Franz Kafka and Judaism

Scholem claimed that when he read the Czech author alongside the Pentateuch and the Talmud during a period of intensive study and feelings of 'the most rationalistic skepticism' about his area of study, "I [found in Kafka] the most perfect and unsurpassed expression of this fine line [between religion and nihilism] an expression which, as a secular statement of the Kabbalistic world-feeling in a modern spirit, seemed to me to wrap Kafka's writings in the halo of the canonical.

In the following year, between the Anschluss and the crossing of the Vistula on June 12 of 1938, Benjamin wrote to Scholem from Europe: The long and the short of it is that apparently an appeal had to be made to the forces of this [ancient, naive mystical] tradition if an individual (by the name of Franz Kafka) was to be confronted with that reality of ours which realizes itself theoretically, for example, in modern (quantum and relativistic) physics, and practically in the technology of modem warfare.

What I mean to say is that this reality can virtually no longer be experienced by an individual, and that Kafka's world, frequently of such playfulness and interlaced with angels, is the exact complement of his era which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale.

[3]Gershom Scholem was not alone among thinking people when he later read these lines as having some prophetic significance in respect to the onrushing disaster which befell the Jews in the European Holocaust.

It unleashed from within itself the bellowing of the inhuman while, at the same time, laying claim to its eminent philosophic literary heritage and while continuing at many levels and in the domesticities of the every day, to function normally.