I. “Jackals and Arabs” between Jews and non-Jews

Franz Kafka's short story “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) was published in October 1917 in the monthly journal Der Jude, the intellectual organ of German-speaking Zionism founded and edited by Martin Buber.Footnote ¹ The narrator, an unidentified and pleasant-mannered European man traveling in the desert, makes a stop at an oasis in an Arab area. The circumstances of his journey and its objectives are unknown. It becomes apparent from his story that the man has come to the Arab desert merely by chance “from the far North,” and that he has no intention of remaining in the area for long.Footnote ² All of a sudden, shortly after his “tall [and] white” Arab host has retired to the sleeping area, the narrator finds himself completely surrounded by a pack of jackals.Footnote ³ One of them, who introduces himself as “the oldest jackal far and wide,” approaches the man and implores him to solve once and for all the long-standing dispute between the jackals and the Arabs, as the traveler alone—a man hailing from those countries in which reason reigns supreme, which is not the case among the Arabs—is capable of doing so. Once the jackal elder has related to the European traveler the story of his tribe's tribulations, and how they have been compelled to reside alongside the “filthy Arabs” from one generation to the next, another jackal produces a pair of scissors, which, according to the jackals' ancient belief, is to serve the long-awaited man of reason “from the North” to rescue them from their abhorrent and hated neighbors.Footnote ⁴ But at that moment, the Arab caravan leader appears, wielding an immense whip. The reader learns that not only was the Arab awake while the jackal elder sought to persuade the European man to undertake the salvation project and listening attentively to the jackal's words, but in fact, he has been well aware of the jackals' intentions for a long time:

It appears, though, that the jackals' continual attempts to outwit the Arabs by eliminating them at the hands of a European while they are asleep do not unduly arouse the Arabs' anger, but rather amuse them greatly. And so, the Arab caravan leader, who has brought for the jackals the carcass of a camel that expired that night, lashes them hard with his sharp whip, as he observes, not without pleasure, how the jackals are torn between their fear of the Arab's whip and their craving for the carcass of his camel.Footnote ⁶ The European, whose tendency not to interfere in the local dispute between the jackals and Arabs is evident throughout the story, now nevertheless appears unable to stand aside at the sight of this wanton cruelty toward the ravenous animals, and he takes hold of the Arab's arm as the latter once more wields his whip.Footnote ⁷ Although the jackals have not won the longed-for active support of the representative of European reason for their cause, he is at least willing to ease their suffering and, to some extent, to moderate the confrontation at its peak. Indeed, the Arab is eventually convinced of the futility of whipping the jackals as they eat the carcass, and he leaves them to continue their feast undisturbed.Footnote ⁸

Largely influenced by the “text-immanent” approach that emerged in literary criticism precisely at the time Kafka's work was in vogue following the Second World War,Footnote ⁹ most of the earlier students of “Jackals and Arabs” were reluctant to treat the story against its immediate historical background, attempting instead to interpret it “from within.” It is hardly surprising, therefore, that interpretations of this sort ignored an “external” fact—the Jewish national orientation of the periodical in which “Jackals and Arabs” first appeared—and thus did not inquire into any possible Jewish-based context of the story.Footnote ¹⁰ Herbert Tauber claimed that “in the character of the Arab the unalterable, inexorable law of the World is opposed to [humanity's] all vain dreams of redemption,” as represented in the jackals' glorification of cleanliness, in itself “a parody of the human dream of light and cleanliness.”Footnote ¹¹ To Charles Neider, the jackal–Arab dichotomy hints at “the incommensurability between nature and spirit,” respectively.Footnote ¹² Walter Sokel was convinced that the story illustrates aspects of Kafka's relationship with the writer's father: the parasitic yet rebellious jackals representing Franz Kafka, himself pitted against the powerful and self-confident Arab, who stands for Hermann Kafka, the father, the prototypical “self-made man.”Footnote ¹³ André Németh, for his part, saw the jackals as European Jews and the whole story as a description of Jewish–Gentile relationships with their alternations of tolerance and intolerance, thereby marking an interpretative direction that became the dominant reading of “Jackals and Arabs” from the late 1960s on.Footnote ¹⁴

Indeed, following the first methodical and detailed analysis of “Jackals and Arabs” by William C. Rubinstein, an agreement in principle among scholars began to take shape with regard to the story's “Jewish” context.Footnote ¹⁵ The main direction of interpretation that emerged held that the pairing of “jackals” and “Arabs” represents the dichotomy of the Jews and the non-Jewish world, respectively. For Rubinstein, that which clearly indicates the “Jewishness” of Kafka's jackals is their zealous adherence to the idea of “purity” (Reinheit in the original), to which they contrast the “filth” of their eternal neighbors the Arabs, alluding to the Jewish customs of kashrut and bodily purity.Footnote ¹⁶ The scissors that the jackals ceremoniously present to the man “from the North” so that he will cut the throats of the hated Arabs allude, in Rubinstein's view, to the “Covenant between the Pieces” concluded between God and Abraham as related in Genesis 15:1–21, or, alternatively, to the rite of circumcision.Footnote ¹⁷ But most important of all, according to Rubenstein, is the figure of the narrator, in whom he saw none other than the personification of the biblical Messiah, whose task is to deliver the people of Israel (the jackals) from their Gentile oppressors (the Arabs).Footnote ¹⁸

Unlike Rubinstein, Jens Tismar found in “Jackals and Arabs” a more concrete intellectual and sociopolitical dimension. In his understanding, this story reflects the author's critical perception of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, which was influenced by Zionist criticism on this matter. The jackals—the parasites residing in an “Arab” country, whose physical existence is completely dependent on the masters of the land—symbolize, according to Tismar, the Jews of the Diaspora in general, and Western Jews in particular, while the Arabs represent the Wirtsvolk, a productive, territorial people rooted in the soil of their homeland, a model of the nation that Zionism sought to create.Footnote ¹⁹

Rubinstein's theological-messianic interpretation was combined with Tismar's “Zionist” interpretation by Hartmut Binder in his Kafka-Handbuch,Footnote ²⁰ and by Ritchie Robertson in his thorough research on the Jewish political aspects of Kafka's writing.Footnote ²¹ Thus, a triangular interpretative construct took root in the study of “Jackals and Arabs”: The jackals were seen as the wandering Jews of the Diaspora in general and the Jews of Western Europe in particular, piteous, cowardly, and impotent creatures whose very existence is at the mercy of the territorial nations; the Arabs as free non-Jews, upright and powerful, “a nation as all the nations,” as in the Zionist vision of self-normalization; and the narrator as a messianic figure, in whose beneficial intervention the jackals/Jews continue in vain to put their faith, as a parable of the refusal of the Jews of the Diaspora in general, and the assimilationist Western Jews in particular, to take responsibility for their own destiny and existence.Footnote ²²

The trend toward reading “Jackals and Arabs” within a Jewish-Zionist context, notable in Kafka studies since the 1970s, reflects the growing recognition among scholars of the importance of Zionist influences on Kafka's worldview, and consequently on his literary writing. Whereas the first works devoted to Kafka at the time of his “rediscovery” in the 1940s and immediately following the Second World War rejected outright the assertion of his Zionist friend and literary executor Max Brod (1884–1968) as to Kafka's deep inner commitment to the Zionist idea, more recent research has generally acknowledged Kafka's complex position on Zionism, which cannot be described in one-dimensional terms as “pro-” or “anti-Zionist.”Footnote ²³ Without agreeing with Brod's somewhat dogmatic and oversimplified assertion that Kafka was a Zionist von innen,Footnote ²⁴ and on the strength of a thorough perusal of the author's diaries and letters, the research literature of the past two generations or so has thus sketched an ambivalent portrait of his rejection–attraction relationship with Zionism, a dynamic of inner tensions and conflict that was to mature into a gradual acceptance of the Zionist option from his late twenties onward.

Thus, alongside what has been perceived as Kafka's outright manifestations of interest in national Jewish culture—such as his admiration for the performances of the Galician Yiddish theater in Prague in 1910–12Footnote ²⁵ and his later (and rather successful) efforts in the years 1917–23 at mastering the Hebrew languageFootnote ²⁶—an additional significant aspect is frequently mentioned in the recent scholarship on Kafka and Zionism/Jewish nationalism: the “Bar Kochba” connection, a reference to the Prague Bar Kochba Association, which was the focus of Zionist activity in Kafka's hometown from 1900 to 1914. Indeed, the “Zionism” toward which Kafka took his measured steps from 1910 on was first and foremost a local Prague Zionism, represented above all by the Bar Kochba circle. Two of its chief “agents of Zionism,” with whom Kafka maintained close intellectual and personal ties—despite strains and reconciliations—were clearly identified with this Zionist group: Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975), Kafka's classmate from the Altstädte German gymnasium and the association's spiritual leader in the decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War, and Max Brod, who, though he never officially joined Bar Kochba, was a full participant in its intellectual and cultural activity after becoming a declared Zionist around 1910.Footnote ²⁷ The principal channel along which Kafka came to be exposed to Zionist discourse at the beginning of the second decade of the last century were the gatherings of this group, which he regularly attended with Bergmann and Brod, and in which he even participated in discussions of Zionist issues.Footnote ²⁸ And the journal that was mentioned in his diaries and letters more frequently than any other printed item, and which he read regularly from 1911 on, was none other than the weekly Selbstwehr, the organ of Prague Zionism, which from 1910 on was exclusively controlled by associates of Bar Kochba.Footnote ²⁹ Furthermore, the Zionists of the Bar Kochba circle, who conducted a protracted intellectual dialogue with Martin Buber after his appearance before them in Prague with his famous Three Addresses on Judaism in 1909–10, played, alongside Buber, a central role in establishing Der Jude in 1916, as well as in determining the content of its first issues, one of which included Kafka's “Jackals and Arabs.” Indeed, by early November 1915, Brod had urged Buber to invite Kafka to contribute to the future Jewish national journal.Footnote ³⁰

In view of all this, once the adherents of the “Zionist” interpretation of “Jackals and Arabs” had argued that the tale reflected the state of relations between Jews and non-Jews (as seen by Kafka at a time when he was influenced by Zionism), it would not have been unreasonable to expect them to address the question of whether, and how, this picture related to the perception of relations between Jews and non-Jews in the views of the Zionists of the Bar Kochba group who were close to Kafka. In fact, the Bar Kochba Zionists' perception of the relations between Jews and non-Jews during the period under discussion related first and foremost to two rather more specific and concrete contexts: Bohemia, from whose soil and in the face of whose local challenges their Zionism had grown, and Palestine, the focus of Zionism's political aspirations. Scott Spector, in his Prague Territories, has been the only one to study “Jackals and Arabs” against the background of the multinational Prague experience of the author and the intellectuals close to him, and he proposed a view of the story as a reflection of the relationships between Jews, Germans, and Czechs in Prague and Bohemia, as perceived—in his understanding, to be discussed later—by Kafka and the Prague Jewish intellectuals nurtured on German culture, among them the Bar Kochbaites.Footnote ³¹ Notwithstanding Kafka's deliberate use of the term “Arabs,” Spector did not consider the relevance of the contemporary Palestinian context of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in unraveling Kafka's message in the story. Tismar did indeed note that within the context of the journal Der Jude, concepts such as “Arabs” and “desert” symbolized the geographic area that constituted Zionism's ultimate goal.Footnote ³² In her doctoral dissertation, Anne Oppenheimer noted somewhat more explicitly that the story “has a comment to make on the Arab–Jewish conflict.”Footnote ³³ But these writers chose not to discuss this issue in any great depth, and therefore they did not address the specific Zionist viewpoint of the Middle East, as seen from Prague.

The anti-Zionist propaganda discourse among intellectuals in the Arab world following the establishment of the state of Israel did not hesitate, on the other hand, to read Kafka's “Arab” quite literally. But as Atef Botros recently and convincingly showed, these anti-Zionist interpretations altogether tear Kafka's story from its historical context, viewing it as an early reflection of the wars between Israel and the Arab countries.Footnote ³⁴ Botros identified in the story an echo of the deep apprehension among Prague Zionists, especially Bergmann, about the fate of the Zionist minority in Palestine, which in their view had an exaggerated estimation of its strength in the face of the hostile Arab majority.Footnote ³⁵ And just as Spector interpreted Kafka's story as a depiction of the relations between Jews and non-Jews restricted to a single, concrete, local context—Bohemia—without looking into its possible link to the Palestinian realm of relations, which aroused undeniable interest among the readers of Der Jude, its editors, and particularly among the Bar Kochba contributors to the journal,Footnote ³⁶ Botros, too, restricted his interpretation to a single Jewish–Gentile arena—Palestine—without considering that this arena was viewed by them from the perspective of a different Jewish–Gentile arena, namely Bohemia, where events occurred with which they were required to contend in the most direct manner. In her recent book Kafka and Cultural Zionism, Iris Bruce offered a twofold interpretation of the story, viewing “Jackals and Arabs” as both a Zionist satire of Jewish life in the Diaspora and a critique of some contemporary Zionists' derogatory descriptions of Palestine's Arabs as uneducated and uncivilized.Footnote ³⁷ Still, she did not address an assumable Bohemian background of the story, other than to briefly refer to Spector's work.Footnote ³⁸

The goal of this article is to demonstrate that “Jackals and Arabs” incorporates a dual reference to the relations between Jews and non-Jews in both Bohemia and Palestine, compatible with the manner in which these multinational arenas were analyzed in the views of the Zionists of the Bar Kochba circle who were close to Kafka, first and foremost Hugo Bergmann and Max Brod. The development of this interpretation will entail grappling with a number of issues that directly touch upon some of the central aspects of this circle's sociocultural position and national perception, a few of which have been discussed in scholarship from a tendentious point of view, and thus are due for reevaluation, while the majority have yet to be adequately studied: What was the position of the intellectuals identified with the Bar Kochba Association within, and in regard to, the triangular Czech–German–Jewish relations in Habsburg Prague? What was their view on the state of ethnic relations in Palestine in the face of the Zionist settlement there? And above all, is it possible to discern any connection between the Bar Kochbaites' approach to the Czech–German–Jewish question in Bohemia and the Arab–Jewish question in Palestine?

II. “Jackals and Arabs” between Jews and non-Jews in Bohemia

Spector, whose Prague Territories is without doubt an original and fascinating combination of scrupulous textual analysis and innovative theoretical perspective on fin-de-siècle Prague's intellectual and cultural history, is, as mentioned, the only scholar who has sought to read “Jackals and Arabs” in association with the author's local experience in his multicultural and multinational hometown.Footnote ³⁹ Spector interpreted the figurative triangle of jackals–Arabs–narrator as a parable of the Czech–German–Jewish relationship: The jackals, abject but instilling fear to some extent, represent the Czech masses; the Arabs, powerful and proud, are the Prague Germans; while the mysterious figure of the narrator-mediator is none other than Kafka himself—the German-speaking Prague Jew, gripped with apprehension and fear at the sight of the tumultuous jackals/Czechs, and pressing himself close to the caravan of the Arabs/Germans.Footnote ⁴⁰

A reading of this sort faithfully reflects Spector's more general interpretation of the cultural experience and intellectual work of the Prague Jewish writers and thinkers of Kafka's generation and background. The German-writing Prague Jewish intellectuals, among them the Zionists Bergmann and Brod, are presented in his book as people who grew up in and were shaped by a kind of German cultural bubble. While their ancestors, Spector asserted, had been “centered on a map of universalist and hegemonic German high culture,” the generation of the sons found itself devoid of any real cultural ground.Footnote ⁴¹ Faced with the continuous erosion of German hegemony and the flourishing of the young Czech culture, members of the generation of Kafka, Bergmann, and Brod felt themselves to be isolated on a kind of island, which “belonged no longer to the past, and could find no place for itself in the future.”Footnote ⁴² In order to extricate themselves from this spiritual-cultural isolation, these German Jewish intellectuals initiated a comprehensive and varied cultural project, which included the expressionist creations of Franz Werfel and Paul Kornfeld; the energetic efforts of Brod and the poets Otto Pick and Rudolf Fuchs to translate Czech literature into the German language; the Zionism of Bergmann, Brod, and the Bar Kochbaites; and the innovative literary writing of Kafka. This project, according to Spector, was founded with the intention of staking out a spiritual space between the two surrounding cultures, the Czech and the German, a space that would provide this group a kind of shelter to escape the realities of modern nationalism.Footnote ⁴³ Despite its dimension of intercultural bridging, and alongside the considerable sympathy for the Czech people on the part of individuals such as Brod and Kafka, Spector argued, their view of the Czechs and their culture was not devoid of a certain Orientalist imagery, characteristic of the contemporary German culture's hegemonic discourse on the “essence” of “Slavness.” One of this discourse's prominent features was its tendency to identify Slavs with their physical element, with special emphasis placed on the fairer of their number, a factor that provided the logic for Spector's identification of Kafka's pack of jackals with the masses of the Czech people.Footnote ⁴⁴

Spector's perception of the origins and the sociocultural patterns of behavior among Jewish Prague's intellectual elite surely constitutes a renewed version of the Germanocentric approach to the study of Prague and Bohemian Jewry at the end of the long nineteenth century, a perspective that retains its relatively dominant position in the historiography despite important research developments in the direction of a more balanced presentation of the relations between Jews and non-Jews in this region. This school, which regards the German–Jewish axis as the primary, relevant context for understanding the nature of relations between Jews and their Bohemian and Prague sociocultural surroundings, reigned supreme in scholarship until some two decades ago.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the eyes of its adherents, the history of the modernization of Jews in Czech lands is confined to the story of their economic, social, cultural, and political integration with the German component of their environment. To the extent that research guided by the Germanocentric approach addressed the phenomenon of Bohemian Zionism in general, and the Bar Kochba Association in particular, it tended, unsurprisingly, to emphasize almost exclusively its German Jewish context. Thus, the members of the Bar Kochba circle, including Kafka's friends Bergmann and Brod, were presented as former German assimilationists or acculturationists who, even after becoming Zionists, maintained their deep involvement in the social and cultural life of Prague's liberal German community, remained constant in their unreserved commitment to the Germanocentric Habsburg establishment, and persisted with their inner struggle between Jewishness and Germanness.Footnote ⁴⁶

In his groundbreaking book in the study of Jews of the Czech lands in the modern era, Hillel J. Kieval took issue with the traditional representation of Bohemian and Prague Jewry in the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as a bastion of German culture in the center of a hostile Slav world.Footnote ⁴⁷ Against this, he indicated for the first time a number of highly significant demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural processes that had gradually occurred in Bohemian Jewish society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and that had matured into a very tangible undermining of Bohemian and Prague Jewry's German orientation at the turn of the century. In contrast to the Germanocentric historiographic image of ongoing Jewish alienation from the surrounding Czech-speaking majority, Kieval established a sound claim for the continuity of everyday contacts between the Jews and the Czech population beginning in the preemancipation period, during which most Bohemian Jews were continually wandering through the Czech rural areas.Footnote ⁴⁸ This phenomenon became more entrenched during the internal Jewish migration that occurred in the two decades following the political changes of 1848–49, when a considerable part of rural Jewry set their sights on the Czech provincial towns, in which they became integrated with the burgeoning Czech middle class and gradually became what Kieval defined as “Czech-Jewish assimilationists.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This type of Czech Jew, many of whom moved to Prague in the last quarter of the nineteenth century following the severe crisis experienced by the Czech economy in the provincial towns in the 1880s, became, according to Kieval, the generators of radical change in the self-image of the sociocultural profile of Jews in the Bohemian capital at the beginning of the twentieth century: from “German Jewry” to “Czech Jewry,” a process he defined as “secondary acculturation.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This development, the prime institutional agent of which was the vociferous Czech Jewish assimilationist movement, found its manifest expression, according to Kieval, in the gradual decline of the phenomenon of the German-language Jewish primary schools, in the ever-wider adoption of Czech as the day-to-day language of communication among Prague Jews, and, above all, in the growing reservations of more and more Jews about the traditional and blind reliance upon the Germanocentric Habsburg establishment.Footnote ⁵¹

Of particular importance to our discussion is Kieval's challenging of the Germanocentric view of the phenomenon of Prague Zionism in general, and that of the Bar Kochbaites in particular, which is one of his book's central foci of study. First, in speaking specifically of Bergmann, Bar Kochba's moving spirit, Kieval was the first to discern a number of significant rifts in Bergmann's German cultural exterior. It becomes apparent that, alongside his studies at the Altstädte high school in Prague, the young Hugo maintained rather close sociocultural ties with the Czech-speaking environment during frequent family visits to the village of Chrastice in central Bohemia, the birthplace of his father Siegmund/Zikmund.Footnote ⁵² Kieval, moreover, questioned the Germanocentric representation of Bar Kochba Zionism at a more abstract level. He asserted that one should place Bar Kochba and the Prague and Bohemian Zionists in the wide sociopolitical context in which the Czech Jewish assimilationist movement developed. Notwithstanding the obvious differences between the Czech Jewish assimilationists and the Zionists with regard to national issues, we are speaking, Kieval claimed, of two phenomena of a similar type as far as the conceptual frame is concerned. For, in a similar fashion to the Czech Jewish movement, Prague Zionism and the Bar Kochbaites presented Bohemian Jewry with an innovative national alternative, while challenging the anachronistic path taken by the liberal German Jewish bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁵³

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

In order to complete the reevaluation of the Germanocentric narrative in the historiography of Prague's Jews and Zionists, it is worth clarifying that the phenomenon of gradual erosion on the part of the local Czech component of the exclusive status of imperial German culture in relationships between Jews and their environment was paradigmatic in the case of the sociocultural experience of key figures in the Bar Kochba Association, as well as among the members of the wider circle such as Brod and Kafka. Indeed, in line with the overwhelming majority of Prague Jews of their generation, they were educated in German culture, and the German tongue was their primary intellectual vehicle. Nevertheless, in everyday life, they and their families were exposed to the Czech environment, language, and culture. They grew up in buildings with ethnically mixed populations who spoke different languages, in which the Czech component was prominent—Bergmann and Kafka in “Czech Jewish” buildings, Brod, Kohn, and Weltsch in “Czech German Jewish” ones.Footnote ⁵⁴ This constituted an exception to the accepted residential patterns among the Jews of Prague, whose most intimate spheres of life tended toward an existence separate from non-Jews, and who preferred to have other Jews as their neighbors.Footnote ⁵⁵ Unlike most of their schoolmates in the German high school, who throughout their schooling boycotted the study of the Czech language (apart from Weltsch's class, half of which did partake in them), and also unlike the majority of students in the German high schools throughout Bohemia at the same period, Bergmann, Kafka, Brod, and Weltsch consistently studied Czech by choice.Footnote ⁵⁶ And insofar as “Kafka's” two Zionists, Bergmann and Brod, are concerned, it is of particular importance to note that their day-to-day exposure to the Czech environment, language, and culture was consistent with their genuine reservations about the hegemonic German cultural discourse on “Czechness” in Bohemia, which fluctuated between denying the Czechs' very national existence and labeling them with the same derogatory colonialist terms used by Europeans to describe the natives of Africa.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moreover, one can clearly establish that a receptiveness toward the neighboring national culture that was different from that on which they had been nurtured, and a challenging of the German discourse on Czechs, constituted a fundamental component of the immediate sociocultural background of both these men's approach to Zionism, and made their significant mark on shaping the substantive dimension of their politics.

Bergmann's memoirs of his friendship with Kafka in the Altstädte high school reveal the complexity of the two friends' sociocultural location relative to the binational non-Jewish Prague environment. It turns out that what first brought them together was, above all, their families' common rural Czech background.Footnote ⁵⁸ In light of this, they both felt fairly alienated in the company of those Jewish classmates who, toward the end of their studies, began to emulate the customs of nationalistic German students. Around 1899, the two friends plucked up some courage and decided to discard the anti-Slav discourse that had completely taken hold of their classmates. This was, related Bergmann, shortly after Kafka and he had joined the class “blister” (Blase), as the German high school students termed the secret student associations. This association, which was composed almost entirely of Jewish students, was built on the model of a fraternity (Verbindung), an organizational pattern characteristic of nationalistic German students. Members of the “blister” were supposed to wear the blue ribbon when not in school and got together each week for a ceremonial banquet (Kneipe), as was customary among the “grown-up” students. One of the Kneipe's symbolic high points was the singing of nationalistic German songs, first and foremost “The Watch on the Rhine” (Wacht am Rhein), which the German students regularly sang when gathering at the “German casino” on the “German” promenade Am Graben/Na přikopě, with the declared intention of provoking the Czech population and initiating a violent confrontation with it. The singing of “The Watch on the Rhine” during the banquet of his “blister” classmates had, according to Bergmann, the selfsame anti-Slav connotations. And thus, when the long-awaited singing began toward the conclusion of this German Jewish fraternity's Kneipe, and all the young men stood up enthusiastically, Bergmann and Kafka were the only ones to remain demonstratively seated. To the great relief of both, they were expelled from the “blister,” with its hostility toward their Czech neighbors and their culture.Footnote ⁵⁹

It was not by chance that Bergmann remembered this confrontation with the discourse of Deutschtum in Prague as a most significant milestone in the development of his awareness toward the point at which he turned to Zionism.Footnote ⁶⁰ Upon coming up against one of the more grotesque manifestations of the Germanocentric position in the Bohemian capital, such as the rendering of “The Watch on the Rhine” by Jewish youngsters on the banks of the Vltava, the young Bergmann became ever more aware of the gap between the Germanocentric discourse that recognized the existence of but one Kultur in Bohemia and Prague, regarding them as geocultural entities of sorts affiliated with Vienna and Berlin, and the multicultural realities in this region. On the other hand, the more Bergmann became exposed to the opposing influences of the local multicultural and, indeed, multinational environment beyond the “blister” of his class, as the burgeoning Czech element was continually challenging the component of German acculturation within him, so did the sense of a particularistic Jewish self take on a sharper form for him. This was part of his recognition of the complexity of the local Bohemian landscape's national-cultural character, which was denied by the Germanocentric discourse, in general, and of his identification with the Czech challenge to German hegemony in particular.

When he came to the national Jewish Bar Kochba Association through the cracks that grew evident in the monocultural, Germanocentric “blister” of his educational environment as a result of the challenge of Czech nationalism, the Zionist Bergmann saw in the divestment from the imperial German discourse and in the search for a dialogue with the local Czech nationalism the guiding principles for the deportment of a Jewish nation in the multinational Bohemian arena. Thus, in one of his first Zionist articles, in which he proposed a series of measures for amending the curriculum in German-language Jewish community schools with the aim of transforming them into an infrastructure for the renewal of Jewish national life in Bohemia, Bergmann presented the issue of the teaching of the Czech language and putting it on an equal footing with German within the framework of Jewish education as nothing less than a Jewish national issue.Footnote ⁶¹ This means that, as someone who would from now on fight tirelessly for official recognition of the Jewish nation as part of the local Bohemian and Prague multinational landscape, he first of all sought to abolish the logic of the hegemony of the imperial German component over the relations of Jews with their linguistic-cultural surroundings, in the aspiration of establishing Zionism—the third local nationalism—as an element that would work for reshaping Bohemia as a space for a more balanced, trilateral of its three national groups.Footnote ⁶²

Bergmann expressed himself in even clearer language in his programmatic article “Prager Brief” of 1904, in which he laid out his position on the issue of the triangular relations between the burgeoning Jewish nationalism in Prague and Bohemia, the imperial Austro-German element, and the Czech national movement. In his opinion, Bohemian Zionism's most tangible objectives should be perceived in light of a highly significant sociocultural process that was gradually evolving among the Jews of his country—the process of “Czechification” (Die Tschechisierung).Footnote ⁶³ It should be noted here that by this term, Bergmann does not mean to indicate a process of assimilation with the Czech nation, nor is he referring to “the Czech transformation” in the sense of “the second acculturation,” as Kieval believed.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nonetheless, his sentiments were expressed upon observing a trend toward greater exposure to and awareness of Czech national culture on the part of Jews, a trend that he welcomed and thought that Zionists should strive to promote. He believed that Jews educated in German culture could harness this trend to extricate themselves from the ghetto-like hermetic circle of “Germanness,” and could find themselves in a dynamic and vibrant cultural experience that would motivate them to seek meaning in a particularistic Jewish existence in their concrete local environment.Footnote ⁶⁵

Unlike Bergmann, Kafka's other Jewish friend, Max Brod, had no family ties to a Czech rural background. His mother Fannie hailed from the German region of Gablonz/Jablonec in northwestern Bohemia, while his father Adolf, the manager of the United Bohemian Bank, could have served as an example of successful Jewish integration into the German-speaking Prague bourgeoisie. Indeed, the father's principled stand against the tradition whereby Germans ignored the Czech environment is particularly noteworthy, as is his consistent aspiration to raise his children in the spirit of receptiveness toward the national Czech culture, of which we learn from the son's memoirs. Through the father's personal story of his sudden realization “that there indeed does exist another people in Prague that also has a high culture and great ability,” a story not devoid of self-irony, the young Brod learned how the ephemeral sense of German cultural superiority had gradually eroded already in his father's generation among considerable parts of the city's Jewish population.Footnote ⁶⁶ In light of his father's early awakening from the blindness toward Czech national existence that was still prevalent among a great many ethnic Germans and Jews brought up on Deutschtum in Prague, it is not surprising that, unlike many of his primary school friends, the young Max was not sent to the German Altstädte high school but to the German high school on Stephan Street. In his autobiography, Brod noted obscurely that these were “two different high schools … two worlds far apart, with no contact between them.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, it suffices to look at the composition of the pupils in Brod's class according to the criterion of their geocultural origin and to compare it to that of the pupils in Bergmann and Kafka's class in the Altstädte; by doing so, we might comprehend the nature of the difference: Approximately one-third of the pupils in Brod's class were born in the Czech-speaking areas outside Prague, compared to one-sixth in the class of Kafka and Bergmann.Footnote ⁶⁸

Once he had taken an independent stand and developed into one of the most productive and acclaimed writers in Prague's German literary arena, Brod openly placed himself on the same collision course with the consciousness of German cultural hegemony in Bohemia that had been staked out by his father and the sociocultural and multinational environment in which Brod himself had grown up. A decisive milestone as he made his way along this path, following which Brod, by no coincidence, turned to Zionism, was his short novel Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen (A Czech Housemaid), written in 1909.Footnote ⁶⁹ Basically the story of the love of a young German clerk for a Czech girl of rural origin, this book contains first and foremost a sharp satirical sting directed ostensibly at that selfsame coma of German imperial denial of the presence of a local Czech national-cultural element in Bohemia from which his father Adolf had previously awakened. The central protagonist, a Vienna-born German by the name of William Schurhaft, suffers from a sort of emotional deficiency: Lacking the basic ability to perceive the actual reality around him and to connect to it, he is able only to comprehend the world of abstract concepts. To cure him of this deficiency, his father sends him to Prague because there, according to the father,

And yet, it seems that all this is in vain: William fails to discern in Prague the slightest sign of a second culture, and he does not hear a single word of Czech. He is surrounded only by Germans: “my landlady … is an old German maid … the owner of my office is a German … as are all his clerks … and even the small boy who brings me my meals.”Footnote ⁷¹ It is only when he comes across a young Czech servant girl, with whom he falls in love, that the protagonist is extricated from his isolation in the hermetically sealed German camp. He is then faced with the reality of the existence of another people alongside him, and thus he finds the ability to see the tangible world.

While he sought to emphasize the dimensions of German blindness toward the Czech surroundings, Brod succeeded in giving the reader the impression that his hero is unaware not only of the Czechs' concrete existence, but also of their images in the German cultural and public discourse. Still, once William suddenly “discovers” that the majority of “German” Prague's residents speak Czech, and once he understands the essential demographic and socioeconomic processes that led to the change in Prague's linguistic-cultural profile from the end of the nineteenth century, it becomes apparent to the reader that at the core of his blindness toward the Czech neighbors rests a firm opinion of the nature of the Czech people, which to him and to other Germans is regarded as certain, indisputable knowledge. After hearing from his beloved the story of the economic crisis that beset her village and led to a mass exodus of its inhabitants, some of whom ventured abroad while others turned to the industrialized “German” cities, thereby joining the internal Czech wave of migration toward “German Bohemia” that incessantly undermined its “Germanness,” the protagonist admits that his previous perception of Czechs was unfounded, and thereby reveals to us its main element:

It thus transpires that in the perception of the hero and those who share the illusion of the “Germanic” nature of Prague and Bohemia's industrialized cities (no doubt the same illusion that enabled the members of the “blister” of Kafka's and Bergmann's class to imagine themselves on the banks of the Rhine), a number of well-defined character traits are attributed to the Czech residents of Bohemia. First and foremost, the Czechs constitute, according to this perception, a static population entity of sorts from a sociodemographic point of view, composed of agrarian laborers shackled forever to their rural homeland, somewhere far away from the urban, industrialized, and dynamic “German Bohemia.” From the beginning, the German protagonist thus fails to sense any sign of “Czechness” in Prague,Footnote ⁷³ as he believes that the Czechs have yet to arrive, in both senses, at “the German Prague”—both from a mental point of view, as they maintain deep emotional ties to the countryside and the rural way of life, and consequently from a tangible physical point of view. However, it now becomes apparent to the protagonist of A Czech Housemaid that following “the severe crisis of Czech agriculture”Footnote ⁷⁴—namely, the grave crisis that in the 1880s beset those branches of the Czech food industry linked to agriculture following the steep decline in grain prices that resulted from the rapid development of railways and steamshipsFootnote ⁷⁵—the Czech masses gained an unexpected capacity for impressive demographic mobility, uprooted themselves from their homes in rural areas, which in the German “imagination” had been intended for them for eternity, and laid “siege to the German land.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The Czechs, as the amazed German observer is made well aware, are subject to the same processes that operate in different historical moments among humanity in general. Like the Germans, they feel at home in the city's dynamic and turbulent atmosphere; as do the Germans, they create a variety of cultural artifacts in their language that will serve as an anchor and support as they experience the instability of the city; and, above all, like the Germans, they, too, appear to the German protagonist as a “nation … of many talents and considerable beauty.”Footnote ⁷⁷

This recognition of the Czechs' nationhood leads Brod's hero, for the first time, to an awareness of the power of the national dispute between them and the Germans, and to recoil from “the struggle for existence” that is waged “with bitterness and fury.”Footnote ⁷⁸ And yet, at the same time, it becomes ever clearer to him that without this recognition of the Czechs' national existence, and all the more so of Prague and Bohemia's binational character, it will be impossible to build a bridge between the opposing camps. Without harboring any illusions as to the hope of ever bringing all the antagonism and power struggles between Czechs and Germans to an end, he thinks that it would be possible to control the conflict, reduce the friction and tensions, and wage “a softer, more moderate … war,” if only the other Germans would recognize, as he does, that “there are many children in the land, and the German lands … are partitioned in an inequitable manner.”Footnote ⁷⁹

As related in Brod's autobiography, A Czech Housemaid constituted the first link in the chain of circumstances that culminated in his joining the circle of Bar Kochbaite Zionists. Leo Hermann, then chairman of the Bar Kochba Association and one of Hugo Bergmann's most prominent followers, published a critique of the novel in the Prague Selbstwehr and in the Brno/Brünn Jüdisches Volksstimme, in which he disagreed with the author on the issue of the relations between the nationalities in Prague.Footnote ⁸⁰ This critique considerably angered Brod, who took issue in particular with what he saw as the critic's simplistic attempt to attribute to him the view that intimate contact could serve as a model of sorts for the solution of the Czech–German conflict in Bohemia. Brod initiated a meeting with Hermann to clarify matters, which he described as protracted and tempestuous, and following which he began to move ever closer to Prague Zionism.

Upon reading Hermann's critique, which turned out to be more favorable than the way it was presented in Brod's autobiography, one finds sharply discerned insights with regard to the novel's subversive dimension and the process of the author's repositioning within Bohemia's multinational arena. Hermann found in A Czech Housemaid first and foremost a commendable expression of the author's own contempt for “the faithful students of the Jewish-German clique of journalists” (getreuer Schüler der israelitisch-deutschen Journalistenclique), who presented themselves as the primary guardians of “Germanness” against “Czechness,” thereby further inflaming the passions of those involved in the national conflict. But in seeking “the basis for understanding” (Verständigungsbasis) between Germans and Czechs, Brod, in Hermann's opinion, stopped halfway. A Jew writing in German in Prague, whose protagonist undermined the position typical of the Prague German Jewish elite and sought a solution to the national problem in Prague that concerned above all ordinary Jews, nevertheless failed even to mention the Jews in his novel. But it is impossible, according to Hermann, to speak of Deutschtum in Prague, and certainly not of ordering the relations between the nationalities in Prague, without considering the conduct of the local Jewish component. Because he ultimately chose not to confront the local national-cultural reality in all its complexity, Brod was content to provide a rather imaginary literary solution to the Prague national conflict (the feeling of love transcending the boundaries between the nationalities), the validity of which in Prague's polarized reality was questionable. On the other hand, Hermann hinted, there certainly were circles among Prague Jewry, to which the critic himself belonged, that were promoting a more effective approach toward the local problem of nationalities. And perhaps the author, who had already taken his first essential step toward a new perception of the local scene when he took issue with the support provided by Jewish power to Prague's “Germanness,” would eventually formulate the foundation for a bridge between Prague's nationalities rather more stable than the hotel bed on which the novel's protagonists were united.Footnote ⁸¹

Hermann thus saw in Brod's short novel the work of a Zionist in the making, to the extent that the author approached the salient points of the same basic view of the complexity of Prague's national-cultural existence that had guided the path of Bar Kochbaite Zionism since the days of Bergmann's leadership. Because Brod had resolutely rejected the Germanocentric representation of Bohemia as affiliated with a hegemonic, imperial meta-entity, while pointing out its bicultural and binational character, all that was left for him to do in order to complete his personal subversion of the discourse of denial of Bohemia's cultural and national diversity was, in Hermann's implied opinion, to recognize the Jews' own national existence as an additional cultural-national entity to those of the Germans and Czechs.

In referring to A Czech Housemaid, Spector claimed, with some justification, that in Brod's description of the relations between “Germanness” and “Czechness” in dichotomous gender-based terms of a “Western,” cerebral, and emotionally and spiritually mature German man against an “Eastern,” “primitive,” “childish,” and unstable Czech woman, there was an echo of the contemporary German–Bohemian gender and nationality discourse. And yet, faithful to the representation of the German-writing Jewish intellectuals of Kafka's Prague as a German Jewish “island” somewhat cut off from the concrete sociocultural reality of their environment, Spector appears to have gone too far in regarding A Czech Housemaid above all as a sort of German Jewish colonialist fantasy expressed in Orientalist and gendered language. In his words, “It is the first source to look for a clue to the morass of issues of desire and patronization, longing and disdain, in the Germano-Jewish gaze to the East.”Footnote ⁸² As the daily lives of Brod and his family were far from being led within a Germanocentric circle isolated from the influences of the local national environment, his little novel reflected first and foremost the peak of the author's own search for alternative channels of identification to that of the Germanocentric imperial one, modes that would be compatible with the picture of Prague's multinational world that had already revealed itself to his father Adolf many years before it was expressed by the protagonist of A Czech Housemaid. Brod, then, found this channel in the Zionism of Bergmann and Bar Kochba, which saw in the balancing of the Jews' German educational-cultural affiliation with a deepened receptiveness toward the Czech majority an existential need for their national future, and also sought to shape the ideological dimension of Bohemian Jewish nationalism as a position from which to engage in dialogue with the local national movement.Footnote ⁸³

As in the case of Spector's analysis of A Czech Housemaid, it is likewise extremely difficult to accept his Germanocentric interpretative tendency with regard to the way in which he reads Kafka's “Jackals and Arabs.” Insofar as one can see the jackals–European traveler–Arabs triangle as an encoding of Kafka's Bar Kochbaite friends' view of local Prague reality (and in contrast to Spector's interpretation), it would appear that the jackals, longing for the voice of European reason in the face of the Arabs' “filth,” rather than representing the Czechs, in fact denote the “German” Jews of Prague, “the foremost guardians of Germanness” against Czechness, according to Leo Herrmann, whose persistence in ignoring the national-cultural existence of the Czechs and whose part in fanning the flames of the Czech–German conflict the Bar Kochba Zionists strongly criticized; the European traveler, who would not tarry for long in the region, does not represent Prague's German Jews, but rather the imperial Austro-German establishment on which these Jews pinned their hopes, and the erosion of whose hegemony in Bohemia “Kafka's” Zionists had well discerned; and the proud and upright Arabs, for their part, who scorned the jackals for continuing to adhere to their baseless belief in Arab inferiority, rather than representing the Germans, in fact represent the Czechs, whose national pride had for some time been recognized by Bergmann, Brod, and, one may assume, by Kafka himself.

III. “Jackals and Arabs” between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine

As far as the approaches of Prague Zionism to the question of Arab–Jewish relations in Palestine are concerned, scholars of Zionism and the Arab–Zionist conflict have not failed to discern the firm stand taken by the former Bar Kochba leaders on this issue during the period of the British mandate, at a time when Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, and Robert Weltsch became known as the Zionist movement's most consistent spokesmen for the idea of an Arab–Jewish binational state.Footnote ⁸⁴ And yet, neither these historians nor the students of the Zionist movement in Habsburg Prague have considered the early voice of Bar Kochba Zionism prior to the First World War on this matter. It was none other than Bergmann, who, in 1911, about a year after his return from a visit to Palestine (August–September 1910), presented his “Notes on the Arab Question” in the Viennese Zionist journal Palästina.Footnote ⁸⁵ In this article, Bergmann leveled trenchant criticism at the Zionist policy of ignoring the needs of the Arab residents of the country, both with respect to the accelerated purchase of land and the separate management of the economy, and above all at what seemed to him the Zionist settlers' palpable blindness toward the very fact of the existence of Arabs in Palestine. In truth, there was nothing new in the actual criticism of the modes of Zionist settlement and of the immigrants' dismissive attitude toward the natives. Yitzhak Epstein (1862–1943), one of the pioneers of the teaching of the Hebrew language in the Yishuv, had already castigated these phenomena in 1907 in his famous article “She'ela ne'elma” (Hidden Question).Footnote ⁸⁶ As a veteran of the Jewish Yishuv, rather than as a visitor from abroad, he leveled wide-ranging and serious accusations against his Zionist associates for neglecting the question of the relations with the majority population of the country, a problem that encapsulated, in his opinion, the seeds of future calamity. And yet, precisely against the backdrop of Epstein's “Hidden Question,” to which Bergmann's article was, to a certain extent, written as a response, one can appreciate the special point of view on the Arab–Jewish question of the visitor from Czech–German–Jewish Prague.Footnote ⁸⁷

In referring to the question of the national awareness of the Arabs of Palestine, Epstein categorically concluded that “In Palestine there is as yet no Arab movement in the national sense … of this concept.”Footnote ⁸⁸ He emphasized how great were the extent and depth of the ties that the local Arabs felt toward their homeland, in which their fathers and forefathers had lived for “twenty jubilees.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Yet he was first and foremost alluding to the “natural” ties of the Arab peasants to the property on which they had worked for generations, and to the primordial bond of traditional Arab society to the graves of their ancestors.Footnote ⁹⁰ As described by Epstein, Arab society of Palestine thus takes the form of a somewhat static and petrified entity, the diametric opposite of European societies that had undergone processes of modernization, and also of the society of the Zionist settlers who hailed from these places.

Indeed, Bergmann likewise pointed out that Palestinian Arab society was on the whole a premodern peasant society. At the same time, however, he identified modernization processes occurring within it that had not been noticed by the Zionists, and he sought to bring to the fore in particular the dimension of potential power contained within these processes, even if these were but the initial trappings of modernization. He utterly rejected the perception that was prevalent among broad Zionist circles, according to which Jewish settlement in the country, and it alone, could lay the foundations of modern life in the region. What Bergmann discerned was that phenomena identified with modernization, such as industrialization and the development of trade and infrastructure, had already begun among Palestine's local population, and were in fact gathering considerable momentum, even if this was not yet sufficient to provide employment for the working class in the making.Footnote ⁹¹ Moreover, in contrast to Epstein's assertion that “the Muslim will not leave his country, will not wander afar,” because “the lower a man's level of development and the narrower his field of vision, the stronger the ties that bind him to his country and his region and the harder it is for him to leave his village and his field,” Bergmann actually emphasized that the Arab population of Palestine and the adjacent territories had in fact lately been in a state of constant demographic movement.Footnote ⁹² He thus clearly discerned the flow of Arab migration from the area of Lebanon to the Galilee, which he claimed had gained momentum in recent years. There was also the phenomenon of Arab migration to the United States, but when they had succeeded in saving the desired sum abroad, Bergmann noted, many of them returned to their homeland in the Middle East, purchased land in the Lebanon area and the Galilee, and in many cases eventually chose to return and lay down roots in northern Palestine.Footnote ⁹³ This is precisely the context within which Bergmann referred to the matter of the Arab residents' awareness of their ties to ihre Heimat.Footnote ⁹⁴ Unlike Epstein, who presented the Arab residents of the country as a collective of primitive workers with an umbilical connection to the land of their ancestors, and whose sights were set only on their ancient customs, which accurately reflected, as it were, the foundations of their present life, Bergmann saw a Palestinian Arab of a different sort, closely resembling a citizen of a modern European nation in the making. Bergmann's Arab—a native of Lebanon or Palestine—is rather exposed to modern life, wandering about the Middle East and even the wide world in search of fresh economic opportunities. At the end of his peregrinations he finds himself in Palestine, and, faced with this dynamic experience, the awareness of his attachment to Palästina is reshaped as a consciousness with an outright national-secular flavor, which collides with the national consciousness of the Zionist settlers.Footnote ⁹⁵

Thus, at so early a stage did the visitor from Prague point out nothing less than the beginnings of the conflict between two local modern nationalisms in Palestine, the Jewish and the Arab. To him, a resolution of this conflict was not impossible, if only the Zionists would adopt a position of open dialogue with the local national environment. As an immediate and concrete means of promoting this position, Bergmann proposed the establishment of a local Zionist newspaper in the Arab language, with the aim of clarifying to the new neighbors the ultimate goal of Zionism, which was, as Bergmann understood it, to create the fabric of Arab–Jewish cooperation in the country, all the while emphasizing both peoples' attachment to Palästina.Footnote ⁹⁶ But the basic prerequisite for the adoption of such a mode of conduct on the part of the Zionists was their recognition of the very foundation of Arab nationalism—embryonic as it might be—in Palestine, and this is the foremost of Bergmann's “Notes on the Arab Question.”

It is perhaps no coincidence that from the end of 1910 on, a few months after the leader of the Bar Kochba circle had visited Palestine and shortly before the appearance of his “Notes on the Arab Question,” the Bar Kochba organ Selbstwehr began to pay increasing attention to the Arab national challenge in Palästina. Up to this time, indeed, there had been virtually no mention of the local Arabs' tangible existence in the weekly's few references to the situation in Palestine. At most, we find intellectual discussions on Muslim influences in Palestinian folktales, and the rare representations of the local population appear only in religious (Christen und Moslems) and anthropological (Beduinen) terms.Footnote ⁹⁷ Now, beginning in December 1910, Selbstwehr began publishing with some regularity the “Palästinanachrichten” column, which for the first time presented the Araber to its readers as a collective entity with national traits and intentions, destined to compete with the Zionist Jewish element in the country. It appears at times as though the anonymous journalist who penned this column was none other than the author of “Notes on the Arab Question” himself. Thus, the weekly paper reported on the accelerating pace of growth of the upper Galilee, while placing particular emphasis on the “tremendous impetus” of the local Arab population. Many of the prosperous Arabs were, according to this report, designing their houses in the European style. Furthermore, numerous peasants were traveling to the United States for several years, and once they had accumulated sufficient funds there for the purchase of a house and land in Palestine, they returned to their homeland. Thus, one could discern the national confrontation between them and the Zionist settlers, who were likewise returning to their homeland.Footnote ⁹⁸ This state of affairs, with its increasing escalation, as Selbstwehr would warn with growing urgency in the course of 1911, compelled the Zionists, as its contributors saw it, to promote the settlement project alongside continuous negotiations with the Arab public and its representatives. Notwithstanding the correspondents' somewhat intuitive sense that the Arab–Jewish national conflict in Palestine would become ever more severe, a situation in which a form of constructive dialogue would develop did not appear to them as an unattainable objective. Selbstwehr saw in the willingness to open up to the language and culture of the local Arab environment an essential immediate step that the Zionists should take toward the inauguration of this dialogue. First, it would be well to promote the teaching of the Arab language in Jewish schools in order to prepare Jewish youngsters for active participation in the written Arab discourse in Palestine, which for the most part displayed a suspicious and hostile tendency toward Zionism.Footnote ⁹⁹ In a similar vein, the paper argued that it was already time to work toward founding a Zionist newspaper in the Arab language.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Like Bergmann, who was to make an identical proposal several months later in his “Notes,” Selbstwehr thus urged the Zionist settlers to take a direct stand, as Zionists writing in the Arab language, in the face of what it perceived as the Arab nationalist discourse in Palestine, in order to attempt to confront it face to face, and thereby nurture channels of bridging and mutual understanding between Zionism and the local Arab nationalism.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Upon reviewing the voice of Bar Kochbaite Zionism on “the Arab question,” it is difficult not to discern a number of similarities between the ways in which Bergmann and Selbstwehr perceived the reality of Palestine and Max Brod's presentation of the state of interethnic relations in contemporary Prague and Bohemia, as revealed to the protagonist of his A Czech Housemaid. In the same way that Brod sought to extricate his German and German–Jewish readers in Bohemia from long-standing blindness to the socioeconomic, political, and demographic changes that had occurred among their Czech neighbors in recent generations, and which had reshaped them as a national political collective evenly matched with the German collective as far as meeting the challenge of modern life was concerned, so, too, did Bergmann and his like-minded colleagues on the Bar Kochba weekly wish to turn the Zionist settlers' attention to the initial budding of such development among the local Arab population. And as Brod's Czechs had no intention of returning to the villages from which they had come, but rather sought to continue residing in the “German” cities while contesting the view of Bohemia's industrialized regions as “German land,” so, too, did Bergmann's and Selbstwehr's Arabs strike roots in the ports of “the Land of Israel,” waging fierce anti-Zionist propaganda in their press while regarding the transfer of the ownership of land from Arab to Jewish hands, even though it was done legally, as the transfer from one national ownership to another and as evidence of the Zionist quest for Jewish national hegemony over the country. And as Brod thought that, in order to promote a solution to the Czech–German conflict at its peak, the German minority must cease to ignore the national existence, material distress, and cultural-spiritual reality of their Czech neighbors, and relinquish the remnants of their political hegemony in Bohemia, so were Bergmann and the Selbstwehr journalists convinced that in order to prevent the outbreak of the Arab–Jewish conflict in Palestine, the Jewish minority had to recognize fully the local ethnonational characteristics of “the Land of Israel,” withdraw from the hegemonic political intention to achieve a Jewish majority in the country, and put a stop to their autarchic economic and cultural deportment while demonstrating a willingness to engage in negotiations with the emerging local nationalism over the possibilities of Arab–Jewish coexistence in a shared land.Footnote ¹⁰² It is interesting to note that the means that Bar Kochbaite Zionism proposed in order to pave the way for dialogue with the Arab nation in the making were very similar to the path that Bergmann and the Bar Kochba leadership urged the Prague community establishment to adopt in relation to the Czech surroundings, namely, acquiring knowledge of the language of a neighboring local nationality. As Bergmann had in 1903 wished for the inclusion of the Czech language in a new curriculum in Prague's Jewish schools, so did Selbstwehr in 1911 propose the teaching of the Arab language in Jewish schools in Palestine.Footnote ¹⁰³

Bergmann's Palestinian Arabs thus resemble Brod's Czechs in that the national existence of both is unrecognized by their neighbors, who became exposed to the trends of modernization at an earlier stage; Bergmann's Zionist settlers thus closely resemble Brod's Germans, and, in fact, also the Jewish proponents of German hegemony in Bohemia, against whom Bergmann himself had railed when still chairman of Bar Kochba in the years 1903–1904. We have, indeed, no way of establishing conclusively whether Bergmann was influenced by the novel of one of his close friends when he wrote his “Notes on the Arab Question.” It can, at most, be determined that the “Arab question” was discussed by Bergmann and Brod between the end of 1915 and early 1916 in the correspondence between them, but this provides no clue to the dual comparison between Bohemian Germans/German Jews and Zionist settlers on the one hand, and between the Czechs and Arabs on the other.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And yet, Bergmann explicitly used this precise comparison as late as 1921, when he sought to illustrate to his former Bar Kochba colleague Robert Weltsch the dimensions of Jewish ignorance of the existence of the Palestinian Arabs as an entity with a genuine national-political awareness: “We are blind to the Arabs, precisely as we in Bohemia were blind to the Czechs, and only saw Vienna and the Germans.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Needless to say, despite his use of the first-person plural (“we … were blind to the Czechs”), Bergmann was not referring to himself, nor to his friends in the Bar Kochba Association. For, as we remember, their Zionist activity in the Bohemian arena—and that of Bergmann himself first and foremost—was motivated largely by a wish to balance their ties to imperial German culture with a sociocultural affiliation to the local Czech national environment. He was surely referring to all those Jewish defenders of German cultural-political hegemony in Bohemia and Moravia, who were wont to ignore the importance of a local sociocultural and political element in the form of Czech nationalism, and turned their backs on the language and culture of a local neighboring population in favor of adherence to imperial cultural-political ties. The central elements of the Zionist movement in Palestine were thus, in Bergmann's assessment, suffering from the same type of blindness toward the increasingly nationalist tendencies among the local population, while turning their gaze to the capital of the British Empire, thereby closely resembling the Viennese political orientation on the part of many among the Jews of Bohemia and Prague at the end of the Habsburg era.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

It is difficult to assume that a comparison of this kind between the attitude of Jewish settlers toward the nascent Arab Palestinian nationalism and that of the Germanocentric Prague Jews toward the Czech national movement at the height of its development had not occurred to Bergmann already in 1911, when he first observed the ways of the Zionist settlement in Palestine and the reactions of the local Arabs to them. For, at the time of making his critical voice heard in “Notes on the Arab Question,” the example of the Czech–German–Jewish triangle appeared before his eyes as part of his life experience, rather than as a past memory, as in 1921, about one year after his immigration to Palestine. But even had this not been the case, one may at least determine that the authors of “Notes on the Arab Question” and A Czech Housemaid, whose Jewish national awareness was shaped while they were questioning the logic of the imperial Austro-German hegemony and upon the repositioning in the Bohemian multinational arena alongside the Czech nationality, followed occurrences in Palestine and in Bohemia, respectively, from the same viewpoint, as it were, that enabled them to identify in the local environment more than one national trend, and motivated them to seek ways of bridging the neighboring nationalities.

This somewhat peripheral viewpoint, located ostensibly at the margins of the “imperial” and at the center of the “local,” and which thus focuses the spotlight on the totality of national-cultural forces operating in the local space, rather than on the unnuanced imperial image of this space, was evidently shared by the author of “Jackals and Arabs.” Indeed, to the extent that one can regard Kafka's jackals–European traveler–Arabs triangulation as a parable in the spirit of the Bar Kochbaite perception of the relations among the Jewish adherents of Deutschtum in Prague, the imperial Germanocentric Habsburg establishment, and the local Czech national environment, one can also discern in it Bar Kochba Zionism's clear gaze turned increasingly toward a different Jewish–imperial–local triangle, namely, the one that was emerging in the Middle East. According to this reading, the jackals represent the Zionist settlers in Bergmann's “Notes on the Arab Question,” entrenched in their position of Eurocentric alienation in relation to the local Arab environment; the European traveler represents the European powers pursuing an imperial interest in Palestine and the Middle East, upon whose support political Zionism relied blindly, a dependence compared by Bergmann in his letter to Robert Weltsch to the conduct of the Germanocentric Jews of Habsburg Bohemia; and the Arabs represent the Palestinian Arabs, or at least those elements manifesting a national awareness, on whom Bergmann and Selbstwehr focused their readers' attention. As an aside, someone who would have been likely to support an interpretation of this sort to some degree was none other than Kafka himself. We know that Martin Buber, who upon reading “Jackals and Arabs” and “A Report to an Academy” was very eager to see these two stories appear in his journal, suggested to Kafka that they be published under the common title of Gleichnisse (Parables). Kafka, however, rejected this proposal politely yet firmly: “May I ask you not to call the pieces parables; they are not really parables. If they are to have any overall title at all, the best might be: ‘Two Animal Stories.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In my view, this resistance on Kafka's part, accompanied by an assertion that rejected a priori any sweeping allegorical interpretation of the two stories, tells us that some of the figures he created in them represented no more and no less than themselves, as they existed only in the reality of the author's imagination. And as far as “Jackals and Arabs” is concerned, both the “Arab” and the “European traveler” are precisely this type of figure.

Did Kafka read the “notes” of his classmate in Palästina, a journal of which he had at least one issue in his possession in October 1912, when he offered it to his fiancée Felice Bauer?Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Or was he perhaps exposed to the Arabs' national representation through the Bar Kochba weekly, which he had, one remembers, begun reading regularly in 1911, the same year in which Selbstwehr first drew for its readers the figure of the Palestinian Arab with a striking resemblance to the man of a European nation?Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Or did he even directly hear Bergmann's impressions of the latter's visit to Palestine, as we are, after all, speaking of two long-standing childhood friends? It is reasonable to assume that it was not deliberation over these questions that prevented Western scholars from reading Kafka's “Arab” literally, but rather the author's description of the Arab as “white,” and also as upright—not only regarding his carriage, but also in relation to his self-perception and self-confidence. On the strength of this description, no doubt, those scholars who addressed the specific identification of Kafka's “Arab” saw him as an unmistakable European: Tismar and Robertson assumed that this was a general representation of “Western” non-Jews, while Spector was more specific in recognizing an allusion to the “potent and proud” Prague Germans.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Yet the Palestinian Arab, to whose actual existence—and even more so, to whose potential existence in the foreseeable future—Bergmann and Selbstwehr alerted their readers, had, in truth, a “European” appearance, at least with regard to the national-modern outline of his physiognomy.

Kafka's Arab is thus also like this—a man well aware of his people's vital interests, who has no difficulty exposing the crafty scheme of his jackal neighbors to persuade hesitant European elements to harm these interests. This kind of representation of the Arab, which considerably added to the significance of the image of the Palestinian Arab presented by Kafka's close friend and by the Prague Zionist weekly that he regularly read, was diametrically opposed to the approach toward “the Arab question” shared by British diplomats and the leaders of political Zionism, who, in the period of the “Great War,” completely ignored the existence of the Arabs as an element of any political weight in the country.Footnote ¹¹¹ It is superfluous to note that this approach, which found its most prominent expression in Chaim Weizmann's view that the Arab residents of Palestine were at least four hundred years behind the Zionists in their self-awareness, was baseless.Footnote ¹¹² There is broad agreement among the historians who have studied the political trends in the Arab society of Palestine on the eve of the First World War that, notwithstanding the lack of an Arab Palestinian national movement in the organizational-political sense, the apprehension over Zionist policy among the strata of educated urban Arabs (the Ayaan) began in those days to take on an outright national-political dimension.Footnote ¹¹³ While the strata among which such developments occurred were indeed extremely thin, Kafka observed them, as a matter of course, primarily through the magnifying glass of Bergmann's “Notes on the Arab Question” and of the “Palästinanachrichten” column in Selbstwehr, while adding to what he saw by employing his literary skills. In other words, while he was, in truth, looking only at the initial outlines of the figure of a politically upright Arab, Kafka had in fact discerned the entire portrait, and thus created the impression of a somewhat anachronistic picture, ahead of its time. Faced with the tendency of the leaders of political Zionism to deny that processes comparable to those occurring in Europe may also evolve in the local Arab Palestinian environment, and consequently their strategic diplomatic tendency to pin their political hopes on casual European visitors, a rather ominous scenario took shape in Kafka's perception: The jackals fail to convince the man “from the North” of the inferiority of the Arabs, and the most that the European is prepared to do is to take hold of the Arab's arm to prevent him from flaying them with his whip.Footnote ¹¹⁴ But it is even worse than this: The visitor from Europe, who, according to the jackals, has “the kind of intelligence that is not to be found among Arabs,” “[is] making only a short tour of [the jackals' and Arabs'] country,”Footnote ¹¹⁵ while it is the Arabs who, it turns out, are no less intelligent than he, will remain forever, and will continue to constitute a permanent challenge to the jackals' existence.