"Pois nós somos como troncos de árvores na neve. Temos a impressão de que assentam sobre ela, e que com um pequeno empurrão seríamos capazes de os deslocar. Não, não somos capazes, porque eles estão firmemente presos à terra. Mas - quem diria? - até isso é ilusório."
Franz Kafka, Parábolas e Fragmentos, p. 49.
"Chegaras tão longe à tua própria custa, e por isso tinhas essa confiança sem limites nas tuas opiniões. Em criança não ficava tão fascinado com isso como quando comecei a entrar na adolescência. Tu governavas o mundo a partir da tua poltrona. A tua opinião era a única correcta, todas as outras eram absurdas, exageradas, bizarras, anormais. E a confiança que tinhas em ti era tão grande quem nem sequer precisavas de ser coerente, mas nunca deixavas de ter razão. Acontecia até não teres opinião sobre um assunto, e consequentemente considerares liminarmente falsas todas as opiniões possíveis sobre ele. Eras capaz de dizer mal dos Checos, depois dos Alemães e depois dos Judeus, não escolhendo este ou aquele aspecto, mas todos, de tal modo que por fim não restava ninguém a não seres tu. Vejo em ti o enigma próprio de todos os tiranos, cuja razão se fundamente na sua pessoa, e não no pensamento. Pelo menos, foi o que me pareceu."
"In Western Europe, anti-Semitism was generally thought to be most virulent in France. For nearly a century, French jews had enjoyed the libertarian legacy of the 1789 revolution. In the mid-1890s, however, republican France was suddenly infected with the racial hatred generated by the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew on the general staff of the french army. Dreyfus, a wealthy Alsatian, was accused of spying on behalf of Germany and in 1894 was tried for treason. The eponymous affair institutionalized anti-Semitism in France in a manner thought unlikely in Germany. A cabal od soldiers, clericalists, aristocrats, politicians, frustrated monarchists, and pseudoscientific savants (...) agitated against Dreyfus and the community to which he belonged. Outside the courtroom where he was tried, the mob growled, "Death to the Jews". In the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, where he was publicly stripped of his rank before being incarcerated on Devil's Island in French Guiana, he continued to proclaim his innocence. Most French Jews were cowed and passive. (...).
The Dreyfus Affair convulsed France for more than a decade. The growing evidence that Dreyfus had been convicted on trumped-up charges seemed to poison the atmosphere even more: Jews were accused of being a pro-German fifth column, responsible for France's defeat in the war of 1870. (...) Public disorder reached such a pitch that for a while it looked as if the army would rise up against the government to prevent a retrial and put an end to the republic. The violent upheavel reconfirmed German Jews, in their patriotic fervor. They considered themselves lucky to live in an orderly country under a relatively benign regime."
"At the turn of the century, a young philosopher, a graduate of the University of Vienna equally at home in German letters and traditional Eastern European Jewish folk culture, suggested an alternative response to the "Jewish question", neither conversion nor traditional separatism but rather a conscious embrace of Jewish history as part of one's German culture. The young man, Martin Buber, postulated nothing less than a "renaissance" of Jewish secular and literary identity through folktale amd myth. Buber introduced Hasidism - a conterculture of pietistic and ecstatic mysticism outside "official" Judaism, widespread since the eighteenth century in Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine - to enlightened Jewish and non-Jewish germans, popularizing it as no one in the West had done before. Hasidism resembled other Eastern European traditions of ecstasy and worship of charismatic, miracle-working saints. Although Hasidism's "wonder rabbis" were often not learned Talmudic scholars, they were widely regarded to be men of great wisdom and experience, linked to the divine through mystic contemplation: some were also healers, working with magic formulas, amulets, and spells. Their concern for the poor and downtrodden attracted thousands to their "courts" to be cured or uplifted through communion, hearfelt prayer, song, and dance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hasidism was still alive in Eastern Europe but, like cabala, was overlooked or derogated in the West as mere superstition and primitive belief. A story was told of the great German Jewish bibliphile Moritz Steinschneider, the father of modern Jewish bibliography. One day as he was proudly showing a young scholar through his vast library, the visitor pointed to a room full of obscure Hebrew texts on Hasidism and remarked, awestruck: "And you Herr Professor, have studied them all!" "Certainly not, young man," Steinschneider responded. "You don't expect me to read that nonsense."It was just such emphatic insistence on dry rationalism that Buber opposed, hailing instead the creative "lefe-giving" force of Hasidism. (...)In trying to bridge the old gulf between German and East European Jews, Buber hoped to expand and enrich the possibilities of German Jewish identity. His vivid and colorful interpretation of Hasidic tales and homilies appealed all the more young Germans - Jews and Gentilles - as it coincided with an upsurge in Germany of interest in spirituality and the "exotic" cultures of Asia and Africa. Buber called on secular young German Jews to seek, as he put it, a genuine Erlebnis - an "inner experience" - of the popular "soul" of Judaism, a Judaism beyond the restrictions and injunctions of Talmudic law, which most German Jews, including Buber, no longer observed. Though ridiculed by some as a pretentious neo-Romantic affectation, his message was taken up by a new generation.Hasidism came to be hailed (especially be secular Jews) as a vital force, more genuine and robust than fossilized orthodoxy or secularized reform. After watching a troupe of Yiddish actors perform in Prague's café Savoy, Kafka concluded that here was a genuine folk spirit, warmer and more humane than the stiffness and self-denial of Western Jews. "
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"The most famous salon and probably the liveliest and most influencial, however, was lauched in 1791 by Rahel Levin, an unmarried twenty-year-old. (...)The poet Jean Paul wrote that scholars, Jews, officers, Prussian bureaucrats, noblemen, and all others who elsewhere "were at one another's throats" contrived to be "friendly at [Rahel Levin's] tea table." Even Goethe paid a visit. (...)Rahel - she was widely known by her given name alone - was an early feminist, a willfully independent woman who set out to build her life on her own terms. She had many lovers, some of whom, like Friedrich von gentz, remained enchanted with her into old age. (...)More than just a renowned socialite, Rahel was also the most important German woman of letters of the nineteenth century; Gentz called her the very first Romantic. Entirely self-taught, she left no conventional oeuvre but was an astonishingly prolific letter writer. Intensely personal and introspective, her correspondence (more than six thousand letters survive of an estimated ten thousand) reveals her impatience with the superficialities and hypocrisies of the elegant world in which she lived. She had a rare ability to portray herself with utmost sincerity; it was said that her heart's blood was contained in every envelope she posted. Since her handwriting was difficult to read, her friends had her letters copied so they could pass them around. the letters touch on all aspects of literature and art; remarkably, politics and the extraordinary historical events of her lifetime (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars) are rarely ever mentioned. The cult of Innerlichkeit (intense introspection) so dear to the Romantics predominates.A thoroughly assimilated Jew, Rahel was credited with having inaugurated the so-called symbiosis between Germans and Jews. (...) Rahel was not interested in Jewish reform; she yearned for integration into the German world. She was revolted - the word is not too strong - by her observant relatives. Mendelssohn's version of judaism hardly appealed to her more; it was too dry and sterile in its rationality. She worshiped feeling, not reason. Her religiosity was of the heart and, like that of other romantics, couched in the mystical imagery of christianity; Christ's Passion and the Mother of God. (...)Rahel's rejection went beyond religiosity. She hated her Jewish background and was convinced it had poisoned her life. For much of her adult life she was what would later be called self-hating. (...) And in 1814, after her mother's death, she converted. But her origins continued to haunt her even on her deathbed.Rahel supreme desire was to live life as though it were "a work of art". Such a life demanded a "great love." And indeed, she gave herself to love unreservedly. (...)"
