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  • Kafka wept
  • Sander L. Gilman (bio)

1. Ritual Murder

On 28 October 1916 Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer:

The other day I’ve read “Ritual Murder in Hungary” by Zweig; its supernatural scenes are as feeble as I would have expected from what I know of Zweig’s work. The terrestrial scenes on the other hand are intensely alive, taken no doubt from the excellent records of the case. Nevertheless, one cannot quite distinguish between the two worlds; he has identified himself with the case and is now under its spell. I no longer see him the way I used to. At one point I had to stop reading, sit down on the sofa and weep aloud. It’s years since I wept. 1

What is striking are Kafka’s tears. What about this drama evoked the tears which he had not shed for years? It was not the “reality” of the blood libel trial, for there were a number of such trials about which Kafka knew and which did not move him to tears. 2 It is the literary restructuring of the realities inherent in the trial that made Kafka weep—its form now not a reflex of the world but a construction of the author. Kafka’s comments and his tears flow from his reading of Arnold Zweig’s play, at the center of which stands the representation of the contemporary complexities of male Jewish identity at the turn of the century.

At the turn of the century the categories of race, illness, and gender were organizing principles of the construction of the fictions of the world. Race, illness, and gender are not ahistorical principles of psychic organization, but rather the historical articulation of deeper psychic categories. It was impossible to think about race at the fin de siècle without evoking gender and illness/health, impos-sible to speak of gender without the other two categories being [End Page 17] present, and just as impossible to evoke the ill or healthy body without discourses of race and gender being present. As Kafka states in a letter to his friend, the Jewish, tubercular physician Robert Klopstock in April 1922, “A Jew, and a German besides, and sick besides, and in difficult personal circumstances besides—those are the chemical forces with which I propose to straight-away transmute gold into gravel or your letter into mine, and while doing so remain in the right.” 3 From all of these categories of difference—race, gender, and illness—both those consciously present and those implied, Kafka makes his world of words. Whether that world is gold transmuted into gravel, as Kafka ironically comments, is an aesthetic judgment; it certainly is a world that has gripped our fantasies for at least the past fifty years.

Zweig’s play is about the myth of blood libel. This charge, lodged again against Jews at the turn of the century, linked notions of race, gender, and illness. All of these questions were implicit in the play by Zweig that fascinated Kafka, and, as we shall see, were also important in contemporary debates about orthodox Jewish ritual practices, particularly those that treated the question of shechita, or ritual slaughter. Fantasies about Jews engaging in ritual murder are linked to the meanings associated with the reality of ritual slaughter at the turn of the century. Interlocking discourses of murder and ritual slaughter are present in the world of literary representation as well as in the rhetoric of the blood libel accusations of the time.

The late nineteenth century saw the resurgence of the accusation of medieval blood libel lodged against Jews. The charge, until that point, had been uniform: Jews killed Christian children for the vital ingredient of blood, the story went, in the production of the unleavened bread used by Jews during Passover. This blood, it was argued, served as a cure for the Jews’ diseases, especially those associated with their own bleeding, such as the menstruation of the males, or by extension phthisis, pulmonary tuberculosis. (Here Kafka’s understanding of his own tuberculosis, which appeared in 1917, incorporated existing images of the relationship between Jews and tuberculosis.) Thus the traditional image of the Jew within...

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