Die Nacht ist eine höher Dimension in der Reihe der Zeiten; ich glaube, Religion ist eine Wirkung der Nacht.-Hatvani, Salto Mortale 69 The Wiener Moderne produced a variety of writers, artists, and philosophers, of whom Paul Hatvani (born Paul Hirsch, 1892-1975) was one of the lesser known. This Austrian-Jewish figure was a sort of Alleskönner in Viennese literary circles during the turmoil of the 1910s and 1920s. Even though he was simultaneously an author, journalist, and theorist as well as a literary and theater critic, Hatvani's oeuvre is fragmentary and eclectic. Stylistically, he favored brief pamphlet-like texts, typical of the germanophone avant-garde at the time, over lengthy, meticulous reflections. Hatvani was acclaimed by his peers and contemporaries, but after the Nazis' rise to power and his eventual emigration to Australia in 1939, his works went unnoticed apart from the few texts that are commonly included in anthologies on expressionism. Moreover, the fragmentary nature of his Nachlaß from the early 1910s and the interwar period has only added to the lack of attention his works have received over the decades, even though the historical avant-garde is currently undergoing a reevaluation from various theoretical viewpoints. A plausible reason for this oversight may well be the very scattered and unsystematic character of Hatvani's thinking: his texts are elliptic and associative. Moreover, his cosmology consists of varied elements, many of which are exclusive to the artist-poet, in a way that gives rise to a modern variant of mysticism. An overarching view of his theories reveals that regardless of his involvement in the avant-garde, he adopted elements from traditional Judaism as well as from Jewish mysticism-the Kabbalah-such as conceptions related to God. The most noteworthy features in Hatvani's thinking are his ideas concerning the relation between language and religion, which are radically unconventional and are expressed through a language-critical attitude. Hatvani transgressed not only the language philosophy of his time but also dogmatic religion. This article focuses on Hatvani's particular version of Sprachkritik and addresses its relation to Jewish culture and mysticism in general as well as to gender dimorphism in kabbalistic theosophy in particular. 1 In what follows, I will examine Hatvani's literary and