I'm reading Kafka these days not just for the incredible pleasure of it but because Kafka lived in a very similar Jewish moment to ours, which he recognized as transitional. Jews were included as never before. They had important jobs in urban society. Yet they were still a vibrant and distinct subculture that told a liberation story– Zionism–and for good reason, antisemitism. Kafka was attracted by Zionism, but never got there, in a word, because of western individualism. He was immersed in Jewish culture and Yiddish literature but also in German and Czech literature. He thought that Jewish culture was inevitably dying out through intermarriage and assimilation.
In 1911 he attended his nephew's circumcision. The description in Kafka's diaries is famous, you can read it here (just search for "perforated" metal disc). But the next paragraph is Kafka's interpretation.
meals and those present, aside from the two grandfathers, spent the time
in dreams or boredom with a complete lack of understanding of the prayer,
I saw Western European Judaism before me in a transition whose end is clearly
unpredictable and about which those most closely affected are not concerned,
but, like all people truly in transition, bear what is imposed upon them.
It is so indisputable that these religious forms which have reached their
final end have merely a historical character, even as they are practiced
today, that only a short time was needed this very morning to interest
the people present in the obsolete custom of circumcision and its half-sung
prayers by describing it to them as something out of history.
Anyone who's been to a circumcision can tell you that the exact same thing happens today, 100 years later. Only a couple of people in the room know exactly what is going on. Not everyone knows the prayers, people are riveted and then bored, and have little patience for the historical explanations. Someone in the corner argues about whether it is healthful or not. At bottom–sorry–it is really a ritual about difference. And my wife–and I imagine countless other gentiles married to Jews, and many of them with a son at stake–believe that it's barbaric, and about "style" not health; and my marriage is the reason that Dershowitz wrote a whole book called The Vanishing American Jew.
So circumcision/Jewish ritual seems as obsolete today as it did to Kafka. He was wrong. Are we?
