciousness as a unified people, Susman argued that this wasno longer the case in Kafka’s writings. The Jews’ theodicy [Theodizeedes Judentums], she explained, continually transformed itself under thepressures of historical necessity and the Jews’ interaction with theirenvironment. With the dissolution of the ghetto and the secularizationof European Jewry, this theodicy took on new forms, which reflectedthe Jews’ new historical reality and the disintegration of their tradi-tional religious mainstay. If Kafka’s prose was a contemporary expres-sion of the ‘‘Jews’ theodicy,’’ it was one that nevertheless revealed theirprofound estrangement from Judaism. As such, it reflected the mannerin which the physical dimension of Jewish exile had been augmentedwith a metaphysical homelessness. In the modern era, she explained,‘‘the isolation and the abandonment of the Jew in exile has been com-pleted with his assimilation into the occidental world.’’9 It was theJobian experience of divine hiddenness that constituted a centraltheme in Kafka’s fiction, and reflected the religious reality of theWestern European Jew. Throughout the essay Susman’s discussionshifts between two motifs, divine absence and the loss of Jewishself-consciousness. The association she establishes between the two

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 3

constitutes an attempt to discuss Kafka and Jewish secularizationwithin a theological framework.

As opposed to Max Brod, who celebrated Kafka as a prophet ofreligious renewal, and claimed that his writing was informed by theethics of traditional Jewish doctrine, Susman saw no positive religiousor doctrinal message in his fiction. In fact, the only metaphysical truthshe saw mirrored in his prose was that of religious decline and com-munal dissolution. In Susman’s account, it was the divine absence thatcharacterized Kafka’s prose and that demonstrated his affinities to theBook of Job, and recalled his Jewishness by way of negation. Kafka’s‘‘unparalleled artistic achievement,’’ she explained, consisted in havingfound ‘‘the form of nothing itself’’ [die Form des Nichts selbst]—a reflec-tion of the ‘‘nothingness’’ Judaism had been reduced to in the modernera.10 Kafka’s nihilistic vision of modernity ‘‘could be completed onlyby a Jewish spirit,’’ 11 because it was precisely the ‘‘form of nothingitself’’ that European Jewry had assumed since the time of theEmancipation. Thus, in contrast to Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, andOskar Baum, for whom Kafka’s ‘‘Jewish spirit’’ denoted a positivemoral and religious Weltanschauung, Susman associated the author’sJewishness with a radical negativity. Conversely, it was not the trium-phal resurgence of modern Jewish culture that Susman identified withKafka’s writing, but its very disintegration. If Kafka’s fiction reflectedthe reality of modern European Jewry, it was because it had succeededin capturing its progressive and inevitable dissolution.

Like Susman, Scholem associates the Jewishness of Kafka’s fictionwith its radical nihilism. In his now famous letter to Zalman Schocken in1937, Scholem describes Kafka’s prose as a modern-secular variant ofJewish mysticism. He explains that the author’s ability to capture the‘‘fine line between religion and nihilism’’ seemed to wrap his writingsin ‘‘the halo of the canonical.’’12 Scholem sees a relationship betweenKafka and the Kabbalah, a mystical tradition that he believes embodies‘‘the secret life of Judaism.’’ To summarize Scholem’s position in theletter: there is surely something nihilistic about Kafka, yet it is a Jewishnihilism that paradoxically manifests the inner continuity of Jewish tra-dition. Decades later Scholem made a similar pronunciation, noting that:

The emptying of the world to a meaningless void not illuminated byany ray of meaning or direction is the experience of him whomI would call the pious atheist . . . This is the experience of modernman, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, forwhom nothing has remained of God but the void—in Kafka’s sense,to be sure, the void of God.13

Both Scholem and Susman read Kafka with the question of Jewishsecularization in mind and impute a certain Jewishness to the nihilistic

4 Abraham Rubin

streak in his writing. Yet while Susman believes Kafka’s nihilism re-flects a complete historical rupture, Scholem regards it as a positiveexpression of Jewish continuity. The affirmative aspect of Scholem’sreading is clearly apparent in a 1931 letter he sent to WalterBenjamin. In the letter, Scholem advised Benjamin, ‘‘to begin anyinquiry into Kafka with the Book of Job, or at least with a discussionof the possibility of divine judgment,’’ which he regarded ‘‘as the solesubject of Kafka’s production [worthy of] being treated in a work ofliterature.’’ Kafka’s prose, he went on to explain, was a ‘‘moral reflec-tion’’ of a ‘‘halakhist [a rabbinic legislator] who attempted a linguisticparaphrase of divine judgment.’’14 These affinities served to justifyScholem’s staunch conviction that Kafka did not belong in the ‘‘con-tinuum of German literature’’ [Kontinuum des deutschen Schrifttums], butin the ‘‘continuum of Jewish literature’’ [judischen Schrifttums], whichhe perceived as two discrete and mutually exclusive entities. AsScholem unequivocally asserted, ‘‘Here, for once, a world is expressedin which redemption cannot be anticipated—go and explain that to thegoyim!’’15

Scholem’s understanding of Kafka’s place on ‘‘the continuum ofJewish literature’’ is premised on its fundamental incompatibility withGerman literature. Ignoring the Book of Job’s prominent role inChristian theology and European thought, Scholem bases his under-standing of Kafka’s Jewishness on the idea that the Book of Job is anexclusively Jewish book. In contrast to Scholem, who perceives theJobian dimension in Kafka’s writing as a mark of its Jewish exclusivity,Susman believes that insofar as the Kafka–Job nexus says somethingabout Kafka’s Jewishness, it is the extent to which Kafka’s ‘‘Jewishtheodicy’’ has been interpenetrated and shaped by foreign culturalinfluences to the point where it is no longer recognizably Jewish. Inthis regard, Susman’s reading of the Kafka–Job nexus may be read as apointed critique of the ideological position encapsulated in Scholem’spuristic picture of Kafka’s place on ‘‘the continuum of Jewish litera-ture.’’ Whereas Scholem tries to define Kafka’s Jewishness along clear-cut theological, cultural, and aesthetic lines, Susman seeks to under-mine the very idea that Kafka’s fiction constitutes an essentially Jewishartifact. Like Scholem, Susman claims that ‘‘no work bears the traits ofJob’s ancient dispute with God as Kafka’s work.’’16 Yet, as opposed toScholem, Susman interprets his writing as a site in which the Jewishand the non-Jewish elements merge to the point where they are prac-tically indistinguishable.

Susman’s explication of Kafka’s Jobian qualities is meant to pro-blematize the kind of distinction Scholem makes between ‘‘Jewish’’and ‘‘non-Jewish’’ literature. To the extent that Susman regardsKafka’s relationship to the Book of Job as a sign of his place on the

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 5

‘‘continuum of Jewish literature,’’ she also believes that it is inextrica-bly bound to his place on the ‘‘continuum’’ of German and modernEuropean literature. In Susman’s reading, Kafka’s ‘‘Jewishness’’ mani-fests itself at the point where it converges with the universal humancondition—the individual’s confrontation with the dehumanizing real-ity of modern life. It is at the point where Kafka’s writing intersectswith the biblical Job, presumably the place where it reveals its singular‘‘Jewish essence,’’ that it becomes wholly indistinguishable from‘‘world literature,’’ or ‘‘goyish’’ literature as Scholem might have it.

Scholem and Susman’s respective readings of Kafka and his inter-textual affinities to the Book of Job do not merely represent twocompeting literary interpretations. They also correspond to two con-flicting views on the historically vexed question of the ‘‘German-Jewishdialogue,’’ an issue that preoccupied the two thinkers both before andafter the Holocaust. When read in the context of their other pro-nouncements on German-Jewish history and culture, the ideologicalimplications of Susman and Scholem’s divergent accounts of Kafkabecome much clearer. Their Kafka interpretations need to be under-stood as an extension of their views on the cultural interaction be-tween Germans and Jews. In what follows, I show how Scholem andSusman’s interpretative differences vis-a-vis Kafka are mirrored in theiropposing verdicts on modern German-Jewish history.

DEBATING THE ‘‘GERMAN-JEWISH DIALOGUE’’

There is a direct line connecting Scholem’s interwar portrayal of Kafkaand his outspoken rejection of the ‘‘German-Jewish dialogue’’ in thepostwar era. Scholem’s harshest critique of the post-Shoah idealizationof German–Jewish relations appeared in a letter entitled ‘‘Against theMyth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,’’ which was published in aFestschrift celebrating Margarete Susman’s ninetieth birthday (1964).17

The piece was addressed to the editor, Manfred Schlosser, who haddescribed the volume as a tribute to the ‘‘German-Jewish dialogue, thecore of which is indestructible.’’18 Never one to mince words, Scholembelligerently declared: ‘‘I deny that there has ever been such aGerman-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever,’’ assertingthat the much-celebrated dialogue died before it even began.19

According to Scholem, this dialogue never occurred for the simplereason that, ‘‘It takes two to have a dialogue, who listen to eachother, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and rep-resents, and to respond to him.’’20 The Germans never accepted theJews as interlocutors and in those rare cases where a dialogue took

6 Abraham Rubin

place it was always contingent upon the Jews’ ‘‘expressed or unex-pressed self-denial’’ of their Jewish identity.21 As Scholem later ex-plained, one could not speak of a ‘‘German-Jewish dialogue,’’ notonly because the Germans never collaborated in this idealistic en-deavor, but also because those Jews who devoted themselves to real-izing this dialogue had already sacrificed their Judaism and were thusno longer Jews ‘‘in the full sense of an unbroken historicalconsciousness.’’22

Scholem’s denial of the ‘‘dialogue’’ corroborated his negative ver-dict on the legacy of German Jewry and its historical trajectory sincethe time of the Enlightenment. Judging the Jews’ attempt to accultur-ate from a post-Shoah perspective, Scholem believed that the collectiveeffort to acculturate was doomed from the start. The Jewish project ofthe Enlightenment, from the times of Moses Mendelssohn and upuntil the rise of National Socialism, was nothing but a misguidedand illusory aspiration that spelled out the Jews’ tragic end. Notonly did ‘‘the ‘adventure’ of assimilation’’23 lead to the inner disinte-gration of Judaism, Scholem also argued that it was intricately linkedto the Jews’ physical destruction at the hands of the Nazis. While thecausal relationship Scholem establishes between emancipation and theShoah seems highly dubious, it is important to contextualize his po-lemical statements within their historical context. His letter to theeditor of Susman’s Festschrift reproached the post-Holocaust glorifica-tion of the German-Jewish cultural symbiosis as a cynical falsificationof history. What was so sinister about this well-intentioned celebrationof German Jewry’s cultural achievements was that they were posthu-mously recognized as Germans after they had been murdered as Jews.

There is surely a moral argument to be made in favor ofScholem’s historical critique. What complicates any attempt to vindi-cate Scholem’s position as a postwar insistence on the ethics ofmemory is that it did not emerge in the wake of Auschwitz but heark-ened back to his teens. His rejection of the German-Jewish dialoguewas readily apparent in his letters and diary entries from the 1910s,where he repeatedly described the Germans and Jews as polar oppo-sites. In August 1917 Scholem wrote to Werner Kraft:

The dialogue with Germanness [Deutschtum], a weighty issue for somany Jews, has never been a problem for me. Also the wholly non-Jewish environment in which I grew up never succeeded in changingthis. I have never sought or found a relationship to values, whoselegitimation lies in the German essence [im deutschen Wesen].24

The abyss that separated Germans from Jews, so Scholem believed,made it impossible for them to realize a shared life in the true sense ofthe word [gemeinschaftliches Leben, im ernsten Sinn].25 His rejection of

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 7

the German-Jewish dialogue was readily apparent in the 1910s.Scholem’s postwar diatribes against the German-Jewish dialogue area reiteration of his earlier convictions that Germanness [Deutschtum]and Jewishness [Judentum] constituted two wholly discrete, if not alto-gether antithetical, entities.

In Scholem’s case, then, Jewish-Zionist self-affirmation is expressedby way of anti-German zeal and an outright rejection of the assimila-tory aspirations of German-Jewish liberalism. After 1945, Scholem re-garded the destruction of European Jewry as a confirmation of hisprewar rejection of German-Jewish acculturation. In claiming theShoah as the ultimate proof of the dialogue’s failure, Scholem con-strues the course of German-Jewish history as a teleological process,whose lethal culmination was inevitable. Samuel Moyn has argued thatScholem’s deterministic approach to German-Jewish history enacts acertain kind of logic, which the literary critic Michael Andre Bernsteincalls ‘‘backshadowing.’’26 Backshadowing, explains Bernstein, is ‘‘akind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge ofthe outcome of a series of events . . . is used to judge the participants inthose events as though they too should have known what was to come.’’27 Itis only by positing the Shoah as the preordained outcome of German-Jewish history that Scholem can deride German Jews for their blind-ness and willful self-deception.

Moyn has perceptively argued that Scholem’s account of German-Jewish history rests on two highly questionable assumptions. The firstis Scholem’s teleological approach to the Holocaust, which determineshis overall evaluation of German-Jewish history, even in those caseswhere such a link is unwarranted on any historical or contextualgrounds. The second problem he points to is Scholem’s ‘‘ethnic abso-lutism,’’ that is, his construal of Jewish identity as if it were a ‘‘trans-historical essence with impermeable boundaries.’’28 According toMoyn, this kind of ‘‘ethnic absolutism’’ goes hand in hand with thedeterministic approach found in traditional German-Jewish historiog-raphy, ‘‘because it secured the desired conclusion in advance: the im-possibility of interaction or identity formation of any kind which triedto bridge the gulf between the German and Jewish universes.’’29

The identitarian stakes underlying Scholem’s Kafka commentariesmaterialize when read in light of his postwar remarks on the ‘‘German-Jewish dialogue.’’ Scholem’s letter to Schlosser, which appeared inMargarete Susman’s Festschrift (1964), exhibits striking continuitieswith his prewar understanding of Kafka. One observation that standsout in particular is found in his 1931 letter to Benjamin, where heexplains that his ‘‘individual thoughts . . . do not concern Kafka’s posi-tion in the continuum of German literature (in which he has no po-sition of any sort, something that he himself did not have the least

8 Abraham Rubin

doubt about; as you probably know, he was a Zionist), but his positionin the continuum of Jewish literature.’’30 In both cases, Scholem hy-postatizes a circumscribed realm of Jewishness, which is defined by itsindependence from German culture and in opposition to it. His post-war rejection of the German-Jewish ‘‘dialogue’’ is thus consistent withhis prewar identity politics, as reflected in the strict distinction hemakes between the German and Jewish literary continuums in hisletter to Benjamin. Ironically, Scholem articulates his conception ofJewish particularity in terms that are taken directly from GermanRomanticism, an intellectual tradition whose influence he wouldmost likely disavow. His conception of Jewishness is deeply indebtedto the Herderian idea that an author’s work expresses a Volksgeistunique to the nation to which he or she belongs.31 Likewise, hisidea of a Jewish literary ‘‘continuum’’ imposes an imaginary consis-tency on a diverse literary history that never possessed any unifyingcharacter in the first place.

AGAINST APOCALYPTIC HISTORY: SUSMAN ON THE GERMAN-JEWISH LEGACY

The two assumptions underlying Scholem’s Zionism—the inevitabilityof the Holocaust and his essentialist character of Jewishness—alsofueled his acerbic critique of Margarete Susman’s prewar writings. Inhis 1972 essay ‘‘Jews and Germans,’’ Scholem writes:

The readiness of many Jews to invent a theory that would justify thesacrifice of their Jewish existence is a shocking phenomenon, andthere are countless variations on it. But nothing, it seems to me,surpasses in sheer self-contradiction, and a credulous demand forself-surrender that could be demanded of no one except just usJews, the formulation produced as late as 1935 by MargareteSusman, in full awareness of the fact that the time had come of‘‘the most fearful fate ever to strike the Jews.’’ She wrote: ‘‘The vo-cation of Israel as a people is not self-realization, but self-surrenderfor the sake of a higher, transhistorical goal.’’ In this case the delu-sion goes so far that we are asked to believe—in the name of theprophets, who indeed did not wish Israel to be a people like otherpeoples—that the ‘‘original meaning of the Jewish idea is the absorp-tion of this people by other peoples.’’32

Scholem chides Susman’s ‘‘credulous demand’’ for Jewish ‘‘self-surren-der’’ as the nadir of German Jewry’s ‘‘inner demoralization.’’ Yet thevery essay that Scholem alluded to in his reproach of Susman alreadyanticipated precisely this critique. Susman’s 1935 essay ‘‘Vom geistigenAnteil der Juden im deutschen Raum,’’ observed that one’s assessmentof the German-Jewish ‘‘cultural symbiosis’’ depended primarily onwhat one understood as authentically Jewish, and how one defined

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 9

peoplehood. An examination of the German-Jewish ‘‘cultural synthe-sis,’’ she declared, was an opportunity to reflect upon the question ofwhat constituted Jewish peoplehood. If Jewish identity could be de-fined along national categories or as a ‘‘mere ethnic unity’’ [bloß eth-nische Einheit], then surely assimilation was a fatal mistake that wouldlead to the disintegration of the Jews as a unified people, and neededto be opposed by all means possible.33 However, if the Jews’ exilichistory provided any indication of what constituted their collectiveidentity and universal vocation, then it was the very fact that theJews transcended the narrow national and ethnic definitions of peo-plehood. It was, she argued, the Jews’ rootlessness and their lack of adistinct collective identity that constituted their religious-ethical call-ing. Two years after the rise of National Socialism, and with the fullrealization that the ‘‘German-Jewish symbiosis’’ had come to an end,Susman celebrated it as a significant episode in Jewish history. It ex-emplified the transnational and trans-cultural character of Jewish his-tory, and showed how the Jews’ fate was inextricably intertwined withthe fate of those nations with whom they co-habited the earth.

Susman’s reflections on the German-Jewish legacy were written inthe 1930s and 1940s, decades before Scholem published his own pro-vocative essays on the subject. Anticipating Scholem’s critique of the‘‘German-Jewish dialogue,’’ Susman pre-emptively refutes the ‘‘back-shadowing’’ and ‘‘ethnic absolutism’’ that framed his rejection ofGerman-Jewish history. Her writings from 1933 onwards questionthe two premises, which Moyn rightly identified with the Zionist biasthat shaped much of post-Holocaust German-Jewish historiography.Susman criticizes the utility of judging German-Jewish history accord-ing to its fateful end and contests the Zionist critique of assimilation.34

In this sense, Susman’s essays on German-Jewish culture were notmerely a eulogy for a dying civilization but a polemic directed againstthe essentialist conception of Jewish identity and the deterministicaccount of German-Jewish history.

According to Susman, the Jews had become so deeply enmeshedin their modern European environment since the times of the eman-cipation that one could no longer speak of a distinct Jewish identity orculture. Once they had become full participants in Europe’s spiritualand cultural life, the Jews shed the external characters that had previ-ously distinguished them as a community of faith. As Susman’s 1929Kafka essay already seemed to indicate, the Jewishness Scholem laterdescribed in terms ‘‘of an unbroken historical consciousness’’35 hadlong ceased to exist. In addition to questioning the Zionist idealizationof the unadulterated ‘‘ideal Jewish type,’’ Susman also criticized theteleological dimension that complemented cultural Zionism’s ‘‘ethnicabsolutism.’’ In ‘‘The Problem of the Emancipation’’ (1933) and

10 Abraham Rubin

‘‘Moses Mendelssohn and his Decision: On the Tragedy of GermanJewry’’ (1942), Susman asks whether the violently tragic culmination ofthe German–Jewish symbiosis confirmed Zionism and orthodoxJewry’s outright rejection of the emancipation and its ideals? Did therise of National Socialism prove that Moses Mendelssohn had led sub-sequent generations on a false path? Susman readily conceded that theepoch that began with Mendelssohn had come to an end, but stronglybelieved that the dissolution of the ‘‘German-Jewish symbiosis’’ did notrefute its historical value or the importance of Mendelssohn’s religiousand philosophical contributions to Judaism. In contrast to Scholem,who regarded the effort to fuse the German and Jewish intellectualtraditions as a vain and ultimately destructive undertaking, Susmanargued that it was counterproductive and senseless to judgeMendelssohn from the vantage point of historical hindsight.Mendelssohn needed to be judged according to the challenges andtruths of his own period and not in light of the fateful turn inGerman-Jewish history.36

At stake in Susman’s investigation of Mendelssohn’s legacy after1933 is the historical legitimacy of the ideal of Deutschjudentum, aproject which German Jewry devoted itself to since the time of theemancipation.37 Scholem believed that the Enlightenment ideal ofDeutschjudentum ushered in by Moses Mendelssohn inevitably broughtabout the ‘‘liquidation of the Jewish substance.’’38 Susman, in contrast,portrayed it as a historical event that allowed the Jews to re-encountertheir ancestral heritage in the guise of reason [Vernunft]. TheEuropean Enlightenment, she claimed, was a secularized product ofJewish monotheism and the biblical proclamation that man was cre-ated in God’s image. Thus, not only had the Enlightenment facilitatedthe Jews’ entry into German society, it grew out of a tradition that wasdeeply indebted to Jewish sources. It was for that reason that GermanJewry did not merely perceive its assimilation as an abandonment ofits religious heritage but as a kind of homecoming. Thinkers such asMoses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen believed that one only hadto peel off the external layers of the German Enlightenment’s spiritualand intellectual heritage in order to recognize its Jewish essence.39

Susman’s most extensive treatment of these questions appeared inher postwar work, The Book of Job and the Fate of the Jewish People(1946), which opened by asking: in what way could the contemporaryJew acknowledge his Judaism and in what sense was the ‘‘Jewish es-sence’’ still recognizable after the secularization of Western-EuropeanJewry?40 For well over a century, the Jews had lived as part of theEuropean nations, speaking their languages and sharing their intellec-tual and cultural traditions. If there was something that was still Jewishabout the modern day Jew, it was a dark incomprehensible element

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 11

that had dissolved and mixed with foreign archetypes. Since their dis-persion, the ‘‘Jews had become an invisible people’’ [ein unsichtbaresVolk geworden]. They shared no collective character nor were they de-fined by any common identity. Modern Jewry was inextricably inter-twined in Europe’s spiritual and cultural heritage to the point that itno longer possessed a distinct national or religious identity of its own.Now that the historical ideal of a German–Jewish symbiosis hadreached its tragic end, Susman soberly observed that the Zionistdesire to liberate the Jews from the foreign influence of Europeanculture was a wholly futile aspiration.

Susman saw a prophetic anticipation of Judaism’s historical disin-tegration in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The experience of thecontemporary Jew, who had become unrecognizable to himself andthe world, had found its correlate in the story of Gregor Samsa, atraveling salesman, who wakes up one morning to discover that hehas been transformed into a disgusting insect. No longer capable ofspeech, Samsa is estranged from his family and is banished from thecompany of mankind. Like Job, Gregor Samsa cannot communicatewith other humans. And yet despite his vermin-like external appear-ance, Gregor experiences the most delicate human sensibilities, whichcontinue to bind him to his fellow man, even as he is violently ex-cluded from society.41 The association Susman makes between Kafka’s‘‘prophetic’’ fiction and the disfiguration of European Jewry is moresubtly alluded to in her 1929 Kafka essay. ‘‘Kafka’s figures,’’ she writes,‘‘lack even in their outward appearance, those qualities which wouldmake them clearly delineated and capable of being looked at, under-stood and evaluated. They are enigmatic—each man an impenetrableriddle for the other.’’42

In her account of the formless dreamlike quality of Kafka’s char-acters Susman utilizes the same language she later used to describe the‘‘invisibility’’ of the Jewish people in The Book of Job and the Fate of theJewish People. In both cases, Susman does not claim that Kafka’s fictionaddresses a solely Jewish phenomenon, but argues that it correspondsto a general human predicament. Thus, if Susman considers Kafka’sprose to be an allegory for the modern Jewish fate, she also reads it asa document that portrays the plight of all individuals. If the relation-ship between Kafka’s ‘‘Jewish’’ and the ‘‘universal’’ significance ismerely hinted at in Susman’s 1929 essay, her book on Job and theJewish fate explicitly fuses the two lines of interpretation, demonstrat-ing the interchangeability of the ‘‘Jewish’’ and ‘‘non-Jewish’’ in hisfiction. As such, Susman’s Kafka commentary reproduces the very am-biguity she identifies with the modern Jewish condition. If Susmandoes not always identify Kafka’s fiction as distinctly Jewish in themanner that Scholem does, it is because she questions the notion of

12 Abraham Rubin

a pure unadulterated Jewishness. There is surely something ‘‘Jewish’’about Kafka’s writings, but this Jewishness has been so radically trans-formed that it is no longer distinctly recognizable as such.

CONCLUSION

To the extent that the question of German-Jewish identity promptsScholem and Susman’s respective readings of Kafka, it is in relationto Kafka that the two articulate their competing conceptions of theJew’s place in German and European culture. In posing the questionof Kafka’s place on ‘‘the continuum of Jewish literature,’’ both com-mentators address the vexed question of their generation—namely,what it is that constitutes the Jewishness of the secular German-speak-ing Jew. Scholem and Susman’s readings demonstrate how literarycriticism relates to, and is informed by, alternate visions of modernJewish identity. They both assert that Kafka’s fiction somehowembodies a Jewish ‘‘essence’’ or ‘‘spirit,’’ yet their explication of this‘‘essence’’ has less to do with Kafka’s own relationship to—or under-standing of—Judaism and more to do with their own preconceivedviews on the subject.

For a German-born scholar who was personally affected by theShoah and ideologically committed to Zionism, the idea that Kafka,whose writings had been banned by the Nazis, could simultaneously becanonized as a German and a Jewish writer, seemed to be an obscenefalsification of recent historical events.43 Scholem’s views are surelyunderstandable in light of his biography and politics, but their validitydoes not withstand scholarly scrutiny. His negative verdict on the‘‘German-Jewish symbiosis’’ is driven by the conviction that one canostensibly distinguish between the preservation of the ‘‘Jewish es-sence’’ and its abandonment through assimilation into a foreign cul-ture. According to Scholem there are only two options: assimilation ordissimilation, self-negating defeatism or national self-affirmation. Yetas Scott Spector observes, the idea that one can establish a dichotomybetween nationalist self-determination and full assimilation presup-poses the ability to distinguish between those elements that are saidto be ‘‘intrinsic’’ and those that are ‘‘foreign’’ to Jewish identity.44

Susman’s various essays on the ‘‘German-Jewish cultural synthesis’’from the 1930s and 1940s manifest a prescient awareness of the ideo-logical biases that shaped the Zionist account of German-Jewish his-tory. Rather than divide Germans and Jews along essentialist criteriaor view them as ontologically fixed entities, as Scholem seems to do,Susman criticizes the idea that ‘‘Jewishness’’ may be regarded as

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 13

diametrically opposed to ‘‘Germanness.’’ Even after the Holocaust,Susman regarded the effort to demarcate the boundaries betweenthe ‘‘Jewish’’ and ‘‘non-Jewish’’ as categorically untenable. She thusseeks to account for the historical and cultural legacy of GermanJewry without replicating the oppositional thinking that predominatedthe cultural Zionist approach. In lieu of sweeping historical generali-zations, her analysis of figures such as Mendelssohn was highly attunedto the cultural specificities and historical transformations that shapedGerman-Jewish self-understanding since the 1800s.

Susman’s conception of German-Jewish identity and culture is sim-ilarly present in her Kafka essay, albeit in a more subtle fashion. Theabsence of any methodical or clear definition of Kafka’s Jewishnessmight be understood as part of the ideological argument she is tryingto make. Short of associating Kafka’s ‘‘Jewish spirit’’ with the Jobianexperience of divine hiddenness, Susman makes no effort to circum-scribe or define the contours of Jewishness in national, ethnic or cul-tural terms. The association of Jewishness with a lack or an absencebespeaks Susman’s attempt to deconstruct the ideal of a stable or fixedJewish identity. Thus, as opposed to Scholem, who sought to over-come the ‘‘tragedy’’ of German Jewry’s bifurcated and fragmentedexistence by withdrawing from German culture and possibly evenfrom Germany itself, Susman sees this fragmentation as the verycore of the modern Jew’s Jewishness.

Susman sees the experience of self-alienation in Kafka’s fiction asa figure for the modern Jewish experience, which in turn stands for amore general human experience, one that inevitably affects all indi-viduals in the modern world, Jew and non-Jew alike. In this regard, her1929 Kafka essay contains the kernel for her subsequent reflections onthe tensions and contradictions underlying modern Jewish existence ingeneral and the German-Jewish experience in particular. What Kafka’swriting signified for Susman was the extent to which Judaism hadirreversibly fallen under the sway of European cultural influences.Thus, instead of trying to categorically differentiate the ‘‘Jewishspirit’’ and isolate it from the general cultural and historical environ-ment in which the Jews lived, Susman problematizes the notion of anautonomous and circumscribed Jewish culture.

Although Susman consciously seeks to avoid reifying Kafka’sJewishness and turning it into a fixed formula, her figurative accountof the ‘‘modern Jewish condition’’ turns out to be no less reductive.Susman identifies the Jewish dimension of Kafka’s work with the ex-perience of metaphysical and ontological exile. Her interpretation con-stitutes a subtle critique of the Zionist identity politics, which articulateKafka’s Jewishness in affirmative essentialist categories. Yet her ownmetaphorical formulation of Jewishness as the quintessence of modern

14 Abraham Rubin

alienation is equally problematic. Her key argument is that modernJewishness does not correspond to any fixed identity, yet she too slipsinto the realm of generalizations by conceptualizing Jewishness as ametaphor for rootlessness, an image, which she then reads as thequintessentially Jewish aspect of modernity.

In sum, Scholem and Susman are not disinterested Kafka com-mentators. Their contradictory interpretations are a reflection of theideological agendas they bring to bear on his work. In both cases,interpreting Kafka becomes an activity that allows these critics to med-itate upon the meaning of modern Jewish identity. They are simulta-neously the subject and object of their interpretations, struggling tounderstand Kafka and at the same time make sense of their own com-plex cultural situation as German-speaking Jews. The respective an-swers given to the question ‘‘what is Jewish about Kafka?’’ reflect thecultural dilemmas and ideological investments that preoccupiedGerman-Jewish thinkers both before and after the Holocaust.

LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

I would like to thank Dr Idit Alphandary (Tel Aviv University) for herinsightful comments on this article. An early draft of this article was pre-sented in June 2013 at a DAAD-sponsored conference in RWTH AachenUniversity, organized by Prof Mark Gelber (Ben-Gurion University).

1 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910-1923, trans. JosephKresh, Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt (New York, 1988), p. 252.

2 These ‘‘Jewish interpretations’’ characteristically fall into the follow-ing patterns: (1) The attempt to relate Kafka’s literature to biblical andpost-biblical sources or demonstrate its Talmudic or Scriptural character-istics. (2) The attempt to show how Kafka’s literature concerned itself withJewish suffering in exile and expressed his yearning for a Jewish home-land. (3) Interpretations that explore the ethical dimension of Kafka’sliterature and argue that these are presented in his work from a uniquelyJewish perspective. (4) Readings that try and demonstrate the ways Kafka’sliterature is ostensibly concerned with issues of Jewish spirituality andstruggles with fundamental questions deriving from Jewish theology. (5)Readings that portray Kafka’s literature as advocating the political andcultural aims of Zionism.

3 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft(Frankfurt am Main, 1975), p. 212; trans. Harry Zohn, Walter Benjamin:The Story of a Friendship (New York, 2003), p. 216.

4 Margarete Susman, ‘‘Das Hiob-Problem bei Franz Kafka,’’ DerMorgen, Vol. 5 (1929), p. 49; trans. Theodore Frankel, ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’Jewish Frontier, Vol. 23 (1956), p. 47.

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 15

5 M. Susman, ‘‘Hiob-Problem,’’ p. 42, ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’ p. 43.6 Ibid., p. 37, ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’ p. 39.7 Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel 1933–1940

(Frankfurt, 1980), p. 174; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin andGershom Scholem, 1932–1940 (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 5 p. 144.

8 Gershom Scholem, ‘‘On Kafka’s The Trial,’’ On the Possibility ofJewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, edited by Avraham Shapira,trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1997), p. 193.

9 M. Susman, ‘‘Hiob-Problem,’’ p. 36; ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’ p. 39.10 Ibid., p. 39; Ibid., p. 40.11 Ibid., p. 39; Ibid., p. 41.12 Quotes from this letter are taken from David Biale,

Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA, 1979),pp. 31–32.

13 Gershom Scholem, ‘‘Reflections on Jewish Theology,’’ On Jews andJudaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York, 1976), p. 283.

14 G. Scholem, Freundschaft, p. 212; Friendship, p. 216.15 Ibid., p. 212; Ibid., p. 216.16 M. Susman, ‘‘Hiob-Problem,’’ p. 49; ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’ pp. 47–48.17 Gershom Scholem, ‘‘Wider den Mythos vom deutsch-judische

Gesprach,’’ in Auf Gespaltenem Pfad: Fur Margarete Susman, edited byManfred Schlosser (Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 229–33.

18 Gershom Scholem, ‘‘Wider den Mythos vom deutsch-judischenGesprach,’’ in Judaica, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 7; ‘‘Againstthe Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,’’ in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis:Selected Essays (New York, 1976), p. 61.

19 G. Scholem, ‘‘Wider den Mythos,’’ p. 8; ‘‘Against the Myth,’’ p. 61.20 Ibid., p. 7–8; Ibid., p. 61.21 Ibid., p. 9; Ibid., p. 62.22 Gershom Scholem, ‘‘Noch einmal: das deutsch-judisch Gesprach,’’

in Judaica, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 17; ‘‘Once More: TheGerman-Jewish Dialogue,’’ in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays(New York, 1976), p. 69.

23 Gershom Scholem, ‘‘Juden und Deutsche,’’ in Judaica, Vol. 2(Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 27; ‘‘Jews and Germans,’’ in On Jews andJudaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York, 1976), p. 77.

24 Gershom Scholem, Briefe an Werner Kraft, ed. Werner Kraft,(Frankfurt am Main, 1986), p. 23.

25 G. Scholem, Briefe an Werner Kraft, p. 59.26 Samuel Moyn, ‘‘German Jewry and the Question of Identity:

Historiography and Theory,’’ Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Vol. 41, No. 1(1996), p. 293.

27 Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against ApocalypticHistory (Berkeley, 1994), p. 16.

28 S. Moyn, ‘‘German Jewry,’’ p. 295.29 Ibid., p. 296.30 G. Scholem, Freundschaft, p. 212; Friendship, p. 216.

16 Abraham Rubin

31 On the German origins of Scholem’s thought see George Mosse,‘‘Gerschom Scholem as a German Jew,’’ Modern Judaism, Vol. 10, No. 2(1990), pp. 117–33; and Jay Howard Geller, ‘‘From Berlin and Jerusalem:On the Germanness of Gershom Scholem,’’ Journal of Religious History,Vol. 35, No. 2 (2011), pp. 211–232.

32 G. Scholem, ‘‘Juden und Deutsche,’’ p. 43; ‘‘Germans and Jews,’’p. 89.

33 Margarete Susman, ‘‘Vom geistigen Anteil der Juden im deutschenRaum,’’ Der Morgen, Vol. 3 (June 1935), p. 108.

34 An example of the Zionist critique of assimilation is FelixWeltsch’s essay, ‘‘Der Einzelne und das Judentum,’’ in which the authordecries the loss of the ‘‘ideal Jewish type.’’ ‘‘One of the most tragic aspectsof our spiritual and cultural situation in Galut [exile],’’ argues Weltsch, ‘‘isthat we have lost our ideal type [Idealtypus]—that ideal type that wouldcorrespond to our own spiritual character. We view ourselves throughforeign eyes. We no longer recognize our own beauty. We no longerperceive it as beauty. We are disgusted with ourselves because we havelost the capacity to assess our Jewishness according to its own measures.This is the lowest point of our assimilation, the assimilation of values[Wertassimilation].’’ Quoted in Felix Weltsch and Max Brod, Zionismus alsWeltanschauung (Mahr.-Ostrau, 1925), p. 17.

35 G. Scholem, ‘‘Noch einmal,’’ p. 17; ‘‘Once More: The German-Jewish Dialogue,’’ p. 69.

36 Margarete Susman, ‘‘Moses Mendelssohn und seine Entscheidung:zur Tragodie des deutschen Judentums,’’ Neue Wege, Vol. 40, Nos. 7–8(1946), p. 362.

37 M. Susman, ‘‘Mendelssohn,’’ p. 339.38 G. Scholem, ‘‘Noch einmal,’’ p. 16; ‘‘Once More: The German-

Jewish Dialogue,’’ p. 68.39 Margarete Susman, Das Buch Hiob und das Schicksal des judischen

Volkes (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), pp. 67–68.40 M. Susman, Das Buch Hiob, p. 26.41 Ibid., p. 108.42 M. Susman, ‘‘Hiob-Problem,’’ p. 44; ‘‘Kafka,’’ p. 45.43 See for example Scholem’s 1974 lecture given on the occasion of

being awarded the literary prize of the Bavarian Academy of Arts. ‘‘MyWay to Kabbalah,’’ in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time, pp.23–24.

44 Scott Spector, ‘‘Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity toGerman–Jewish History,’’ Jewish History, Vol. 20, Nos. 3–4 (2006),pp. 349–61.

Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem 17