THIRTY YEARS AGO, Evelyn Torton Beck broke new ground in studies of Kafka by suggesting that his contact with the Yiddish actors awakened a wide-ranging interest in Judaism that could be traced throughout his life and career. That insight has now become a commonplace. Kafka’s interest in aspects of Judaism, religious and political, has been documented by Marthe Robert, Giuliano Baioni, Karl Erich Grözinger, Hans Dieter Zimmermann, Marina Cavarocchi, myself, and others; the Jewish character of his work has been sensitively studied by Robert Alter; and his personal writings have been assigned by Dieter Lamping to the “Jewish discourse” that develops within twentieth-century literature in German.

It is important, however, to remember how eclectic Kafka was in drawing on religious traditions. The story of Kafka’s estrangement from the Judaism in which he had been nominally brought up, and his rediscovery at least of aspects of Judaism with the help of Max Brod, Georg Langer, and other friends, is by now familiar. But he also read Christian writers: Pascal, Augustine, Tolstoy, and of course Kierkegaard. Christian imagery enters his work more prominently than images drawn from Judaism. A crucial chapter of Der Proceß (The Trial) is set in a cathedral; both Kafka’s other novels mention churches; yet a synagogue is mentioned only in a short fragment (“In der Thamühler Synagoge” [In the Thamühl Synagogue]). On the other hand, Jewish imagery sometimes appears more discreetly. A few months before beginning Der Proceß, Kafka visited Martin Buber in Berlin and asked him about the “unjust judges” in Psalm 82 (Robertson, “Von den ungerechten Richtern”). And Karl Erich Grözinger has pointed out many intriguing similarities between the imagery of the novel and that of the Kabbalah, with its judges and door-keepers, though he has not explained how Kafka knew about the Kabbalah at this stage in his life (Kafka und die Kabbala). It seems that Kafka borrowed images eclectically to express religious concerns that are not esoteric but find many echoes in the religious experience of humankind. He himself wrote, distancing himself both from Christians like Kierkegaard and from inheritors of Judaism like the Zionists, “Ich bin Ende oder Anfang” (NS II 98), “I am the end or the beginning.”