The Trial - Franz Kafka....................................Diego Vicentini - Scott Kossman - Jonathan Jordan
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Kafka's Judaism
Kafka was born and raised as a Jew and he remained Jewish for the entirety of his life. The majority of Kafka's friends were Jewish and all of his girlfriends except a select few were all Jewish. In Prague, where Kafka grew up, there was a lot of antisemitism. The Jews were distrusted in Bohemia so stereotypes for the Jews were created. They were regarded as conniving, shifty, cheap, and physically weak. In 1899 in Prague, there were anti-semitic riots where many shops owned by Jews were wiped out. Kafka's father owned a shop but was able to avoid having his shop ruined by anti-Semites because he registered his family as Czech nationals. I would imagine that Kafka grew up living in fear because he was Jewish In his literature, Jews are regarded as hard-working people that face great dangers that they manage to overcome.
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I knew that Kafka was born to jewish parents but i thought that he had mixed feelings about Judaism. That is until he met his last girlfriend who was an orthodox jew. This caused him to go so far as to learn to not speak the hebrew. Most jews could recite prayers, and read and write but not many can speak the language. Also it is ironic that at the end of his life he became almost obsessed with the Jewish religion and then twenty years later his sisters died in a riot in a Jewish ghetto.
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