In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h A P t e r 5 Open Boundaries The Castle and the Origins of Modern Hebrew Bailiff: an official surveyor, who fixes the boundary lines of the different owners, and thus may increase or limit one’s property. —Rashi’s commentary, Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 98b Kafka’s messianic concern with modern Hebrew in The Castle was first noticed by Evelyn Torton Beck in Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (1971). The would-be occupation of K. as “land surveyor,” or “Landvermesser” in German, she observes , also points us to the Hebrew term for “surveyor,” lacking only a single letter to become the Hebrew word mashiakh, or “messiah,” a form of Hebrew wordplay hinted at in the Talmudic commentary by Rashi cited above.1 Such is the warning about his Jewish sources that Kafka embedded in the German. A “Landvermesser,” or “land measurer” in the literal sense, would indeed be “vermessen ,” or “foolhardy,” as Erich Heller points out, since the verb vermessen means “to survey” or in hubris “to take the wrong measure,” in the sense of “sich vermessen”—certainly the case if the standard modern Hebrew dictionary is surveyed as the singular meaning of Kafka’s text.2 In the Hebrew that Kafka textured into The Castle, a sense of Jewish tradition and its diverse linguistic texture and sources are allied. The three-letter Hebrew root that means “to anoint with oil,” “M-SH-KH” (‫ח‬-‫ש‬-‫)מ‬, and produces the word for “messiah” (‫)מש’ח‬ also produced the Aramaic-Hebrew word for “land surveyor” that is one letter apart (‫)משוח‬, suggesting the playful differences from which linguistic traditions are formed. Adding one letter to the end produces “mashikha” (‫)משיחה‬, or the noun for “land surveying” in the Even-Shoshan Hebrew Dictionary, that Grimm Dictionary of the modern Hebrew tongue.3 This Hebrew “Wortspiel,” Open Boundaries 171 or “play on words,” as Kafka used the word in his diary entry of October 29, 1911, on the Talmud’s most famous passage on interpretation, “Pardes” in Hagiga 14b, thus suggests Hebrew’s many meanings to be one of the keys to Kafka’s German, in the comic sense that his multilingual playfulness also means that tradition can have no single key.4 The multiple meanings of modern Hebrew in The Castle helped Kafka break the “lock,” or “Schloß,” of his imagination of tradition in this final novel, as the humorous use of Jewish mysticism so prevalent in The Trial turns to questions of Zionism in a linguistic sense. Compared to his love of Yiddish, of course, Kafka’s diaries and letters give almost no sense of his devotion to the modern Hebrew language, and he wrote “not one word about Hebrew writers and intellectuals, whose work had been translated into German,” though he did comment on Bialik and Y. H. Brenner, coding his approach to cultural Zionism into his texts, as Iris Bruce has shown.5 Kafka “shied away from any ideological agenda” and was dryly comic in his famous evaluation of the “Jews.” The nationalism that left him cold made him love a Hebrew that, as it drew from different sources in its renaissance, exposed the comedy of establishing a single origin for any language or individual.6 “What have I in common with the Jews,” as Kafka once emphasized the differences that constitute nations as well as individuals ; “I have hardly anything in common with myself.”7 In late 1921 the arrival in Prague of Puah Ben-Tovim, “among the first of the new generation” in Jerusalem “to grow up with Hebrew as her native tongue,” provided Kafka with invaluable information on the modern Hebrew he had been working away at since 1917.8 Ben-Tovim was the daughter of Zalman Ben-Tovim, a “Hebraist in his own right who happened to be [Eliezer] Ben-Yehuda’s neighbor”; Ben-Yehuda was the legendary “father of modern Hebrew” who helped to coin much of its new vocabulary. “As one of his pupils,” Puah Ben-Tovim was aware of just how many foreign sources Ben-Yehuda and his cohort were drawing upon to re-create Hebrew as a modern language, such as the German Bahnhof (literally “court of the train”), which through Hebrew loan translation becomes Beit Takhanot, or “house of the stations,” Hebrew for what in English is known as the “railway station.”9 As Mordechai Georg (Jìri) Langer reports, Kafka took comic pleasure in such coinages when he spoke Hebrew in Prague.10 The implicit humor of the transnational sources of the reborn national...

Share