In “Panasien,” a pathos-ridden essay published in Der Jude in 1922, the author Eugen Hoeflich enthusiastically surveys the anticolonial agitation percolating throughout Asia in the wake of the Great War. The “Oriental world,” he contends, was caught up in a series of revolutionary convulsions that paralleled the emerging national consciousness of European Jewry. “What is at stake,” he writes, “is the awareness that has simultaneously burst unto the surface in China, India, the Near East and among certain Jews—a part of the East scattered throughout the West—of the need to liberate the Orient from the tutelage of the Occident.”Footnote 1 Eugen Hoeflich (1891–1965) or Moshe Yaʿakov Ben-Gavriel, the name he assumed upon immigrating to Palestine in 1927, was an expressionist writer, journalist, and cultural Zionist, who established his reputation as an oppositional voice, criticizing mainstream Zionism for its mimicry of European nationalism.Footnote 2 In an effort to rethink the political and cultural foundations of Zionism and disentangle it from what he saw as its Eurocentric influences and colonialist tendencies, Hoeflich turned to the world of Pan-Asian thought, and conceptualized an alternative vision of Jewish nationalism in dialogue with the philosophies of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Confucian thinker Gu Hongming (1857–1928), and the Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913).Footnote 3 Pan-Asianism was an anticolonial ideology that valorized Asia as a unified civilizational entity, justifying its ideal of Asianness through different claims of ethnic, religious, and spiritual commonalities. While the political and regional motivations behind such assertions differed, they all presupposed the existence of a common Asian civilization and the need to defend Asia from Western imperial domination.Footnote 4
Hoeflich's ideal of Jewish Asianness took part in the Orientalist vogue that characterized the writings of thinkers and poets such as Martin Buber, Else Lasker-Schüler, Hans Kohn, and Jakob Wassermann.Footnote 5 In the first decades of the twentieth century, key figures associated with the central European Jewish cultural renaissance reappropriated the stereotype of the Jew as Oriental Other, and employed it as a resource for the affirmation of Jewish identity and difference. The equation of Jewish authenticity with various Orientalist characteristics became a way to criticize assimilation and work through the ambiguities of Western Jewish identity. Paul Mendes-Flohr calls this kind of Orientalist self-fashioning an “aesthetic affirmation of Judaism.”Footnote 6 While this positive ideal of the Jew as an Oriental allowed for the inversion of the negative connotations that were associated with the Jews’ imputed Orientalism, Mendes-Flohr's reading suggests that these acts of self-Orientalization belonged to the realm of aesthetics rather than those of politics. Steven Aschheim offers a particularly pointed critique of this phenomenon, calling it a “nonpersuasive and vain strategy, a consolatory alternative völkisch source of identity.”Footnote 7 According to Aschheim, “The paradox of all these Orientalisms consists in the fact that they were essentially European counter-myths, ideas conceived within a European context and in European categories and hardly meant as serious calls to actively de-Europeanize and ‘Orientalize’ themselves.”Footnote 8
Jewish Orientalism was undoubtedly implicated in—and formulated as a response to—Europe's Orientalist imaginary. Yet Aschheim goes one step further by discounting it as a derivative discourse that never truly challenged the paradigm of European Orientalism, arguing that it merely reproduced its rhetoric and underlying assumptions. Hoeflich's Pan-Asianism provides a compelling counterpoint to Aschheim's critique, demonstrating how some exponents of Jewish Orientalism sought to break with the Eurocentric framework that had given Orientalism its original impetus. In conceptualizing the challenge of Jewish national self-definition in relation to Pan-Asian anticolonial thought, Hoeflich draws a direct analogy between the Jews of Europe and the colonized subaltern. Exploring the way Hoeflich formulates this analogy in his interwar writings, and the role it plays in his thinking about Jewish nationalism, reveals the political stakes of his “Orientalism” as an attempt to disentangle Jewish self-definition from the dominant terms of European modernity and forge an independent conception of Jewish nationhood.Footnote 9
I argue that Hoeflich's attempt to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular, constitutes a serious effort to resolve a conceptual problem called the “postcolonial predicament,” elaborated in the works of Partha Chatterjee.Footnote 10 Chatterjee points to an inherent paradox underlying anticolonial nationalism: “Nationalism sets out to assert its freedom from European domination. But in the very conception of its project, it remains a prisoner of the prevalent European intellectual fashions.”Footnote 11 The colonized seek liberation through national self-assertion, but nationalism, a discourse inherited from the colonizer, presupposes the inferiority of the colonized. The contradiction underlying anticolonial nationalism is that it bases itself on Orientalist logic: “The object in nationalist thought is still the Oriental, who retains the essentialist character depicted in Orientalist discourse. Only he is not passive, non-participating. He is seen to possess a ‘subjectivity’ which he can himself ‘make.’”Footnote 12 The paradox is that in asserting their collective difference in national terms, the colonized resort to the very language that was previously used to justify their subjugation. Hoeflich's conception of Zionism as a political and cultural expression of Pan-Asianism is thus an effort to work through European Jewry's “postcolonial predicament.” It asks how the Jews might assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presupposed their inferiority.
This essay first sketches out Hoeflich's intellectual biography and outlines his synthesis of Zionism and Pan-Asianism. It explores the diverse intellectual sources that inspired Hoeflich's conception of Jewish nationalism and broaches its political limitations by introducing the critiques raised by his contemporaries. The second section provides an overview of Hoeflich's political project and its broader ideological stakes through an examination of his engagement with the thought of the Bengali poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, showing how Hoeflich harnesses Tagore's critique of Western nationalism and his admonition against Asia's adoption of Western forms of political organization to articulate his vision of Pan-Asian Zionism. The turn to Tagore supplies Hoeflich with the conceptual tools to formulate an alternative ideal of Jewish national self-determination, supposedly untainted by European influence. Finally, I look at how Hoeflich translates his political vision of Jewish-Asian solidarity into poetic form. Focusing on Feuer im Osten (1920), a volume of short expressionist prose inspired by Hoeflich's deployment to Palestine as an Austro-Hungarian officer during the Great War, I examine Hoeflich's effort to affiliate the Jewish and Indian national struggles and construct an idealized image of Asian-Jewish kinship.
Portrait of a Pan-Asian Zionist
Born in Vienna in 1891, Hoeflich grew up in an assimilated middle-class home in Ottakring, a working-class suburb of Vienna, where his father worked as a physician. Like many of his central European contemporaries, Hoeflich revolted against the assimilatory tendencies of his parents’ generation by turning to Zionism. Hoeflich's youth coincided with the rise of radical politics and populist nationalism. The crisis of liberalism and the intensification of antisemitism led Hoeflich to reassess the terms of his Jewish identity and his relationship to Europe. What differentiates Hoeflich from the more familiar cases of postassimilatory revolt is that he related his generation's return to Judaism to the Asiatic cultural revival valorized by Pan-Asian thinkers. Hoeflich's writings bear the distinct mark of cultural Zionism, but what is unique to his particular brand of Zionism is the effort to bring the ideas of Martin Buber and Asher Ginzberg (Aḥad Ha-‘am) into dialogue with those of Asian intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Kakuzo.Footnote 13
During the First World War Hoeflich fought on the eastern front, where he was severely wounded in battle and spent several months convalescing in a field hospital. Upon his recovery he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and in March 1917 he was deployed to Palestine as part of a contingent of German and Austro-Hungarian troops sent to reinforce the Ottoman Army. Hoeflich spent several months serving in a logistics unit that was based in the Ratisbonne Monastery in Jerusalem, before being repatriated, ostensibly for his politically subversive views. Hoeflich's time in Jerusalem had a formative influence on his subsequent political and artistic development, inspiring the Orientalist themes and motifs found in his literary works. His writings attest to a deep fascination with the Orient, and recount his quasi-mystical impressions of the Palestinian landscape. Hoeflich was equally captivated by the religion and culture of the land's native inhabitants. Feuer im Osten (1920) and Der rote Mond (1920)—two expressionist works that drew their inspiration from his time in Palestine—are populated with kabbalists, dervishes, Bedouins, and other exotic figures that embody the spiritual, communal, and religious ideals he identified with the Orient and contrasted to a disenchanted European modernity.Footnote 14
After being sent back to Europe, Hoeflich spent the remainder of the war near Vienna guarding Italian prisoners of war. This sinecure assignment allowed Hoeflich to devote himself to his literary and intellectual activities.Footnote 15 Hoeflich's diaries from that period testify to the sentiments that gave rise to his Orientalist poetics and Pan-Asian Zionism: “Disconnected, I move through Vienna as if I were suspended in the air. … I feel an immense yearning for Palestine, which is so great that I sense myself completely alien here in Europe. Whether I wish to or not, I am incessantly preoccupied with the land, occasionally feeling that I will fall apart among the people and the relations surrounding me; they have nothing Jewish about them whatsoever.”Footnote 16 Later that month, Hoeflich wrote: “I have become obsessed with the idea of Judaism's unconditional Asianism.”Footnote 17
In the immediate years following the First World War, Hoeflich translated his obsession with Judaism's “Asianness” into political action. He helped establish several Zionist organizations and societies, among them the Viennese chapter of Ha-poʿel Hatzair, a socialist Zionist worker's party inspired by the philosophy of A. D. Gordon. He served as the editor for numerous Jewish periodicals, such as Esra, Das Zelt, Jerubaal—most of them short-lived. During this time, he wrote dozens of articles advocating his unique strand of Pan-Asian Zionism, circulating his ideas in Der Jude, Selbstwehr, Jüdische Rundschau, Die Arbeit, Jüdische Zeitung, and Wiener Morgenzeitung.
In Der Weg in das Land (1918) and Die Pforte des Ostens: Das arabisch-jüdische Palästina vom panasiatischen Standpunkt aus (1923) Hoeflich elaborates his Pan-Asian vision of Palestine. He attacks the “pernicious influence of Europe,” which led to “the de-Orientalization of the Orient,” and argues that if a Jewish Palestine was to be “internally viable” it needs to reject European utilitarianism, mercantilism, and technology in favor of a communal ethics grounded in Mosaic Law and Asian spirituality.Footnote 18 “Mosaic Law” and “Asian spirituality” are mainly defined by their antithetical relationship to modern Europe. Here, as in many of his other works, Hoeflich conceptualizes Asianness as an abstract construct that is defined through a series of dichotomies. Geographically and culturally, this Asianness corresponds to Arabia, India, Japan, and China, but also includes the Jews, whom he calls “children of the East scattered throughout the West.”Footnote 19 What these civilizations supposedly share is a strong spiritual and communal proclivity. The introspective orientation and deep religiosity of these Asian civilizations sets them apart from the mechanized and commercial character of Western modernity. For Hoeflich, the return to Palestine represents the Jews’ reclamation of their Asian cultural and spiritual patrimony, which had been distorted and obfuscated during their long European exile. The recovery of the Jews’ “Eastern origins” will not only enable them to overcome their self-estrangement, it is also an opportunity for them to establish a new utopian society. Palestine is meant to embody “a new type of communal life, based on naturalness, fullness of feeling, love, honesty, and a new ethic foreign to Europe, a Europe-overcoming ethic.”Footnote 20 This new community is imagined as the antithesis to the mercantilist and utilitarian ethos he attributes to Europe.
Hoeflich's idea of a geographical and civilizational divide separating East and West is drawn directly from Pan-Asianism's key exponents, Rabindranath Tagore, Okakura Kakuzo, and Gu Hongming. Tagore argued for the superiority of Eastern civilization, whose moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines offered an alternative path to modernity. Advocating its redemptive potential for the whole of humanity, Tagore claimed, “If Asian civilization constituted a great reservoir of spiritual power, and if modern civilization was about to destroy humanity itself, then it must be from a regenerated Asia that man's salvation would come.”Footnote 21 Tagore's and Okakura's conception of Asia as a spiritual essence, rather than a mere geographical entity, allowed Hoeflich to reinscribe European Jews as a part of Asia.Footnote 22 By distilling Asianism as a spiritual predisposition, Okakura's and Tagore's ideal of Asian identity was broad and malleable enough to include the Jews of Europe, whom Hoeflich regarded as displaced Easterners.Footnote 23 Both Okakura and Tagore posited the existence of a spiritual and civilizational essence that was shared by all Asians and that was threatened by the encroachments of Western modernity. Only a revitalized awareness of this fundamental difference would allow Asia to recuperate its true spirit and identity. Hoeflich extends this message to European Jewry, writing that “one should reawaken the consciousness of an autonomous past and an autonomous ancient culture in the contemporary Jew.” Only under these conditions will “the Jewish national genius” (der jüdische nationale Genius) avoid being “disguised, diminished, watered down, and Levantinized.”Footnote 24
In 1927 Hoeflich resettled in Jerusalem, where he remained until his death in 1965. During his first years in Palestine, Hoeflich supported himself as a foreign correspondent for various German news agencies, and wrote articles on Palestine for European and American periodicals. He kept in contact with Arab intellectuals and supported the Brit Shalom movement's attempts to facilitate a binational state.Footnote 25 Although he was a committed advocate for peace, Hoeflich did not shy away from taking up arms. In the prestate years, he worked with the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary underground movement that later evolved into the Israeli Army. During the Second World War he enlisted in the British Army, and he took part in the 1948 war and the 1956 Sinai campaign as an officer in the Israeli Army.
Hoeflich's literary breakthrough occurred in the 1950s, when he published a series of middlebrow novels, whose plots mostly took place in the Middle East, which became best sellers in the German-speaking world.Footnote 26 Hoeflich's popularity led to a series of lecture tours in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Hanan Harif notes the irony of Hoeflich's deepening ties with Germany during the last two decades of his life. The young Hoeflich demanded the complete disavowal of Europe in favor of the Jews’ full immersion in the East. Although many of his writings were translated into Hebrew, they failed to resonate with Israeli audiences. It was only in Europe that Hoeflich found the celebrity that had eluded him for most of his career. Hoeflich devoted much of his life to advancing Jewish-Arab solidarity, yet he left his greatest mark as a cultural mediator between Israel and Germany and for his contribution to German-Israeli reconciliation in the wake of the Holocaust.Footnote 27
While Hoeflich's literary works from the 1950s and 1960s won some measure of international recognition, his interwar writings have been virtually forgotten. His political meditations and poetic output from the prestate period have received scant scholarly attention. It is safe to assume that this neglect has something to do with the fact that Hoeflich's political vision was egregiously disconnected from its surrounding historical realities and was particularly fuzzy when it came to hashing out practical details. Even Zionists who shared many of Hoeflich's political sensibilities responded to his Pan-Asianism with skepticism. Replying to Hoeflich's invitation to join his Pan-Asian initiative, the political philosopher and erstwhile Zionist Hans Kohn (1891–1971) wrote that he did not think that Asian nationalism represented an ideal that was superior to its European counterpart. Moreover, he argued, Egyptian and Turkish nationalisms seemed practically identical to their French and Czech equivalents. He added, “I cannot share the view that all that is Asian is good, while all that is European is bad. In my view, the English rule over India was far more decent than Japan's domination of Korea. I fear that the Pan-Asian standpoint will congeal into a chauvinism similar to the kind that has materialized on European soil.”Footnote 28 Kohn thought it was naive to believe that Asian nationalism was ethically superior to its Western counterpart, an observation that was corroborated in the case of Japan, which used Pan-Asianism to justify its imperial ambitions.Footnote 29 The Zionist journalist and editor Robert Weltsch (1891–1982) responded to Hoeflich's overtures with similar coolness, writing that his biggest objection to the idea of a Jewish Pan-Asianism was that it seemed to merely be a symbolic gesture that lacked any concrete content. One could not establish a true connection with these Asian nations or represent their cause without being intimately familiar with their languages and cultures.Footnote 30 The Prague-born philosopher Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975) was even more dismissive. He wrote Hoeflich that the current state of Palestine demonstrated the indubitable necessity of relying on Europe for the advancement of its education, agriculture, and industry. The Pan-Asian idea seemed to Bergmann as no more than a “literary stunt” (literarische Spielerei).Footnote 31
Kohn, Weltsch, and Bergmann raise important questions concerning the ideological coherence and political practicality of Hoeflich's envisioned program. Yet Hoeflich's effort to link Zionism and Pan-Asianism was not guided by considerations of realpolitik. Hoeflich's portrayal of a unified Asian identity is undoubtedly essentialist, but this essentialism characterized the discourse of Pan-Asianism in general. Hoeflich's hyperbolic claims concerning the Jews’ Asianness might surely be pegged as an Orientalist fantasy. Yet in faulting Hoeflich for his geopolitical naiveté and Orientalist aestheticism, one loses sight of the deeper conceptual questions he grapples with. His imaginary identification of the Jews with Asia's racialized and colonized Others is meant to critically address Zionism's relationship to Europe and distinguish Jewish nationalism as a collective identity that is politically and culturally distinct from Europe.
Thus, instead of dismissing Hoeflich's writing as a “literary stunt,” this article asks how the Pan-Asian analogy contributes to Hoeflich's rethinking of Zionism. What drew Hoeflich to Pan-Asianism was its preoccupation with the challenge of subaltern self-assertion vis-à-vis Europe. Elleke Boehmer terms this challenge “the theoretical conundrum of colonized self-representation.”Footnote 32 According to Boehmer, the question of cultural representation is central to the process of asserting postcolonial selfhood. Independence, she argues, is not only about gaining territorial sovereignty or economic autonomy. It is also about asserting one's freedom from the colonizer's epistemological framework. Considering Hoeflich's engagement with Pan-Asianism in these terms illuminates the political stakes of his intellectual project: the attempt to “de-Occidentalize” Zionism. It is this challenge that led Hoeflich to the work of Rabindranath Tagore.
A Zionist Reads Rabindranath
Hoeflich's turn to the East exhibits marked affinities to the Orientalist vogue that pervaded central Europe in the 1920s. Noting the prominence of Oriental themes in German popular culture in the 1920s, Suzanne Marchand explains Orientalism's appeal during this time period to the foreboding premonitions of civilizational decline and cultural crisis that permeated Germany following its devastating loss in the First World War. The humiliation of national defeat may have been the immediate trigger for the German turn eastwards, yet, as Marchand adds, the interwar search for cultural alternatives in the East was also the culmination of a “longstanding iconoclastic, anti-classical and often neoromantic worldview” that had always been a defining feature of the German Orientalist tradition.Footnote 33
Situating Hoeflich within the historical framework of fin-de-siècle German Orientalism allows us to recognize the affinities his work bears to its broader cultural context. Yet these parallels only constitute part of the story. Hoeflich's identification with India was not uncommon for Zionists in the 1920s, many of whom saw a distinct parallel between their respective political ambitions. As Arie Dubnov notes, Indo-Jewish encounters in the first half of the twentieth century “were often marked by a mutual search for an alternative to the aggressive nationalism and rapacious imperialism many Zionist Jews and Indians considered to be the dominant feature of most European cultures.”Footnote 34 According to Dubnov, memory of these transnational identifications was erased during the first decades following the establishment of Israel, when the young Jewish state fortified its alignment with the West. The geopolitical order that came into being during the Cold War obscured the memory of an earlier era, when many Zionists identified the Jewish national renaissance with what Hoeflich called the “reawakening East.”Footnote 35
Hoeflich's preoccupation with the writings of poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and the recurring references to India and Indians in his literary works offer another portal for examining the Jewish-Indian entanglements that characterized early twentieth-century Zionist thought.Footnote 36 Hoeflich saw a clear link between the challenges faced by Zionism and those confronted by the Indian national movement. His engagement with the figures of Tagore and Gandhi, whose writings he regarded as relevant to the project of Jewish national revival, sheds light on what Dubnov calls the forgotten “conceptions of a Zionist-Indian nationalist nexus.”Footnote 37 Several key parallels may be reconstructed between Hoeflich's and Tagore's attempts to conceptualize a national and cultural identity that would, in the words of Tagore, “transcend the barriers of external geography.”Footnote 38
In a 1919 issue of the Viennese Jewish journal Esra, Hoeflich published an essay by Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Asien und Europa.” The essay was an abridged translation of a speech Tagore delivered in Tokyo in 1916.Footnote 39 Introducing the piece, Hoeflich explains that while Tagore did not explicitly refer to Judaism, it nevertheless held an important lesson for those seeking to align their Judaism with the goals of a reawakening East. Guiding Hoeflich's publication of an Indian intellectual's talk to Japanese students is the conviction that the Jews’ national regeneration is predicated upon the affirmation of their “affiliation with the spirit of the Orient,” and the recognition that their goals converge with the Orient's struggle against the “mercantilist unspiritual West.”Footnote 40 The inclusion of Tagore's speech in a Viennese Zionist publication represents a symbolic identification between Jews and subalterns. Beyond asserting the Jews’ spiritual, ethnic, and cultural kinship with the subaltern, Hoeflich employs Tagore's critique of Western nationalism as a template for articulating Zionism's national and cultural objectives. To grasp these connections, let us turn to Tagore's speech and its background.
Tagore begins his lecture celebrating Japan's military victory in the Russo-Japanese War, stressing its symbolic significance for the whole of Asia.Footnote 41 Japan's defeat of a European power proved that Asia could stand up to the West, and showed the other Asian nations that they too could overthrow the yoke of imperial domination. Japan's successful modernization serves as an inspiration for all of Asia, boosting its self-confidence and refuting the pernicious idea of its civilizational inferiority. The fundamental issue that Japan needed to confront now that it had vanquished its external enemies was its future national character: Would it be an imitation of the West or would it remain faithful to its Asian spiritual essence? This fateful dilemma was one that all Asians would now need to confront.
Tagore recognizes that Japan's triumph was the result of the Meiji Restoration that began in the mid-nineteenth century, when the empire embarked on a full-scale modernization of its government, military, and industry—a feat achieved by importing Western technology and expertise. He insists, however, that Japan successfully reclaimed its independence and sovereignty not by virtue of its modernization, but because it held on to its ancient Eastern essence: “Modern Japan has come out of the immemorial East like a lotus blossoming in an easy grace, all the while keeping its firm hold upon the profound depth from which it has sprung.”Footnote 42 Tagore's vision of the “immemorial East” is constructed through a series of oppositions that are mapped on to a geographical dichotomy of East versus West—contrasting the soul and the machine, self-sacrifice and the desire for profit, social consciousness and egotistical individuality, spiritualism and materialism. Japan may have adopted Western technology, but it did not internalize the Western spirit. If it were to become a “mere reproduction of the West,” it would betray its past and fail the Asian nations that look up to it.Footnote 43 Against the “unwieldy car of progress, shrieking out its loud discords as it runs,” Tagore makes an appeal for Asian unity, and urges Asians to pursue their own path, which is “not political but social, not predatory and mechanically efficient, but spiritual and based upon all the varied and deeper relations of humanity.”Footnote 44
Hoeflich, who considered Tagore to be the “foremost representative” of “a spiritual movement encompassing all of Asia,” constructs his vision of Jewish nationalism on similar principles.Footnote 45 Echoing Tagore, Hoeflich's thought revolves around a civilizational conflict between East and West, in which the Jews’ true regeneration depends on the retrieval of their “Oriental essence.” He posits Zionism in opposition to Western nationalism, envisioning it as a form of collective self-determination that transcends the chauvinism and militarism of the European nation-states. Hoeflich explains Tagore's significance for Zionism thus: “In his excellent new book Nationalism, Rabindranath Tagore writes: ‘We must never forget that those people who have got their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely powerful.’ These words should be set in stone for political Zionism and should hang in the house of every Zionist. The Zionist may thus suddenly realize that freedom lies on another path than the one upon which the West marches toward the East, that the bayonets of a European power may indeed conquer Palestine, but they will not liberate Judaism.”Footnote 46
In the passage Hoeflich quotes, Tagore distinguishes between casting off the yoke of external domination and the attainment of true liberty. The two are not identical. If the colonized gain independence from the colonizer only to assert their self-sovereignty in Western terms they will have failed to free themselves from European domination. Hoeflich adopts Tagore's admonition against Asia's mimicry of the West and applies it to Zionism. He sees the disavowal of European influence as the precondition for Jewish national revival and liberation. Acknowledging Tagore's relevance to the yet-undetermined future of Zionism is not merely an issue of intellectual influence. It is also a symbolic affirmation of the Jews’ Oriental identity.
The Indian analogy illuminates the fundamental challenge Hoeflich grapples with as he seeks to identify Zionism as an Asian liberation movement and incorporate it within a larger Pan-Asian vision. As Hoeflich succinctly puts it: “We want to return, but not as Europeans.”Footnote 47 Hoeflich articulates his view of Jewish nationalism in opposition to Herzlian Zionism, which he accuses of coopting the Jewish national project and transforming it into a “projected copy of Europe in a Jewish Orient” (projiziertes Abbild Europas in einem jüdischen Orient).Footnote 48 Pan-Asianism offers Hoeflich an intellectual and cultural resource with which to counteract and challenge the Eurocentric and imperial tendencies he identifies within Zionism. According to Hoeflich, Zionism needs to evade the categories of Western political thought if it is to truly emancipate the Jews, otherwise the Jews will simply turn into “trailblazers of Europe in the Orient, into an English colonial clerk.”Footnote 49 If a Jewish Palestine is to be “internally viable” (innerlich lebensfähig), it must devote itself to “overcoming Europe.”Footnote 50
Tagore's and Hoeflich's attempts to formulate an “Asian” form of collective self-determination that is distinct from Western nationalism points to a shared predicament: as “latecomers” to modernity, how can the Indian and the Jew assert their independence if their collective self-assertion draws on the very political and intellectual traditions that marked them as inferior?Footnote 51 This “anxiety of influence” pushes Tagore and Hoeflich to claim a fundamental difference from European nationalism, and declare that their political programs draw on the primordial wellsprings of Hinduism and Judaism respectively. Their ideas are a response to the problem of historical agency: Is the Indian (or Jew) passively imbibing a “foreign” form of self-sovereignty, and thus perpetuating his subjection on an “inner” level, or can he reconstitute an authentic form of selfhood?
Partha Chatterjee formulates this conceptual predicament as follows:
If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.Footnote 52
Chatterjee criticizes the notion that Afro-Asian nationalisms are merely adaptations of political models derived from the West. The assumption that Third World nationalism is the result of a one-way flow of knowledge from the West reduces the experience of anticolonial nationalism to a “caricature of itself.”Footnote 53 Quite to the contrary, claims Chatterjee: “The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the ‘modular’ forms of the national society propagated by the modern West.”Footnote 54
In Chatterjee's reading, the struggle of anticolonial nationalism begins before its political confrontation with the empire, when it looks to establish its own sovereignty in the domain of culture. Since the colonized society lags behind the colonizing society in the economic, scientific, and technological domains, it seeks to assert its superiority in the spiritual, “inner” realm, which it designates as a marker of its independent cultural identity.Footnote 55 The dynamic of colonial resistance outlined here can easily be mapped onto Tagore's 1916 Japan lecture and his 1918 monograph Nationalism—the two works cited by Hoeflich.Footnote 56 “Politics in the West have dominated Western ideals, and we in India are trying to imitate you,” writes Tagore, who goes on to warn that Indians must recognize “that we cannot borrow other people's history, and that if we stifle our own, we are committing suicide.”Footnote 57 Against the East's attempt “to take unto itself a history which is not the outcome of its own living,” Tagore asserts India's need to develop its national culture “from within.”Footnote 58 Hoeflich makes a similar point when he admonishes his Jewish readers “that orienting ourselves toward the West threatens us with calamity … because it takes away the last remains of our essence, rendering us a Hebrew-speaking part of the European nation folk that has been shoved to Palestine.”Footnote 59
There are clear parallels between Hoeflich's contrarian politics vis-à-vis mainstream Zionism and Tagore's own complicated relationship with Indian nationalism. Tagore first joined forces with the Swadeshi national movement in the early 1900s, but later renounced its narrow nationalist stance, as he sought to articulate an internationalist political vision based on Pan-Asian solidarity. Tagore's turn to anticolonial cosmopolitanism in the 1910s marks the waning of his domestic influence and the beginning of his successful career as a poet-philosopher in the West. Similarly, Hoeflich's antagonism to the establishment of a Jewish nation-state and his vision of a binational Palestine that would be part of a larger regional Pan-Arab federation placed him on the margins of the Zionist movement. Tagore was portrayed as an antinationalist by friends and foes alike. This image fails to do justice to the nuanced ideas of a thinker who disavowed “the colorless vagueness of cosmopolitanism” and “the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” in equal measure.Footnote 60 This misconception of Tagore's position is mirrored in Hoeflich's case, whose ideas also failed to gain traction with his contemporaries.
Fictional Filiations in Feuer im Osten
The Pan-Asian ideal Hoeflich draws on in order to articulate his vision of Zionism extends to his literary works, which offer imaginative elaborations of Jewish-Asian solidarity. Exemplifying this continuity is Feuer im Osten (1920), a volume of short stories and sketches that translate the author's Pan-Asian conception of Zionism into expressionist prose. Many of the narratives in Feuer im Osten revolve around the author's conflicted sense of identity as an Austrian officer stationed in Jerusalem during the First World War. The speaker in these texts suffers from a deep ambivalence about his role as an agent of Western imperialism and identifies with the native Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of Palestine rather than his own comrades in arms. The European Jewish protagonist in these stories feels a deep sense of kinship with the landscape and its inhabitants, and is loath to return to Europe, a place he feels he no longer belongs. The stories depict numerous scenes of mutual recognition between the Jew and the Asian. In this paradigmatic theme of inter-Asian encounter, the Jew and the Asian—alternately figured as Chinese, Indian, or Arab—come to realize their shared destiny and common spiritual heritage. The volume constitutes a poetic enactment of the cultural conflict between Asia and Europe, expressing the author's disavowal of Europe, and the deep desire to recuperate his Jewish Asiatic authenticity.
The work's debt to Tagore is acknowledged in the book's dedication, which thanks him, alongside the Confucian intellectual Gu Hongming and the cultural Zionist luminary Martin Buber, for inspiring Hoeflich's “immense love for Asia” and strengthening his “belief in the ultimate glorious victory of Asia.”Footnote 61 Hoeflich also sent Tagore a copy of the book with a personal dedication in rudimentary English that read: “On the turning point of the history of my Jewish people, which is returning again in his oriental native country I send you this book, what I have dedicated to you. It maintains the same idea as you: the unity of the oriental mind: Indians and Jews shall be brothers, the world will be redeemed if the pan-asiatish [sic] idea will have prevailed Asia and his people.”Footnote 62
The text that best exemplifies Hoeflich's emotional and intellectual investment in India and conveys his idea of a Jewish-Indian nexus is a story called “Abend im Taurus” (An evening in Taurus). The story is a fictional elaboration of a brief encounter between Hoeflich and soldiers of the British-Indian Army, captured in the battle of Kut Al Amra in 1916. Hoeflich met these Indian prisoners of war in Anatolia during the First World War on the way to his deployment in Palestine. Despite serving as an Austrian officer, Hoeflich recognized these enemy combatants as fellow Asiatics, who share a common culture and cause with European Jews such as himself, who are aware of their “Oriental affinities.”Footnote 63
The story begins with the narrator leaving an unnamed city and walking through a valley, where he is surprised to find a group of Indian prisoners crowding around a bonfire, trying to keep warm. The narrator listens in on their conversation, and hears an Oxford-educated Indian quietly denouncing England and Europe to his comrades. In a whispered tirade the Indian prisoner charges: “This is our enemy, who thinks he is better than us, who does not understand us and chokes our throat; this is the spirit, for which we are preparing the way.”Footnote 64 The prisoner then points to the railway track he is sitting on and declares: “This is where Europe runs toward us in order to turn our souls into profit, turn brother against brother, mass murder, technology, eternal misery.… The destructive forces of this dehumanizing civilization are grasping at the heart of Asia.”Footnote 65 The imprisoned Indian soldier directs his ire at the civilizing-mission ideology meant to justify European imperialism and subjugate the people of Asia.Footnote 66 The mention of his educational background at Oxford attests that the subaltern subject is capable of mastering Occidental knowledge. The exposure to the West, however, has not compelled him to assimilate. It has strengthened his cultural and political commitment to the Orient. The Indian's ideological conviction mirrors Hoeflich's own: both assert their Asian identities in opposition to Europe.
The prisoner interrupts his tirade when he notices the narrator, a uniformed officer of the enemy army. He is still unaware of the narrator's ethnic background and political sympathies: “He did not yet know that I was a Jew, an Oriental like him, one whose blood runs with the spirit of the Orient, despite the European centuries.”Footnote 67 As the prisoners are corralled by their Askari guards and led back to their fenced compound, the educated Indian approaches the narrator, who takes the opportunity to reveal his true identity. He addresses the Indian in broken English, with the words “I am Jew” (sic). Surprised, the Indian responds by raising a hand toward him and exclaiming, “Brother?”Footnote 68 This fleeting moment of mutual recognition leads the speaker to reflect on the Jews’ relationship to “mother Asia”: “Today, half of Europe lies between you and me, mother Asia, and more still: the embittered misunderstanding between me and a brother of my blood, who does not hear the call of Asia, which also applies to us, this heart-rending cry of the mother for her children.”Footnote 69 Hoeflich borrows the image of “mother Asia” from Okakura Kakuzo, a Western-educated Japanese art historian, curator, and friend of Tagore's.Footnote 70 Okakura's best-known work, The Ideals of the East (1903) sought to define a common Asian spiritual heritage by mapping out a shared aesthetic tradition linking Japan, India, and China. At the core of his concept of Asian civilization was the tradition of Japanese art, which he celebrated as the epitome of Eastern spirituality.Footnote 71 Opening his book with the memorable and oft-quoted line, “Asia is one,”Footnote 72 Okakura argued that underlying the continent's cultural and religious diversity was a shared spiritual essence: “Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient Asiatic peace, in which there grew up a common life, bearing in different regions different characteristic blossoms, but nowhere capable of a hard and fast dividing-line.”Footnote 73 The Ideals of the East rejected the Eurocentric notion of civilizational progress and criticized the corrosive influence that Western rationalism and materialism had on Asian civilization, while calling for the reclamation of Asiatic authenticity and spiritualism. The association to Okakura is even more explicit in Hoeflich's retelling of this encounter in his autobiographical novel Die Flucht nach Tarschisch. As Harif has shown, in this version of the encounter, the British Indian prisoner declares, “Asia is one.”Footnote 74
Like Tagore, Okakura conceptualizes Asia as a spiritual essence, rather than a mere geographical entity. Tagore's and Okakura's conception of Asia as a spiritual essence turns Asianness into a transferable identity. This detachable definition of Asianness allows Hoeflich to incorporate European Jews within this ideal of Asia. Recuperating the true spirit of Asia, Okakura argued, requires one to acknowledge the fundamental difference between East and West. Hoeflich extends Okakura's message to European Jewry, writing that “the consciousness of the difference [Andersartigkeit] between the two continents, as concerning their spiritual foundations, is the only basis for the self-liberation of Asia. Before the awareness and recognition of the deeper causes this other liberation cannot be conceived.”Footnote 75
The narrator at the end of Hoeflich's story makes a similar appeal, as he recollects this encounter with the Indian prisoner now that he is back in Europe. His present distance from “mother Asia” is not merely geographical, it is reflected in the “embittered misunderstanding” between the Jewish speaker and his coreligionists, who fail to “hear the call of Asia,” and realize that it “applies to us.” The story ends on a prophetic note, shifting from the speaker's despair to a utopian future in which Asian civilization will reign supreme: “I will long be gone … yet the idea will come to pass.… Where Europe's profit-sucking ‘Progress’ once raged, the spirit of the Orient will once again come to be. … Harken, my brothers, harken to the call of the Mother. Prepare yourselves!”Footnote 76
The story's closing passage reaffirms the fleeting and hesitant moment of fraternal recognition between the Jewish Austrian officer and the British Indian soldier. Despite the physical barriers separating them, and despite wearing the uniforms of enemy armies, the Jew and the Indian share a common cause and confront a similar predicament. These ostensible rivals are pit against one another by force of foreign imperial powers. They are both the victims of Europe, who are in fact closer to one another than they are to the respective armies they are fighting for. There is a symmetry to this encounter: the Jew, in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian Army, and the Indian, in the uniform of the British Army, become conscious of their Oriental kinship, if only for a brief moment. The two belong to the community Tagore calls “we of no nations of the world,” who must unite against Europe, not only for the sake of their national liberation, but also for the sake of their common Asian identity.Footnote 77 At stake in Asia's struggle against Western modernity is the ultimate future of humanity. The narrator's belief in the universal redemptive potential of Asian civilization corresponds to an idea voiced by Pan-Asian intellectuals such as Tagore and Okakura, who asserted the superiority of Asian civilization and argued that it possessed the spiritual resources to redeem a belligerent and morally misguided West from wreaking further damage upon itself and the rest of the world.
The image of Indo-Jewish solidarity emerging from this short story does not translate into any explicit political program. But it serves as a poetic avenue for thinking about an alternative Jewish politics aimed at dissociating Jewish national identity from its European moorings. Hoeflich's identification of the Jew and the Indian resurfaces again in the two texts that close Feuer im Osten. The volume's penultimate text, “Proclamation to the One-Hundred and Eight Rebels Murdered in Calcutta in October 1919,” is a short elegy dedicated to the Indian rioters killed by the British.Footnote 78 Hoeflich praises the Hindus, Muslims, and Persians who sacrificed their lives in the name of their “inextinguishable love for the All-Mother.”Footnote 79 He asserts the divine righteousness of their cause in the name of his people (Im Namen meines Volkes), the Jews, swearing that their death shall not be in vain.Footnote 80 In declaring his sympathies with Calcutta's martyred protestors, Hoeflich draws a direct analogy between the Indian anticolonial struggle and the project of Jewish national self-determination in Palestine. His emphasis on the varied religious and ethnic makeup of the Indian protestors echoes several other texts in the volume that note the cultural diversity of the Orient, thus allowing for the incorporation of the Jew within a Pan-Asian alliance. His valorization of interreligious collaboration corresponds to the Pan-Asian ideal preached by Tagore and Okakura, who celebrate the spiritual unity underlying Asia's religious and cultural diversity.
Hoeflich's tribute to the anticolonial rioters of Calcutta is followed by a requiem for the victims of a pogrom, called “Appeal to the Dead of Minsk.”Footnote 81 In placing these two texts side by side, Hoeflich compresses the distance between the two continents and peoples into the emblematic space of the volume's successive pages. This metonymic logic of martyrdom affirms the affinities between the Indian victims of colonial violence in Calcutta and the Jewish casualties of a pogrom in Minsk. The struggle against European antisemitism and the struggle against British imperialism are one and the same.
The texts in Feuer im Osten celebrate the cultural and political possibilities that inhere in identifying the Jew and the Asian, or to be more precise: identifying the Jew as Asian. The book's recurring appeal to inter-Asian solidarity—which also includes the Jews, whom Hoeflich considers “children of the Orient scattered throughout the West”—complements Hoeflich's aspirational vision of merging Zionism with the Pan-Asian ideal. Hoeflich's identification of the Jewish national struggle with the revolt of the subjugated subaltern never matured into a concrete political program, yet the symbolism of this affiliation constitutes a pointed political statement concerning Zionism's ideological and cultural horizons. By valorizing the emancipatory potential of the Jews’ racial and cultural identification with Asia, Feuer im Osten creates a space for cross-national solidarity among the Jews of Europe and the oppressed of the Orient. Hoeflich's identification of the Jew and the Asian reorients Jewish national identity away from its cultural, political, and intellectual ties to Europe.
Conclusion
The Occidentalist image of Zionism—commonly identified as a Eurocentric ideology—obscures the ideological diversity that characterized its prestate varieties, many of which challenged Jewish nationalism's grounding in European political thought, and saw Zionism as the means of differentiating Jewish identity and culture from its European counterpart. In recent years, scholars such as Derek Penslar, Arie Dubnov, Hanan Harif, and Stefan Vogt have sought to complicate this wholesale identification of Zionism as a European political movement, driven by the desire to imitate the West.Footnote 82 As Noam Pianko observes, “Jews have remained largely invisible in the writings of scholars” dealing with “transnational associations, minority rights, and the moral limits of sovereignty.”Footnote 83 Pianko contends that because Jews have been perceived as too statist, white, and integrationist, “few scholars have considered the history of Zionism in tracing the evolution of political critiques of national sovereignty or in locating the early and influential expressions of collective solidarity within and across political boundaries.”Footnote 84 In a similar vein, Santiago Slabodsky notes “the scarcity of postcolonial Jewish thought,” arguing that this is the result of a radical transformation in the Jews’ racial image since 1945. Once seen as foreign Orientals on European soil, Jews are now extolled as model Westerners. “This discursive reclassification,” he explains, “militates against investigating the decolonial aspects of their conceptual programs or correlating their historical resistances to imperialism with contemporary anticolonial struggles.”Footnote 85
Revisiting Eugen Hoeflich's forgotten legacy illuminates the subaltern solidarities that formed the basis for his thinking about Jewish nationalism, allowing us to recover the global imaginary that nurtured certain visions of Zionism before the establishment of the state. If Hoeflich's writings seem naive from a contemporary standpoint, they nevertheless constitute an original voice in the landscape of German Jewish Orientalism and interwar Zionism. The significance of Hoeflich's vision does not consist in its practicality but in its perceptive grasp of the political implications and moral dilemmas underlying the realization of the Jewish national project. While Hoeflich's Pan-Asianism fails to articulate a programmatic political vision, it is nevertheless an immanent critique of the Eurocentric and colonial influences that Hoeflich recognized in mainstream Zionism. Hoeflich also challenges the exceptionalist narrative, which regarded Zionism from an exclusively “Jewish” perspective. He rejected the uniqueness of the Jewish national cause and aimed to articulate it in terms of interwar anticolonial nationalism in the subaltern.
Ultimately, Hoeflich's work from the 1920s brings the history of Zionism into closer proximity to the history of anticolonial nationalism among the subaltern, demonstrating the parallels and intersections between the two movements that were in the process of consolidation at the same time. His thought sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed Zionist thinkers in the interwar era, thus shedding light on what Leela Gandhi describes in another context as the “multiple, secret, unacknowledged friendships and collaborations between anticolonial South Asians and marginal and anti-imperial ‘westerners.’”Footnote 86
