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Zionism, Pan-Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament in the Interwar Writings of Eugen Hoeflich
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2021
Abstract
In the early 1920s, the Viennese writer and journalist Eugen Hoeflich promoted a unique vision of Zionism that aligned Jewish nationalism with a set of anticolonial ideologies collectively known as Pan-Asianism. This article explores the poetic and political strategies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular. I read Hoeflich's turn to Pan-Asianism as an attempt to work through a conceptual problem that theorist Partha Chatterjee calls the “postcolonial predicament.” That is, how might the Jews assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presuppose their inferiority? Hoeflich's vision of Indian-Jewish solidarity constitutes an imaginative effort to de-Europeanize Jewish nationalism and disentangle Zionism from British imperial designs. On a broader level, this study sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed central European Zionists in the interwar era, and points to the discursive continuities that linked Jewish nationalists in Europe to anticolonial thinkers in Asia.
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Footnotes
I delivered an earlier version of this paper in November 2019 at the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für europäisch-jüdische Literaturstudien at RWTH Aachen University. I wish to thank the conference organizers Stephan Braese and Judith Müller for giving me the opportunity to present and discuss my work in that forum. I am also grateful to Koby Oppenheim, Ruthie Wenske-Stern, Amir Engel, and Idit Alphandary for their comments on previous drafts of this article.
References
1. Hoeflich, Eugen, “Panasien,” Der Jude 6, no. 12 (1922): 764Google Scholar. All translations from German and Hebrew are my own unless otherwise noted.
2. The most extensive work on Hoeflich's life and writing has been done by Armin Wallas and Hanan Harif. See Wallas, Armin A., “Ben-Gavriel, Mosche Ya'akov (eigentl. Eugen Hoeflich),” in Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur, ed. Kilcher, Andreas B. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012), 51–53Google Scholar; Wallas, “Nachwort,” in Feuer im Osten / Der rote Mond by Eugen Hoeflich, ed. Armin A. Wallas (Wuppertal: Arco, 2002), 141–64; Wallas, “Nachwort: Eugen Hoeflichs Leben und Werk bis 1927,” in Tagebücher 1915 bis 1927 by Eugen Hoeflich, ed. Armin A. Wallas (Wien: Böhlau, 1999), 569–603; Wallas, “Der Pförtner des Ostens. Eugen Hoeflich - Panasiat und Expressionist,” in Von Franzos zu Canetti. Jüdische Autoren aus Österreich; neue Studien, ed. Mark H. Gelber, Hans Otto Horch, and Sigurd Paul Scheichl (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996), 305–44; Hanan Harif, “The ‘Revival of the East,’ Pan-Semitism and Pan-Asianism within Zionist Discourse” [in Hebrew] (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2013); Harif, “Asiatische Brüder, europäische Fremde. Eugen Hoeflich und der ‘panasiatische Zionismus’ in Wien,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 60, no. 8 (2012): 646–60; Harif, “Between Oriental Aesthetics and Transnationalism” [in Hebrew], Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 15 (2011): 75–94; Harif, For We Be Brethren: The Turn to the East in Zionist Thought [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2019). Hoeflich's extensive Nachlaß, which includes his published and unpublished writings as well as a small part of his correspondence, is archived at the National Library of Israel.
3. There is no evidence of any direct exchange between Hoeflich and these thinkers. The only proponent of Pan-Asianism with whom Hoeflich actually met and corresponded was the Japanese philosopher Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884–1949). For an account of their relationship see Harif, For We Be Brethren, 238–44; see also Eugen Hoeflich, “Panasien. Die Kernfrage des Zionismus,” Neues Wiener Journal, August 18, 1925, 1–2; The National Library of Israel, Moshe Yaʿakov Ben Gavriel Archive, ARC. Ms. Var. 365 4 144. For an informative overview of Kanokogi's thought and his controversial political views, see Christopher W. A. Szpilman. “Kanokogi Kazunobu: Pioneer of Platonic Fascism and Imperial Pan-Asianism,” Monumenta Nipponica 68, no. 2 (2013): 233–80.
4. See Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Introduction: The Emergence of Pan-Asianism as an Ideal of Asian Identity and Solidarity, 1850–2008,” in Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, vol. 1, 1850–1920, ed. Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 1–42; Prasenjit Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism,” Journal of World History 12, no. 1 (2001): 99–130; Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Searching for Alternatives to Western Modernity: Cross-Cultural Approaches in the Aftermath of the Great War,” Journal of European History 4, no. 2 (2006): 241–59; Adam K. Webb, “The Countermodern Moment: A World-Historical Perspective on the Thought of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, and Liang Shuming,” Journal of World History 19, no. 2 (2008): 189–212; Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
5. For a more detailed comparison of Hoeflich's work and other contemporary expressions of Jewish Orientalism see Asher Biemann, review of Tagebücher 1915 bis 1927 by Eugen Hoeflich, Modern Judaism 21, no. 2 (2001): 175–84. See also Michael Brenner, “The Invention of the Authentic Jew: German-Jewish Literature,” in The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 129–52; Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler, eds., Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015); Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M&P Verlag, 1997); Achim Rohde, “Der Innere Orient. Orientalismus, Antisemitismus und Geschlecht im Deutschland des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Die Welt des Islams 45, no. 3 (2005): 370–411.
6. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de Siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 108.
7. Steven Aschheim, “The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism,” in At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 30.
8. Ibid.
9. In analyzing the Asian-Jewish nexus that informs Hoeflich's Zionism, this essay takes its cue from the work of scholars such as Elleke Boehmer, Antoinette Burton, Françoise Lionnet, and Shu-mei Shih, who criticize the conventional frameworks used to conceptualize postcolonial identities for privileging the oppositional relationship between colonizer and colonized, European Self and Other. Instead of focusing on the interaction between European metropole and colonial periphery, these critics propose shifting our attention to the interactions that take place between peripheries in order to consider how different liberation movements in the colonial world position themselves in relation to one another, and articulate their respective political programs through expressions of cross-national solidarity. Extending this theoretical approach to Hoeflich's case allows us to evaluate a parallel effort to displace Europe's centrality in the affirmation of Jewish national identity. See Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Antoinette Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
10. See Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
11. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10.
12. Ibid., 38.
13. Hoeflich belongs to that generation of German and central European Jewish thinkers that Steven Aschheim and Anson Rabinbach have described as “post-assimilatory.” These figures rejected the previous generation's belief in the values of Bildung, liberalism, and the German-Jewish symbiosis. In their search for alternative political paths, they articulated revolutionary-messianic ideologies that rejected the constraints of Enlightenment rationalism and secularism. See Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (1985): 78–124; Steven Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe (New York: Verso, 2017).
14. In addition to Feuer im Osten and Der rote Mond, Hoeflich wrote several works of fiction based on his experiences as a soldier in the First World War, most significantly Jerusalem wird verkauft oder Gold auf der Straße. While the original German version was only published posthumously, its Hebrew translation appeared in 1946 under the title Zahav ba-ḥuẓut (Gold on the streets). See Mosche Yaʿakov Ben-Gavriel, Jerusalem wird verkauft oder Gold auf der Straße, ed. Sebastian Schirrmeister (Wuppertal: Arco, 2016); Ben-Gavriel, Zahav ba-ḥuẓot, trans. Avigdor Hameiri (Jerusalem: Aḥiasaf, 1947). Hoeflich rewrote and incorporated parts of Jerusalem wird verkauft in his autobiographical novel Die Flucht nach Tarschisch. Hoeflich planned the work as a three-part novel, of which only the first appeared in the original German version. The Hebrew translation, which was published a decade later and included the second part, contains a fictional account of Hoeflich's time in Palestine during the First World War. See Mosche Yaʿakov Ben-Gavriel, Die Flucht nach Tarschisch. Ein autobiographischer Bericht (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1963); Ben-Gavriel, Ha-briḥah tarshishah (Tel Aviv: ʿAm Ha-sefer, 1972). The complete manuscript is held at the National Library of Israel, see Moshe Yaʿakov Ben-Gavriel Archive, ARC. Ms. Var. 365 2 28.1; ARC. Ms. Var. 365 2 28.2, and ARC. Ms. Var. 365 2 28.3.
15. Wallas, “Der Pförtner des Ostens,” 313.
16. Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 28.
17. Ibid., 29.
18. Hoeflich, Der Weg in das Land, 4.
19. Eugen Hoeflich, Die Pforte des Ostens. Das arabisch-jüdische Palästina vom panasiatischen Standpunkt aus (Berlin: B. Harz, 1923), 88.
20. Hoeflich, Der Weg in das Land, 23–24.
21. Quoted in Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West, 64–65.
22. Another exponent of Asianism whose writings influenced Hoeflich in the immediate years after the First World War was Gu Hongming. Hailed as the “Chinese Tagore,” Gu Hongming was a popular spokesman for traditional Chinese thought and culture in the early twentieth century, whose works were widely read in interwar Europe. Whereas Gu Hongming advocated his brand of Confucian humanism as a cure for the ills of European modernity, Hoeflich believed his works were “especially important for Jews.” Hoeflich opens his 1921 review of Gu Hongming's China's Defense against European Ideas and The Spirit of the Chinese People asserting the ethical, religious, and cultural parallels that link Judaism to “nearly all civilized peoples of the Asian continent.” Enumerating Judaism's commonalities with Confucianism and Taoism, Hoeflich observes that “the Jews like the Chinese, like all the people of the Orient, share a common predisposition … their uninhibited feeling for God sharply separates them from the people of European modernity.” Eugen Hoeflich, “Die chinesische Parallele,” Selbstwehr, March 25, 1921. Moshe Yaʿakov Ben-Gavriel Archive, Gedrückte Aufsätze und Artikel ARC. Ms. Var. 365 3 2, document B91. See also Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 95; Hoeflich, review of “Vox Clamantis” by Ku Hung Ming, Wiener Morgenzeitung, March 27, 1921, 9. On Gu Hongming and his reception in Europe see Chunmei Du, “Gu Hongming as a Cultural Amphibian: A Confucian Universalist Critique of Modern Western Civilization,” Journal of World History 22, no. 4 (2011): 715–46; Uwe Riediger, “Ku Hung-ming. Umrisse eines Lebens,” Oriens Extremus 31 (1987–1988): 197–242.
23. Hanan Harif suggests that Hoeflich's ideas were also inspired by Pan-Germanic ideologies, which were particularly popular in Vienna in the early twentieth century. He further finds a telling symbolism in the fact that Okakura and Hoeflich both wrote their Pan-Asian manifestos in European languages, adding that the different expressions of Pan-Asianism, even though they were articulated in defense of the East against the encroachments of the West, actually attested to the Western acculturation of these thinkers. Despite the romantic-Orientalist influences he detects in Hoeflich's image of Eastern unity, Harif claims that his thought must be understood in light of an extra-European intellectual context and in relationship to the internationalist, Pan-Asian, and Pan-Islamic discourse of its time. See Harif, “The ‘Revival of the East,’” 11 and 186.
24. Eugen Hoeflich, “Anmerkungen zu einem Buch,” Jüdische Rundschau, June 20, 1922, 322. Hoeflich uses the term “Levantine” in its derogatory sense to designate a bastardized, inauthentic Mediterranean culture. In the words of Marcus Ehrenpreis, “The Levantine type is psychologically and socially, truly a ‘wavering form,’ a composite of Easterner and Westerner, multilingual, cunning, superficial, unreliable, materialistic, and above all, without tradition. This absence of tradition seems to account for the low intellectual and, to a certain extent, moral quality of the Levantines.… In a spiritual sense these creatures are homeless [as they] are no longer Orientals nor yet Europeans.” Quoted in Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of the Separatist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 47–48. More recent figures, such as the Egyptian-born writer Jacqueline Kahanoff and the scholar David Ohana, have sought to reclaim Levantinism as a cultural common ground that would reconcile Israel with its Arab neighbors. See Gil Hochberg, “The Legacy of Levantinism against National Normality,” in In Spite of Partition, 44–72; Jacqueline Kahanoff, Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, ed. Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); David Ohana, “Levantinism as a Cultural Theory,” in Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 77–97.
25. See Andrea M. Lauritsch, “Salun Jerusalem. Moshe Yaacov Ben-Gavriel und sein Bekanntenkreis in den 1930er Jahren” (PhD diss., Alpen Adria Universität Klagenfurt, 2014).
26. For an overview of Hoeflich's postwar literary oeuvre see Josef Schmidt, Der Unterhaltungsschriftsteller Mosche Ya-akov Ben-Gavriel: Bio-Bibliographie und literaturkritische Bestimmung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979).
27. Harif, “‘Revival of the East,’” 195.
28. Letter from Hans Kohn, 5 April 1925. Quoted in footnote 835 in the commentary section of Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 533.
29. On the connection between Pan-Asianism and Japanese expansionism and ultranationalism see Saaler and Szpilman, “Emergence of Pan-Asianism,” 10 and 22.
30. Letter from Robert Weltsch, 5 April 1925. Quoted in footnote 836 in the commentary section of Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 534.
31. Letter from Hugo Bergmann, 8 August 1920. Quoted in Wallas, “Der Pförtner des Ostens,” 320n56.
32. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 159.
33. Suzanne Marchand, “Eastern Wisdom in an Era of Western Despair: Orientalism in 1920s Central Europe,” in Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, ed. Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 341. See also Martin Kämpchen, “Rabindranath Tagore and Germany,” Indian Literature 33, no. 3 (1990): 109–40; Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Alex Aronson, Rabindranath through Western Eyes (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1943).
34. Arie Dubnov, “Notes on the Zionist Passage to India, or: The Analogical Imagination and Its Boundaries,” Journal of Israeli History 35, no. 2 (2016): 178.
35. Eugen Hoeflich, “Das Wiedererwachende Asien,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, October 12, 1919, 2–3.
36. Hoeflich's diary attests to his enthusiastic reception of Tagore's Nationalism, whose ideas he felt converged with his own: “I read Rabindranath's new book Nationalism, read and read and read and rejoiced that there was another, who said what I had thought and felt.” See Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 85 and 132. As Arie Dubnov and Shimon Lev have shown, Hoeflich was far from the only Zionist who identified Tagore's writings with the Jewish national cause. This list included figures such as Martin Buber, Rabbi Binyamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldman), and Hans Kohn. See Rabbi Binyamin, “Kol mi-Hodu” [A voice from India], in ʿAl ha-gvulin: Reshimot ve-ma'amarim (Vienna: Union Press, 1922), 331–38; Hans Kohn, “Asiens Nationalismus,” in Nationalismus: Über die Bedeutung des Nationalismus im Judentum und in der Gegenwart (Wien: R. Löwit-Verlag, 1922), 72–86; Dubnov, “Notes on the Zionist Passage to India,” 178; Shimon Lev, “‘Clear Are the Paths of India’: The Representation of Tagore in Jewish Literature,” The Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies 15, no. 1 (2015): 31–48.
37. Dubnov, “Notes on the Zionist Passage to India,” 181.
38. Rabindranath Tagore, A Tagore Reader, ed. Amiya Chakravarty (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 198.
39. Rabindranath Tagore, “Asien und Europa,” Esra: Monatsschrift des jüdischen Akademikers 1, no. 4 (1919–1920): 118–22. For the full English version see Rabindranath Tagore, The Message of India to Japan: A Lecture (New York: Macmillan, 1916). On the context of this speech and its Japanese reception see Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West, 63–68.
40. Eugen Hoeflich's introduction to “Asien und Europa,” 118–19. See also Hoeflich, “Ein politisches Werk Rabindranath Tagores,” Neue Freie Presse, July 24, 1921, 32–33.
41. On the Asian responses to Japan's victory and its place in fomenting anticolonial resistance throughout the empire, see Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
42. Tagore, “Asien und Europa,” 119; Tagore, “Message of India,” 11.
43. Tagore, “Asien und Europa,” 119; Tagore, “Message of India,” 14.
44. Tagore, “Asien und Europa,” 122; Tagore, “Message of India,” 28.
45. Hoeflich, “Das Wiedererwachende Asien,” 3.
46. Eugen Hoeflich, “Anmerkungen,” Esra: Monatsschrift des jüdischen Akademikers 1, no. 8 (1919–1920): 248–49. See also Hoeflich, Die Pforte des Ostens, 81.
47. Hoeflich, Die Pforte des Ostens, 99.
48. Ibid., 18.
49. Ibid., 24.
50. Hoeflich, Der Weg in das Land, 20.
51. Tagore's Pan-Asian vision is often equated with antinationalism, and contrasted to his earlier support of the Swadeshi movement for Indian national independence. This portrayal of Tagore's ideological position is inaccurate. As Louise Blakeney Williams argues, Tagore's cosmopolitan nationalism was misunderstood because of its radical newness and because it failed to correspond to preexisting forms of nationalism. Manu Goswami points to the strong continuities between Tagore's “nationalist” and “post-nationalist” phases, writing that “his liberal internationalism shared with swadeshi discourse the categorical ideal born of an encompassing ethic of indigeneity and the self-conscious pursuit of forms of sociality and personhood untouched by the abstract logic of capitalism and exempt from the geographies of domination that constituted colonial worlds. What held together these apparently distinct formations beyond their common intellectual genealogy was their roots within the historically specific problem of colonial unevenness, the shared grappling with the mundane and spectacular differentiations wrought by the making of a colonial space-time.” See Louise Blakeney Williams, “Overcoming the ‘Contagion of Mimicry’: The Cosmopolitan Nationalism and Modernist History of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (2007): 70; Manu Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparability: Notes on the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial,” boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 32, no. 2 (2005): 202–3.
52. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 6.
56. My interpretation is indebted to the work of Derek Penslar, who turns to Partha Chatterjee in order to point out the “many intriguing points of contiguity between the Zionist project and anticolonial movements.” Penslar uses this analogy not only to reframe our thinking about Zionism, but to reconsider Chatterjee's own work, which he criticizes for its tendency “to essentialize anticolonial movements and unjustly deny their grounding in classic European nationalism.” Goswami raises a similar issue, noting that Chatterjee “tends to reify an indigenous domain as the repository of a pure difference. But there are good empirical and conceptual reasons to question the claim of a static and pure indigenous sphere untouched by colonial and capitalist transformations.” These critiques notwithstanding, Chatterjee's work offers a compelling descriptive model for understanding the conceptual problems and hypostatized solutions of anticolonial nationalism. Whether or not Third World nationalisms succeed in circumventing European influence, Chatterjee convincingly shows how central this conceptual/epistemological predicament is to postcolonial thought. See Penslar, Derek, “Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?,” in Colonialism and the Jews, ed. Katz, Ethan, Leff, Lisa Moses, and Mandel, Maud (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 277Google Scholar; Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparability,” 208.
57. Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1918), 107Google Scholar.
58. Ibid.
59. Hoeflich, “Das wiedererwachende Asien,” 3.
60. Tagore, Nationalism, 5.
61. Hoeflich, Feuer im Osten, 9.
62. Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 93.
63. Hoeflich alludes to this encounter in a programmatic essay outlining his conception of Pan-Asian Zionism: “The call not only for a political-economic, but also spiritual and ethical Monroe Doctrine for the Mother of Mankind uttered by a modest Jewish author found its echo on the threshold of Asia in 1917. At that time, I came to the shocking realization that an idea which had only been shared by a few would soon come to fruition, when somewhere in Anatolia an Indian prisoner of war told me the day the English army capitulated in Kut Al Amra: ‘today Europe has lost Asia.’ Soon after, Kakuzo Okakura's excellent book The Ideals of the East appeared, and ‘All Asia is one’ gradually became an intelligible, if still uncommon pronouncement.” See Hoeflich, “Panasien. Die Kernfrage des Zionismus,” 1–2. In “Das jüdische Problem. Panasien,” Jüdische Zeitung Breslau, June 12, 1925, 1373–76, Hoeflich writes: “The Indian prisoners of war from Kut Al Amra, whom I briefly met somewhere in Anatolia, and spoke to about Pan-Asianism, met this idea with far more understanding than those I needed to address primarily, the representatives of my people, who at this moment stand before an unprecedented historical opportunity.”
64. Hoeflich, Feuer im Osten, 38.
65. Ibid. In his political writings, Hoeflich also employs the railway as a symbol for European treacherousness. The railways are not constructed out of mere altruism or for the benefit of the Orient, but to serve European interests: “The railways of Europe go over the dead bodies of natives from Anatolia to Cochin and from Ceylon to Nepal. … The whole technical Europeanization of the Orient, its de-Orientalization is only meant to benefit Western commercial capitalism.” See Hoeflich, Die Pforte des Ostens, 85–86.
66. See Adas, Michael, “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology,” Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004): 31–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67. Hoeflich, Feuer im Osten, 38–39.
68. Ibid., 39. The linguistic barrier that separates Hoeflich from the British Indian soldier provides a glimpse of the immanent contradictions that characterized his political program. The gap between the Jewish narrator and Indian captive can only be bridged by the narrator's resort to a rudimentary English, the “nonnative” language of the European oppressor.
69. Ibid., 39.
70. Hoeflich describes reading Okakura's The Ideals of the East in revelatory terms, noting in his diaries: “I am at the beginning of an immense spiritual experience.” See Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 142. He also dedicated his last published work, Ein Weg beginnt mit dem ersten Schritt (1963) to the memory of Kakuzo Okakura and Kazunobo Kanokogi, crediting the two Pan-Asian Japanese thinkers for showing him “the other way.” For Hoeflich's commentary on Okakura's ideas and their relevance to Zionism see Hoeflich, “Panasien,” 765; Hoeflich, “Anmerkungen zu einem Buch,” 322–23; Hoeflich, Die Pforte des Ostens, 96–103. On Okakura's relationship to Tagore, see Bharucha, Rustom, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West, 35–51.
71. In his enthusiastic review of Okakura Kakuzo's Die Ideale des Ostens, Hoeflich muses philosophically: “A question that repeatedly occurs to me, is it a bane or a blessing that when reading Eastern books I instinctively search for the parallels to Judaism? In any case, it is proof of Judaism's Asian affinities.” Citing Okakura's assertion of Asian unity, Hoeflich claimed that Judaism too “belongs to this circle,” adding, “there is no dividing line that separates it from the Orient.” According to Hoeflich, Okakura's work confirmed that the “Jewish spirit” formed part of the “all-Asian spirit,” a fact that could be discerned from the philosophical affinities between Moses and Confucius, Lao-Tze and the biblical prophets. See Hoeflich, “Anmerkungen zu einem Buch,” 322.
72. Kakuzo, Okakura, Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London: John Murray, 1905), 1Google Scholar
73. Ibid., 3–4.
74. Harif, For We Be Brethren, 234.
75. Hoeflich, Die Pforte des Ostens, 81.
76. In another fictionalized version of this scene in the novel Jerusalem wird verkauft (Hebrew translation appeared in 1946; German original published posthumously in 2016), the protagonist, an Austrian lieutenant named Dan, encounters an emaciated Indian prisoner of war, who studied in England. In the novel the Indian says to the Austrian officer: “Do you believe that any one of us would willingly fight against the Turks, a people we did not know? … Now that we've met them, we see that they are no better than the English. What is the difference? What is the purpose of this war?” Dan, the Austrian lieutenant, replies: “If the Asian people were united there would be no war in the world. They would force us to make peace.” In full agreement with Dan, the unnamed Indian exclaims: “You are absolutely right. All of Asia is one and it must finally understand that it is one, from China to Palestine.” See Ben-Gavriel, Jerusalem wird verkauft, 60–61.
77. Tagore, Nationalism, 46.
78. Hoeflich, “Proklamation an die hundertacht im Oktober 1919 in Kalkutta hingemordeten Aufrührer,” in Feuer im Osten, 74.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Hoeflich, “Aufruf an die Toten von Minsk,” in ibid., 75.
82. Penslar, “Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?”; Dubnov, “Notes on the Zionist Passage to India”; Harif, For We Be Brethren; Vogt, Stefan, “The Postcolonial Buber: Orientalism, Subalternity, and Identity Politics in Martin Buber's Political Thought,” Jewish Social Studies 22, no. 1 (2016): 161–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83. Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 5.
84. Ibid., 6.
85. Slabodsky, Santiago, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Cheyette, Bryan, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
86. See Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gandhi argues that limiting the scope of postcolonial resistance to the non-Western world overlooks the complementary and mutually reinforcing relationships between “minor” forms of anti-imperial thought that originated in Europe and their counterparts in the colonial world.
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