Kafka and Judaism
Kafka and Judaism. ” I was not brought into life by the heavy down-sinking hand of Christianity like Kierkegaard was, and I have not caught the remotest tab of the prayer mantle, floating away, like the Zionists have. I am the end or the beginning. ” ( Franz Kafka ) [1] The family Kafka was not religiously strictly practicing Jews. It was a divided family: the father was the Western Jew, secular, "Viertagejude" – i.e., he visited the synagogue the required four times per year - while his mother came from a Eastern Jewish sphere with more traditional Jewish values, which never became predominant. They were simply mainly bourgeois. Kafka had experienced - if not in person - the persecution and harassment of Jews in Prague. He could see from a window rioting directed against the Jews could read about lawsuits against people who murdered Jews. Comrades to him, like Oscar Baum, were beaten up in the str...