Plausible Primitives: Kafka and Jewish Primitivism

Abstract

This article analyzes Kafka's works as an exemplar of Jewish primitivism. The eastern European Jew had, from the turn of the century, become increasingly aestheticized and anthropologized, a confluence that bespeaks the concurrent and intertwined development of anthropology and of a modernist fascination with those who were identified as the authentic bearers of culture. Eastern European Jews became subjects for the exploration of ‘authentic’ culture much like South Seas Islanders, with the crucial difference lying in their linguistic, ethnic, religious, and geographic propinquity to the German‐speaking Jews of central Europe; this propinquity created what I term a plausible primitivism, the central defining characteristic of Jewish primitivism. This transferal of the ethnographic object from far away to near at hand offered a new mode of primitivism that privileged the ethnographic encounter over formalist primitivism. As such, it brought primitivist discourses into the center of debates over identity and modernity among German Jews.