Conclusion
Conclusion
The End of Jewish Primitivism
The Conclusion considers the meaning of Jewish primitivism in light of the catastrophic destruction of Jewish life in Europe during the First World War and its decimation in the Holocaust. Through a reading of two short texts by the Czech-German-Jewish journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, I show how Kisch exposes the limits of Jewish primitivism as a constructive critical force, compromised by capitalism, by extremist political ideologies, and by violent death. In these stories – one about a search for the Golem of Prague, the other about a search for “Indian Jews” in Mexico – Kisch’s primitivism catalyzes a sense of solidarity with the presumed primitive. It is a solidarity born of the common experience of violence and traumatic loss, but it generates a melancholic humanism that was the end of an aesthetic that, after the Holocaust, no longer had the same meaning.
Keywords: Egon Erwin Kisch, Holocaust, First World War, Golem, humanism, trauma
Stanford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
