Zionism, Pan-Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament in

the Interwar Writings of Eugen Hoeflich

Abraham Rubin

AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies, Volume 45,
Number 1, April 2021, pp. 120-142 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/813697

[ Access provided at 20 Jan 2022 10:39 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

AJS Review 45:1 (April 2021), 120–142
© Association for Jewish Studies 2021
doi:10.1017/S0364009420000446

Z IONISM , PAN -A SIANISM , AND THE P OSTCOLONIAL

P REDICAMENT IN THE I NTERWAR W RITINGS OF
E UGEN H OEFLICH
Abraham Rubin
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 strat-
egies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the
Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in par-
ticular. 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 solidar-
ities 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.

In “Panasien,” a pathos-ridden essay published in Der Jude in 1922, the

author Eugen Hoeflich enthusiastically surveys the anticolonial agitation percolat-
ing throughout Asia in the wake of the Great War. The “Oriental world,” he con-
tends, was caught up in a series of revolutionary convulsions that paralleled the
emerging national consciousness of European Jewry. “What is at stake,” he
writes, “is the awareness that has simultaneously burst unto the surface in
China, India, the Near East and among certain Jews—a part of the East scattered
throughout the West—of the need to liberate the Orient from the tutelage of the
Occident.”1 Eugen Hoeflich (1891–1965) or Moshe Yaʿakov Ben-Gavriel, the
name he assumed upon immigrating to Palestine in 1927, was an expressionist
writer, journalist, and cultural Zionist, who established his reputation as an oppos-
itional voice, criticizing mainstream Zionism for its mimicry of European

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.
1. Eugen Hoeflich, “Panasien,” Der Jude 6, no. 12 (1922): 764. All translations from German
and Hebrew are my own unless otherwise noted.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

nationalism.2 In an effort to rethink the political and cultural foundations of

Zionism and disentangle it from what he saw as its Eurocentric influences and
colonialist tendencies, Hoeflich turned to the world of Pan-Asian thought, and
conceptualized an alternative vision of Jewish nationalism in dialogue with the
philosophies of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Confu-
cian thinker Gu Hongming (1857–1928), and the Japanese art historian
Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913).3 Pan-Asianism was an anticolonial ideology that
valorized Asia as a unified civilizational entity, justifying its ideal of Asianness
through different claims of ethnic, religious, and spiritual commonalities. While
the political and regional motivations behind such assertions differed, they all pre-
supposed the existence of a common Asian civilization and the need to defend
Asia from Western imperial domination.4

2. The most extensive work on Hoeflich’s life and writing has been done by Armin Wallas and
Hanan Harif. See Armin A. Wallas, “Ben-Gavriel, Mosche Ya’akov (eigentl. Eugen Hoeflich),” in
Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur, ed. Andreas B. Kilcher (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012),
51–53; 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 phil-
osopher 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 Euro-
pean 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 Univer-
sity 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).

121
Abraham Rubin

Hoeflich’s ideal of Jewish Asianness took part in the Orientalist vogue that
characterized the writings of thinkers and poets such as Martin Buber, Else
Lasker-Schüler, Hans Kohn, and Jakob Wassermann.5 In the first decades of the
twentieth century, key figures associated with the central European Jewish cultural
renaissance reappropriated the stereotype of the Jew as Oriental Other, and
employed it as a resource for the affirmation of Jewish identity and difference.
The equation of Jewish authenticity with various Orientalist characteristics
became a way to criticize assimilation and work through the ambiguities of
Western Jewish identity. Paul Mendes-Flohr calls this kind of Orientalist self-
fashioning an “aesthetic affirmation of Judaism.”6 While this positive ideal of
the Jew as an Oriental allowed for the inversion of the negative connotations
that were associated with the Jews’ imputed Orientalism, Mendes-Flohr’s
reading suggests that these acts of self-Orientalization belonged to the realm of
aesthetics rather than those of politics. Steven Aschheim offers a particularly
pointed critique of this phenomenon, calling it a “nonpersuasive and vain strategy,
a consolatory alternative völkisch source of identity.”7 According to Aschheim,
“The paradox of all these Orientalisms consists in the fact that they were essen-
tially European counter-myths, ideas conceived within a European context and
in European categories and hardly meant as serious calls to actively
de-Europeanize and ‘Orientalize’ themselves.”8
Jewish Orientalism was undoubtedly implicated in—and formulated as a
response to—Europe’s Orientalist imaginary. Yet Aschheim goes one step
further by discounting it as a derivative discourse that never truly challenged
the paradigm of European Orientalism, arguing that it merely reproduced its rhet-
oric and underlying assumptions. Hoeflich’s Pan-Asianism provides a compelling
counterpoint to Aschheim’s critique, demonstrating how some exponents of
Jewish Orientalism sought to break with the Eurocentric framework that had
given Orientalism its original impetus. In conceptualizing the challenge of
Jewish national self-definition in relation to Pan-Asian anticolonial thought,

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 Euro-
pean 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 Deutsch-
land 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.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

Hoeflich draws a direct analogy between the Jews of Europe and the colonized
subaltern. Exploring the way Hoeflich formulates this analogy in his interwar writ-
ings, and the role it plays in his thinking about Jewish nationalism, reveals the pol-
itical stakes of his “Orientalism” as an attempt to disentangle Jewish self-definition
from the dominant terms of European modernity and forge an independent con-
ception of Jewish nationhood.9
I argue that Hoeflich’s attempt to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea
in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular, constitutes a serious
effort to resolve a conceptual problem called the “postcolonial predicament,” ela-
borated in the works of Partha Chatterjee.10 Chatterjee points to an inherent
paradox underlying anticolonial nationalism: “Nationalism sets out to assert its
freedom from European domination. But in the very conception of its project, it
remains a prisoner of the prevalent European intellectual fashions.”11 The colon-
ized seek liberation through national self-assertion, but nationalism, a discourse
inherited from the colonizer, presupposes the inferiority of the colonized. The
contradiction underlying anticolonial nationalism is that it bases itself on Oriental-
ist logic: “The object in nationalist thought is still the Oriental, who retains the
essentialist character depicted in Orientalist discourse. Only he is not passive,
non-participating. He is seen to possess a ‘subjectivity’ which he can himself
‘make.’”12 The paradox is that in asserting their collective difference in national
terms, the colonized resort to the very language that was previously used to
justify their subjugation. Hoeflich’s conception of Zionism as a political and
cultural expression of Pan-Asianism is thus an effort to work through European
Jewry’s “postcolonial predicament.” It asks how the Jews might assert their col-
lective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presupposed
their inferiority.

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.

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Abraham Rubin

This essay first sketches out Hoeflich’s intellectual biography and outlines
his synthesis of Zionism and Pan-Asianism. It explores the diverse intellectual
sources that inspired Hoeflich’s conception of Jewish nationalism and broaches
its political limitations by introducing the critiques raised by his contemporaries.
The second section provides an overview of Hoeflich’s political project and its
broader ideological stakes through an examination of his engagement with the
thought of the Bengali poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, showing how
Hoeflich harnesses Tagore’s critique of Western nationalism and his admonition
against Asia’s adoption of Western forms of political organization to articulate
his vision of Pan-Asian Zionism. The turn to Tagore supplies Hoeflich with the
conceptual tools to formulate an alternative ideal of Jewish national self-
determination, supposedly untainted by European influence. Finally, I look at
how Hoeflich translates his political vision of Jewish-Asian solidarity into
poetic form. Focusing on Feuer im Osten (1920), a volume of short expressionist
prose inspired by Hoeflich’s deployment to Palestine as an Austro-Hungarian
officer during the Great War, I examine Hoeflich’s effort to affiliate the Jewish
and Indian national struggles and construct an idealized image of Asian-Jewish
kinship.

P ORTRAIT OF A PAN -A SIAN Z IONIST

Born in Vienna in 1891, Hoeflich grew up in an assimilated middle-class
home in Ottakring, a working-class suburb of Vienna, where his father worked
as a physician. Like many of his central European contemporaries, Hoeflich
revolted against the assimilatory tendencies of his parents’ generation by
turning to Zionism. Hoeflich’s youth coincided with the rise of radical politics
and populist nationalism. The crisis of liberalism and the intensification of anti-
semitism led Hoeflich to reassess the terms of his Jewish identity and his relation-
ship to Europe. What differentiates Hoeflich from the more familiar cases of
postassimilatory revolt is that he related his generation’s return to Judaism to
the Asiatic cultural revival valorized by Pan-Asian thinkers. Hoeflich’s writings
bear the distinct mark of cultural Zionism, but what is unique to his particular
brand of Zionism is the effort to bring the ideas of Martin Buber and Asher Ginz-
berg (Ah.ad Ha-‘am) into dialogue with those of Asian intellectuals such as Rabin-
dranath Tagore and Okakura Kakuzo.13
During the First World War Hoeflich fought on the eastern front, where he
was severely wounded in battle and spent several months convalescing in a field

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, Redemp-
tion and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe (New York: Verso, 2017).

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

hospital. Upon his recovery he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and in
March 1917 he was deployed to Palestine as part of a contingent of German
and Austro-Hungarian troops sent to reinforce the Ottoman Army. Hoeflich
spent several months serving in a logistics unit that was based in the Ratisbonne
Monastery in Jerusalem, before being repatriated, ostensibly for his politically
subversive views. Hoeflich’s time in Jerusalem had a formative influence on his
subsequent political and artistic development, inspiring the Orientalist themes
and motifs found in his literary works. His writings attest to a deep fascination
with the Orient, and recount his quasi-mystical impressions of the Palestinian
landscape. Hoeflich was equally captivated by the religion and culture of the
land’s native inhabitants. Feuer im Osten (1920) and Der rote Mond (1920)—
two expressionist works that drew their inspiration from his time in Palestine—
are populated with kabbalists, dervishes, Bedouins, and other exotic figures that
embody the spiritual, communal, and religious ideals he identified with the
Orient and contrasted to a disenchanted European modernity.14
After being sent back to Europe, Hoeflich spent the remainder of the war
near Vienna guarding Italian prisoners of war. This sinecure assignment allowed
Hoeflich to devote himself to his literary and intellectual activities.15 Hoeflich’s
diaries from that period testify to the sentiments that gave rise to his Orientalist
poetics and Pan-Asian Zionism: “Disconnected, I move through Vienna as if I
were suspended in the air. … I feel an immense yearning for Palestine, which is
so great that I sense myself completely alien here in Europe. Whether I wish to
or not, I am incessantly preoccupied with the land, occasionally feeling that I
will fall apart among the people and the relations surrounding me; they have
nothing Jewish about them whatsoever.”16 Later that month, Hoeflich wrote: “I
have become obsessed with the idea of Judaism’s unconditional Asianism.”17
In the immediate years following the First World War, Hoeflich translated
his obsession with Judaism’s “Asianness” into political action. He helped establish

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-h.uz.ut (Gold on the streets). See
Mosche Yaʿakov Ben-Gavriel, Jerusalem wird verkauft oder Gold auf der Straße, ed. Sebastian Schirr-
meister (Wuppertal: Arco, 2016); Ben-Gavriel, Zahav ba-h.uz.ot, trans. Avigdor Hameiri (Jerusalem:
Ah.iasaf, 1947). Hoeflich rewrote and incorporated parts of Jerusalem wird verkauft in his autobio-
graphical 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 pub-
lished 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-brih.ah tar-
shishah (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.

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Abraham Rubin

several Zionist organizations and societies, among them the Viennese chapter of
Ha-poʿel Hatzair, a socialist Zionist worker’s party inspired by the philosophy
of A. D. Gordon. He served as the editor for numerous Jewish periodicals, such
as Esra, Das Zelt, Jerubaal—most of them short-lived. During this time, he
wrote dozens of articles advocating his unique strand of Pan-Asian Zionism,
circulating his ideas in Der Jude, Selbstwehr, Jüdische Rundschau, Die Arbeit,
Jüdische Zeitung, and Wiener Morgenzeitung.
In Der Weg in das Land (1918) and Die Pforte des Ostens: Das arabisch-
jüdische Palästina vom panasiatischen Standpunkt aus (1923) Hoeflich elaborates
his Pan-Asian vision of Palestine. He attacks the “pernicious influence of Europe,”
which led to “the de-Orientalization of the Orient,” and argues that if a Jewish Pal-
estine was to be “internally viable” it needs to reject European utilitarianism, mer-
cantilism, and technology in favor of a communal ethics grounded in Mosaic Law
and Asian spirituality.18 “Mosaic Law” and “Asian spirituality” are mainly defined
by their antithetical relationship to modern Europe. Here, as in many of his other
works, Hoeflich conceptualizes Asianness as an abstract construct that is defined
through a series of dichotomies. Geographically and culturally, this Asianness cor-
responds to Arabia, India, Japan, and China, but also includes the Jews, whom he
calls “children of the East scattered throughout the West.”19 What these civiliza-
tions supposedly share is a strong spiritual and communal proclivity. The intro-
spective orientation and deep religiosity of these Asian civilizations sets them
apart from the mechanized and commercial character of Western modernity. For
Hoeflich, the return to Palestine represents the Jews’ reclamation of their Asian
cultural and spiritual patrimony, which had been distorted and obfuscated
during their long European exile. The recovery of the Jews’ “Eastern origins”
will not only enable them to overcome their self-estrangement, it is also an oppor-
tunity for them to establish a new utopian society. Palestine is meant to embody “a
new type of communal life, based on naturalness, fullness of feeling, love,
honesty, and a new ethic foreign to Europe, a Europe-overcoming ethic.”20 This
new community is imagined as the antithesis to the mercantilist and utilitarian
ethos he attributes to Europe.
Hoeflich’s idea of a geographical and civilizational divide separating East
and West is drawn directly from Pan-Asianism’s key exponents, Rabindranath
Tagore, Okakura Kakuzo, and Gu Hongming. Tagore argued for the superiority
of Eastern civilization, whose moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines
offered an alternative path to modernity. Advocating its redemptive potential for
the whole of humanity, Tagore claimed, “If Asian civilization constituted a
great reservoir of spiritual power, and if modern civilization was about to
destroy humanity itself, then it must be from a regenerated Asia that man’s salva-
tion would come.”21 Tagore’s and Okakura’s conception of Asia as a spiritual

18. Hoeflich, Der Weg in das Land, 4.

19. Eugen Hoeflich, Die Pforte des Ostens. Das arabisch-jüdische Palästina vom panasiati-
schen 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.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

essence, rather than a mere geographical entity, allowed Hoeflich to reinscribe

European Jews as a part of Asia.22 By distilling Asianism as a spiritual predispos-
ition, Okakura’s and Tagore’s ideal of Asian identity was broad and malleable
enough to include the Jews of Europe, whom Hoeflich regarded as displaced East-
erners.23 Both Okakura and Tagore posited the existence of a spiritual and civiliza-
tional essence that was shared by all Asians and that was threatened by the
encroachments of Western modernity. Only a revitalized awareness of this funda-
mental difference would allow Asia to recuperate its true spirit and identity. Hoe-
flich extends this message to European Jewry, writing that “one should reawaken
the consciousness of an autonomous past and an autonomous ancient culture in the
contemporary Jew.” Only under these conditions will “the Jewish national genius”
(der jüdische nationale Genius) avoid being “disguised, diminished, watered
down, and Levantinized.”24

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 Euro-
pean 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 com-
monalities 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 sym-
bolism in the fact that Okakura and Hoeflich both wrote their Pan-Asian manifestos in European lan-
guages, 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, super-
ficial, 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

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In 1927 Hoeflich resettled in Jerusalem, where he remained until his death in

1965. During his first years in Palestine, Hoeflich supported himself as a foreign
correspondent for various German news agencies, and wrote articles on Palestine
for European and American periodicals. He kept in contact with Arab intellectuals
and supported the Brit Shalom movement’s attempts to facilitate a binational
state.25 Although he was a committed advocate for peace, Hoeflich did not shy
away from taking up arms. In the prestate years, he worked with the Haganah,
the Jewish paramilitary underground movement that later evolved into the
Israeli Army. During the Second World War he enlisted in the British Army,
and he took part in the 1948 war and the 1956 Sinai campaign as an officer in
the Israeli Army.
Hoeflich’s literary breakthrough occurred in the 1950s, when he published a
series of middlebrow novels, whose plots mostly took place in the Middle East,
which became best sellers in the German-speaking world.26 Hoeflich’s popularity
led to a series of lecture tours in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Hanan Harif
notes the irony of Hoeflich’s deepening ties with Germany during the last two
decades of his life. The young Hoeflich demanded the complete disavowal of
Europe in favor of the Jews’ full immersion in the East. Although many of his
writings were translated into Hebrew, they failed to resonate with Israeli audien-
ces. It was only in Europe that Hoeflich found the celebrity that had eluded him
for most of his career. Hoeflich devoted much of his life to advancing Jewish-Arab
solidarity, yet he left his greatest mark as a cultural mediator between Israel and
Germany and for his contribution to German-Israeli reconciliation in the wake
of the Holocaust.27
While Hoeflich’s literary works from the 1950s and 1960s won some
measure of international recognition, his interwar writings have been virtually for-
gotten. His political meditations and poetic output from the prestate period have
received scant scholarly attention. It is safe to assume that this neglect has some-
thing to do with the fact that Hoeflich’s political vision was egregiously discon-
nected from its surrounding historical realities and was particularly fuzzy when
it came to hashing out practical details. Even Zionists who shared many of Hoe-
flich’s political sensibilities responded to his Pan-Asianism with skepticism.
Replying to Hoeflich’s invitation to join his Pan-Asian initiative, the political

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 Kahan-
off, 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 Bekann-
tenkreis 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 Unterhal-
tungsschriftsteller Mosche Ya-akov Ben-Gavriel: Bio-Bibliographie und literaturkritische Bestimmung
(Bonn: Bouvier, 1979).
27. Harif, “‘Revival of the East,’” 195.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

philosopher and erstwhile Zionist Hans Kohn (1891–1971) wrote that he did not
think that Asian nationalism represented an ideal that was superior to its European
counterpart. Moreover, he argued, Egyptian and Turkish nationalisms seemed
practically identical to their French and Czech equivalents. He added, “I cannot
share the view that all that is Asian is good, while all that is European is bad.
In my view, the English rule over India was far more decent than Japan’s domin-
ation of Korea. I fear that the Pan-Asian standpoint will congeal into a chauvinism
similar to the kind that has materialized on European soil.”28 Kohn thought it was
naive to believe that Asian nationalism was ethically superior to its Western coun-
terpart, an observation that was corroborated in the case of Japan, which used Pan-
Asianism to justify its imperial ambitions.29 The Zionist journalist and editor
Robert Weltsch (1891–1982) responded to Hoeflich’s overtures with similar cool-
ness, writing that his biggest objection to the idea of a Jewish Pan-Asianism was
that it seemed to merely be a symbolic gesture that lacked any concrete content.
One could not establish a true connection with these Asian nations or represent
their cause without being intimately familiar with their languages and cultures.30
The Prague-born philosopher Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975) was even more dis-
missive. He wrote Hoeflich that the current state of Palestine demonstrated the
indubitable necessity of relying on Europe for the advancement of its education,
agriculture, and industry. The Pan-Asian idea seemed to Bergmann as no more
than a “literary stunt” (literarische Spielerei).31
Kohn, Weltsch, and Bergmann raise important questions concerning the
ideological coherence and political practicality of Hoeflich’s envisioned
program. Yet Hoeflich’s effort to link Zionism and Pan-Asianism was not
guided by considerations of realpolitik. Hoeflich’s portrayal of a unified Asian
identity is undoubtedly essentialist, but this essentialism characterized the dis-
course of Pan-Asianism in general. Hoeflich’s hyperbolic claims concerning the
Jews’ Asianness might surely be pegged as an Orientalist fantasy. Yet in faulting
Hoeflich for his geopolitical naiveté and Orientalist aestheticism, one loses sight of
the deeper conceptual questions he grapples with. His imaginary identification of
the Jews with Asia’s racialized and colonized Others is meant to critically address
Zionism’s relationship to Europe and distinguish Jewish nationalism as a collect-
ive identity that is politically and culturally distinct from Europe.
Thus, instead of dismissing Hoeflich’s writing as a “literary stunt,” this
article asks how the Pan-Asian analogy contributes to Hoeflich’s rethinking of
Zionism. What drew Hoeflich to Pan-Asianism was its preoccupation with the
challenge of subaltern self-assertion vis-à-vis Europe. Elleke Boehmer terms

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.

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Abraham Rubin

this challenge “the theoretical conundrum of colonized self-representation.”32

According to Boehmer, the question of cultural representation is central to the
process of asserting postcolonial selfhood. Independence, she argues, is not
only about gaining territorial sovereignty or economic autonomy. It is also
about asserting one’s freedom from the colonizer’s epistemological framework.
Considering Hoeflich’s engagement with Pan-Asianism in these terms
illuminates the political stakes of his intellectual project: the attempt to
“de-Occidentalize” Zionism. It is this challenge that led Hoeflich to the work
of Rabindranath Tagore.

A Z IONIST R EADS R ABINDRANATH

Hoeflich’s turn to the East exhibits marked affinities to the Orientalist vogue
that pervaded central Europe in the 1920s. Noting the prominence of Oriental
themes in German popular culture in the 1920s, Suzanne Marchand explains
Orientalism’s appeal during this time period to the foreboding premonitions of
civilizational decline and cultural crisis that permeated Germany following its
devastating loss in the First World War. The humiliation of national defeat may
have been the immediate trigger for the German turn eastwards, yet, as Marchand
adds, the interwar search for cultural alternatives in the East was also the culmin-
ation of a “longstanding iconoclastic, anti-classical and often neoromantic world-
view” that had always been a defining feature of the German Orientalist
tradition.33
Situating Hoeflich within the historical framework of fin-de-siècle German
Orientalism allows us to recognize the affinities his work bears to its broader cul-
tural context. Yet these parallels only constitute part of the story. Hoeflich’s iden-
tification with India was not uncommon for Zionists in the 1920s, many of whom
saw a distinct parallel between their respective political ambitions. As Arie
Dubnov notes, Indo-Jewish encounters in the first half of the twentieth century
“were often marked by a mutual search for an alternative to the aggressive nation-
alism and rapacious imperialism many Zionist Jews and Indians considered to be
the dominant feature of most European cultures.”34 According to Dubnov,
memory of these transnational identifications was erased during the first
decades following the establishment of Israel, when the young Jewish state forti-
fied its alignment with the West. The geopolitical order that came into being
during the Cold War obscured the memory of an earlier era, when many Zionists

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 Entangle-
ment: 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.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

identified the Jewish national renaissance with what Hoeflich called the “reawak-
ening East.”35
Hoeflich’s preoccupation with the writings of poet-philosopher Rabindra-
nath Tagore and the recurring references to India and Indians in his literary
works offer another portal for examining the Jewish-Indian entanglements that
characterized early twentieth-century Zionist thought.36 Hoeflich saw a clear
link between the challenges faced by Zionism and those confronted by the
Indian national movement. His engagement with the figures of Tagore and
Gandhi, whose writings he regarded as relevant to the project of Jewish national
revival, sheds light on what Dubnov calls the forgotten “conceptions of a
Zionist-Indian nationalist nexus.”37 Several key parallels may be reconstructed
between Hoeflich’s and Tagore’s attempts to conceptualize a national and cultural
identity that would, in the words of Tagore, “transcend the barriers of external
geography.”38
In a 1919 issue of the Viennese Jewish journal Esra, Hoeflich published an
essay by Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Asien und Europa.” The essay was an
abridged translation of a speech Tagore delivered in Tokyo in 1916.39 Introducing
the piece, Hoeflich explains that while Tagore did not explicitly refer to Judaism, it
nevertheless held an important lesson for those seeking to align their Judaism with
the goals of a reawakening East. Guiding Hoeflich’s publication of an Indian intel-
lectual’s talk to Japanese students is the conviction that the Jews’ national regen-
eration is predicated upon the affirmation of their “affiliation with the spirit of the
Orient,” and the recognition that their goals converge with the Orient’s struggle
against the “mercantilist unspiritual West.”40 The inclusion of Tagore’s speech
in a Viennese Zionist publication represents a symbolic identification between

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 Natio-
nalismus 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.

131
Abraham Rubin

Jews and subalterns. Beyond asserting the Jews’ spiritual, ethnic, and cultural
kinship with the subaltern, Hoeflich employs Tagore’s critique of Western nation-
alism as a template for articulating Zionism’s national and cultural objectives. To
grasp these connections, let us turn to Tagore’s speech and its background.
Tagore begins his lecture celebrating Japan’s military victory in the Russo-
Japanese War, stressing its symbolic significance for the whole of Asia.41 Japan’s
defeat of a European power proved that Asia could stand up to the West, and
showed the other Asian nations that they too could overthrow the yoke of imperial
domination. Japan’s successful modernization serves as an inspiration for all of
Asia, boosting its self-confidence and refuting the pernicious idea of its civiliza-
tional inferiority. The fundamental issue that Japan needed to confront now that
it had vanquished its external enemies was its future national character: Would
it be an imitation of the West or would it remain faithful to its Asian spiritual
essence? This fateful dilemma was one that all Asians would now need to
confront.
Tagore recognizes that Japan’s triumph was the result of the Meiji Restor-
ation that began in the mid-nineteenth century, when the empire embarked on a
full-scale modernization of its government, military, and industry—a feat achieved
by importing Western technology and expertise. He insists, however, that Japan
successfully reclaimed its independence and sovereignty not by virtue of its mod-
ernization, but because it held on to its ancient Eastern essence: “Modern Japan
has come out of the immemorial East like a lotus blossoming in an easy grace,
all the while keeping its firm hold upon the profound depth from which it has
sprung.”42 Tagore’s vision of the “immemorial East” is constructed through a
series of oppositions that are mapped on to a geographical dichotomy of East
versus West—contrasting the soul and the machine, self-sacrifice and the desire
for profit, social consciousness and egotistical individuality, spiritualism and
materialism. Japan may have adopted Western technology, but it did not internal-
ize the Western spirit. If it were to become a “mere reproduction of the West,” it
would betray its past and fail the Asian nations that look up to it.43 Against the
“unwieldy car of progress, shrieking out its loud discords as it runs,” Tagore
makes an appeal for Asian unity, and urges Asians to pursue their own path,
which is “not political but social, not predatory and mechanically efficient, but
spiritual and based upon all the varied and deeper relations of humanity.”44
Hoeflich, who considered Tagore to be the “foremost representative” of “a
spiritual movement encompassing all of Asia,” constructs his vision of Jewish
nationalism on similar principles.45 Echoing Tagore, Hoeflich’s thought revolves
around a civilizational conflict between East and West, in which the Jews’ true

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.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

regeneration depends on the retrieval of their “Oriental essence.” He posits

Zionism in opposition to Western nationalism, envisioning it as a form of
collective self-determination that transcends the chauvinism and militarism of
the European nation-states. Hoeflich explains Tagore’s significance for Zionism
thus: “In his excellent new book Nationalism, Rabindranath Tagore writes: ‘We
must never forget that those people who have got their political freedom are not
necessarily free, they are merely powerful.’ These words should be set in stone
for political Zionism and should hang in the house of every Zionist. The Zionist
may thus suddenly realize that freedom lies on another path than the one upon
which the West marches toward the East, that the bayonets of a European
power may indeed conquer Palestine, but they will not liberate Judaism.”46
In the passage Hoeflich quotes, Tagore distinguishes between casting off the
yoke of external domination and the attainment of true liberty. The two are not
identical. If the colonized gain independence from the colonizer only to assert
their self-sovereignty in Western terms they will have failed to free themselves
from European domination. Hoeflich adopts Tagore’s admonition against Asia’s
mimicry of the West and applies it to Zionism. He sees the disavowal of European
influence as the precondition for Jewish national revival and liberation. Acknow-
ledging Tagore’s relevance to the yet-undetermined future of Zionism is not
merely an issue of intellectual influence. It is also a symbolic affirmation of the
Jews’ Oriental identity.
The Indian analogy illuminates the fundamental challenge Hoeflich grapples
with as he seeks to identify Zionism as an Asian liberation movement and incorp-
orate it within a larger Pan-Asian vision. As Hoeflich succinctly puts it: “We want
to return, but not as Europeans.”47 Hoeflich articulates his view of Jewish nation-
alism in opposition to Herzlian Zionism, which he accuses of coopting the Jewish
national project and transforming it into a “projected copy of Europe in a Jewish
Orient” (projiziertes Abbild Europas in einem jüdischen Orient).48 Pan-Asianism
offers Hoeflich an intellectual and cultural resource with which to counteract and
challenge the Eurocentric and imperial tendencies he identifies within Zionism.
According to Hoeflich, Zionism needs to evade the categories of Western political
thought if it is to truly emancipate the Jews, otherwise the Jews will simply turn
into “trailblazers of Europe in the Orient, into an English colonial clerk.”49 If a
Jewish Palestine is to be “internally viable” (innerlich lebensfähig), it must
devote itself to “overcoming Europe.”50
Tagore’s and Hoeflich’s attempts to formulate an “Asian” form of collective
self-determination that is distinct from Western nationalism points to a shared pre-
dicament: as “latecomers” to modernity, how can the Indian and the Jew assert
their independence if their collective self-assertion draws on the very political

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.

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Abraham Rubin

and intellectual traditions that marked them as inferior?51 This “anxiety of influ-
ence” pushes Tagore and Hoeflich to claim a fundamental difference from Euro-
pean nationalism, and declare that their political programs draw on the primordial
wellsprings of Hinduism and Judaism respectively. Their ideas are a response to
the problem of historical agency: Is the Indian (or Jew) passively imbibing a
“foreign” form of self-sovereignty, and thus perpetuating his subjection on an
“inner” level, or can he reconstitute an authentic form of selfhood?
Partha Chatterjee formulates this conceptual predicament as follows:

If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined commu-
nity from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe
and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem,
has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consum-
ers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history,
have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment
and exploitation, but also that of our anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial
misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.52

Chatterjee criticizes the notion that Afro-Asian nationalisms are merely adapta-
tions of political models derived from the West. The assumption that Third
World nationalism is the result of a one-way flow of knowledge from the West
reduces the experience of anticolonial nationalism to a “caricature of itself.”53
Quite to the contrary, claims Chatterjee: “The most powerful as well as the
most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are
posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the ‘modular’ forms of
the national society propagated by the modern West.”54

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 cosmopol-
itan 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 swa-
deshi 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.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

In Chatterjee’s reading, the struggle of anticolonial nationalism begins

before its political confrontation with the empire, when it looks to establish its
own sovereignty in the domain of culture. Since the colonized society lags
behind the colonizing society in the economic, scientific, and technological
domains, it seeks to assert its superiority in the spiritual, “inner” realm, which it
designates as a marker of its independent cultural identity.55 The dynamic of colo-
nial resistance outlined here can easily be mapped onto Tagore’s 1916 Japan
lecture and his 1918 monograph Nationalism—the two works cited by Hoeflich.56
“Politics in the West have dominated Western ideals, and we in India are trying to
imitate you,” writes Tagore, who goes on to warn that Indians must recognize “that
we cannot borrow other people’s history, and that if we stifle our own, we are com-
mitting suicide.”57 Against the East’s attempt “to take unto itself a history which is
not the outcome of its own living,” Tagore asserts India’s need to develop its
national culture “from within.”58 Hoeflich makes a similar point when he admon-
ishes his Jewish readers “that orienting ourselves toward the West threatens us
with calamity … because it takes away the last remains of our essence, rendering
us a Hebrew-speaking part of the European nation folk that has been shoved to
Palestine.”59
There are clear parallels between Hoeflich’s contrarian politics vis-à-vis
mainstream Zionism and Tagore’s own complicated relationship with Indian
nationalism. Tagore first joined forces with the Swadeshi national movement in
the early 1900s, but later renounced its narrow nationalist stance, as he sought
to articulate an internationalist political vision based on Pan-Asian solidarity.
Tagore’s turn to anticolonial cosmopolitanism in the 1910s marks the waning of
his domestic influence and the beginning of his successful career as a poet-
philosopher in the West. Similarly, Hoeflich’s antagonism to the establishment
of a Jewish nation-state and his vision of a binational Palestine that would be

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 antico-
lonial 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 notwith-
standing, Chatterjee’s work offers a compelling descriptive model for understanding the conceptual
problems and hypostatized solutions of anticolonial nationalism. Whether or not Third World nation-
alisms succeed in circumventing European influence, Chatterjee convincingly shows how central this
conceptual/epistemological predicament is to postcolonial thought. See Derek Penslar, “Is Zionism a
Colonial Movement?,” in Colonialism and the Jews, ed. Ethan Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud
Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 277; Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparabil-
ity,” 208.
57. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1918), 107.
58. Ibid.
59. Hoeflich, “Das wiedererwachende Asien,” 3.

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Abraham Rubin

part of a larger regional Pan-Arab federation placed him on the margins of the
Zionist movement. Tagore was portrayed as an antinationalist by friends and
foes alike. This image fails to do justice to the nuanced ideas of a thinker who dis-
avowed “the colorless vagueness of cosmopolitanism” and “the fierce self-idolatry
of nation-worship” in equal measure.60 This misconception of Tagore’s position is
mirrored in Hoeflich’s case, whose ideas also failed to gain traction with his
contemporaries.

F ICTIONAL F ILIATIONS IN F EUER IM O STEN

The Pan-Asian ideal Hoeflich draws on in order to articulate his vision of
Zionism extends to his literary works, which offer imaginative elaborations of
Jewish-Asian solidarity. Exemplifying this continuity is Feuer im Osten (1920),
a volume of short stories and sketches that translate the author’s Pan-Asian con-
ception of Zionism into expressionist prose. Many of the narratives in Feuer im
Osten revolve around the author’s conflicted sense of identity as an Austrian
officer stationed in Jerusalem during the First World War. The speaker in these
texts suffers from a deep ambivalence about his role as an agent of Western imperi-
alism and identifies with the native Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of Palestine
rather than his own comrades in arms. The European Jewish protagonist in
these stories feels a deep sense of kinship with the landscape and its inhabitants,
and is loath to return to Europe, a place he feels he no longer belongs. The stories
depict numerous scenes of mutual recognition between the Jew and the Asian. In this
paradigmatic theme of inter-Asian encounter, the Jew and the Asian—alternately
figured as Chinese, Indian, or Arab—come to realize their shared destiny and
common spiritual heritage. The volume constitutes a poetic enactment of the cultural
conflict between Asia and Europe, expressing the author’s disavowal of Europe, and
the deep desire to recuperate his Jewish Asiatic authenticity.
The work’s debt to Tagore is acknowledged in the book’s dedication, which
thanks him, alongside the Confucian intellectual Gu Hongming and the cultural
Zionist luminary Martin Buber, for inspiring Hoeflich’s “immense love for
Asia” and strengthening his “belief in the ultimate glorious victory of Asia.”61
Hoeflich also sent Tagore a copy of the book with a personal dedication in
rudimentary English that read: “On the turning point of the history of my
Jewish people, which is returning again in his oriental native country I send
you this book, what I have dedicated to you. It maintains the same idea as you:
the unity of the oriental mind: Indians and Jews shall be brothers, the world
will be redeemed if the pan-asiatish [sic] idea will have prevailed Asia and
his people.”62
The text that best exemplifies Hoeflich’s emotional and intellectual invest-
ment in India and conveys his idea of a Jewish-Indian nexus is a story called
“Abend im Taurus” (An evening in Taurus). The story is a fictional elaboration

60. Tagore, Nationalism, 5.

61. Hoeflich, Feuer im Osten, 9.
62. Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 93.

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of a brief encounter between Hoeflich and soldiers of the British-Indian Army,

captured in the battle of Kut Al Amra in 1916. Hoeflich met these Indian prisoners
of war in Anatolia during the First World War on the way to his deployment in
Palestine. Despite serving as an Austrian officer, Hoeflich recognized these
enemy combatants as fellow Asiatics, who share a common culture and cause
with European Jews such as himself, who are aware of their “Oriental affinities.”63
The story begins with the narrator leaving an unnamed city and walking
through a valley, where he is surprised to find a group of Indian prisoners crowd-
ing around a bonfire, trying to keep warm. The narrator listens in on their conver-
sation, and hears an Oxford-educated Indian quietly denouncing England and
Europe to his comrades. In a whispered tirade the Indian prisoner charges:
“This is our enemy, who thinks he is better than us, who does not understand
us and chokes our throat; this is the spirit, for which we are preparing the
way.”64 The prisoner then points to the railway track he is sitting on and declares:
“This is where Europe runs toward us in order to turn our souls into profit, turn
brother against brother, mass murder, technology, eternal misery.… The destruc-
tive forces of this dehumanizing civilization are grasping at the heart of Asia.”65
The imprisoned Indian soldier directs his ire at the civilizing-mission ideology
meant to justify European imperialism and subjugate the people of Asia.66 The
mention of his educational background at Oxford attests that the subaltern
subject is capable of mastering Occidental knowledge. The exposure to the
West, however, has not compelled him to assimilate. It has strengthened his cul-
tural and political commitment to the Orient. The Indian’s ideological conviction
mirrors Hoeflich’s own: both assert their Asian identities in opposition to Europe.

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, “Pan-
asien. 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 Ana-
tolia 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 Michael Adas, “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on
the Civilizing Mission Ideology,” Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004): 31–63.

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Abraham Rubin

The prisoner interrupts his tirade when he notices the narrator, a uniformed
officer of the enemy army. He is still unaware of the narrator’s ethnic background
and political sympathies: “He did not yet know that I was a Jew, an Oriental like
him, one whose blood runs with the spirit of the Orient, despite the European cen-
turies.”67 As the prisoners are corralled by their Askari guards and led back to their
fenced compound, the educated Indian approaches the narrator, who takes the
opportunity to reveal his true identity. He addresses the Indian in broken
English, with the words “I am Jew” (sic). Surprised, the Indian responds by
raising a hand toward him and exclaiming, “Brother?”68 This fleeting moment
of mutual recognition leads the speaker to reflect on the Jews’ relationship to
“mother Asia”: “Today, half of Europe lies between you and me, mother Asia,
and more still: the embittered misunderstanding between me and a brother of
my blood, who does not hear the call of Asia, which also applies to us, this heart-
rending cry of the mother for her children.”69 Hoeflich borrows the image of
“mother Asia” from Okakura Kakuzo, a Western-educated Japanese art historian,
curator, and friend of Tagore’s.70 Okakura’s best-known work, The Ideals of the
East (1903) sought to define a common Asian spiritual heritage by mapping out
a shared aesthetic tradition linking Japan, India, and China. At the core of his
concept of Asian civilization was the tradition of Japanese art, which he celebrated
as the epitome of Eastern spirituality.71 Opening his book with the memorable and
oft-quoted line, “Asia is one,”72 Okakura argued that underlying the continent’s
cultural and religious diversity was a shared spiritual essence: “Arab chivalry,

67. Hoeflich, Feuer im Osten, 38–39.

68. Ibid., 39. The linguistic barrier that separates Hoeflich from the British Indian soldier pro-
vides 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 rudi-
mentary 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 Rustom Bharucha, Another
Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 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 Juda-
ism’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. Okakura Kakuzo, Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London:
John Murray, 1905), 1

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Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient
Asiatic peace, in which there grew up a common life, bearing in different
regions different characteristic blossoms, but nowhere capable of a hard and fast
dividing-line.”73 The Ideals of the East rejected the Eurocentric notion of civiliza-
tional progress and criticized the corrosive influence that Western rationalism and
materialism had on Asian civilization, while calling for the reclamation of Asiatic
authenticity and spiritualism. The association to Okakura is even more explicit in
Hoeflich’s retelling of this encounter in his autobiographical novel Die Flucht
nach Tarschisch. As Harif has shown, in this version of the encounter, the
British Indian prisoner declares, “Asia is one.”74
Like Tagore, Okakura conceptualizes Asia as a spiritual essence, rather than
a mere geographical entity. Tagore’s and Okakura’s conception of Asia as a spir-
itual essence turns Asianness into a transferable identity. This detachable defin-
ition of Asianness allows Hoeflich to incorporate European Jews within this
ideal of Asia. Recuperating the true spirit of Asia, Okakura argued, requires one
to acknowledge the fundamental difference between East and West. Hoeflich
extends Okakura’s message to European Jewry, writing that “the consciousness
of the difference [Andersartigkeit] between the two continents, as concerning
their spiritual foundations, is the only basis for the self-liberation of Asia.
Before the awareness and recognition of the deeper causes this other liberation
cannot be conceived.”75
The narrator at the end of Hoeflich’s story makes a similar appeal, as he rec-
ollects this encounter with the Indian prisoner now that he is back in Europe. His
present distance from “mother Asia” is not merely geographical, it is reflected in
the “embittered misunderstanding” between the Jewish speaker and his coreligion-
ists, who fail to “hear the call of Asia,” and realize that it “applies to us.” The story
ends on a prophetic note, shifting from the speaker’s despair to a utopian future in
which Asian civilization will reign supreme: “I will long be gone … yet the idea
will come to pass.… Where Europe’s profit-sucking ‘Progress’ once raged, the
spirit of the Orient will once again come to be. … Harken, my brothers, harken
to the call of the Mother. Prepare yourselves!”76
The story’s closing passage reaffirms the fleeting and hesitant moment of
fraternal recognition between the Jewish Austrian officer and the British Indian

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.

139
Abraham Rubin

soldier. Despite the physical barriers separating them, and despite wearing the uni-
forms of enemy armies, the Jew and the Indian share a common cause and confront
a similar predicament. These ostensible rivals are pit against one another by force
of foreign imperial powers. They are both the victims of Europe, who are in fact
closer to one another than they are to the respective armies they are fighting for.
There is a symmetry to this encounter: the Jew, in the uniform of the Austro-
Hungarian Army, and the Indian, in the uniform of the British Army, become con-
scious of their Oriental kinship, if only for a brief moment. The two belong to the
community Tagore calls “we of no nations of the world,” who must unite against
Europe, not only for the sake of their national liberation, but also for the sake of
their common Asian identity.77 At stake in Asia’s struggle against Western mod-
ernity is the ultimate future of humanity. The narrator’s belief in the universal
redemptive potential of Asian civilization corresponds to an idea voiced by
Pan-Asian intellectuals such as Tagore and Okakura, who asserted the superiority
of Asian civilization and argued that it possessed the spiritual resources to redeem
a belligerent and morally misguided West from wreaking further damage upon
itself and the rest of the world.
The image of Indo-Jewish solidarity emerging from this short story does not
translate into any explicit political program. But it serves as a poetic avenue for
thinking about an alternative Jewish politics aimed at dissociating Jewish national
identity from its European moorings. Hoeflich’s identification of the Jew and the
Indian resurfaces again in the two texts that close Feuer im Osten. The volume’s
penultimate text, “Proclamation to the One-Hundred and Eight Rebels Murdered
in Calcutta in October 1919,” is a short elegy dedicated to the Indian rioters killed
by the British.78 Hoeflich praises the Hindus, Muslims, and Persians who sacri-
ficed their lives in the name of their “inextinguishable love for the All-Mother.”79
He asserts the divine righteousness of their cause in the name of his people
(Im Namen meines Volkes), the Jews, swearing that their death shall not be in
vain.80 In declaring his sympathies with Calcutta’s martyred protestors, Hoeflich
draws a direct analogy between the Indian anticolonial struggle and the project of
Jewish national self-determination in Palestine. His emphasis on the varied reli-
gious and ethnic makeup of the Indian protestors echoes several other texts in
the volume that note the cultural diversity of the Orient, thus allowing for the
incorporation of the Jew within a Pan-Asian alliance. His valorization of interreli-
gious collaboration corresponds to the Pan-Asian ideal preached by Tagore and
Okakura, who celebrate the spiritual unity underlying Asia’s religious and cultural
diversity.
Hoeflich’s tribute to the anticolonial rioters of Calcutta is followed by a
requiem for the victims of a pogrom, called “Appeal to the Dead of Minsk.”81

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.

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 Zionism, Pan‐Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament

In placing these two texts side by side, Hoeflich compresses the distance between
the two continents and peoples into the emblematic space of the volume’s succes-
sive pages. This metonymic logic of martyrdom affirms the affinities between the
Indian victims of colonial violence in Calcutta and the Jewish casualties of a
pogrom in Minsk. The struggle against European antisemitism and the struggle
against British imperialism are one and the same.
The texts in Feuer im Osten celebrate the cultural and political possibilities
that inhere in identifying the Jew and the Asian, or to be more precise: identifying
the Jew as Asian. The book’s recurring appeal to inter-Asian solidarity—which
also includes the Jews, whom Hoeflich considers “children of the Orient scattered
throughout the West”—complements Hoeflich’s aspirational vision of merging
Zionism with the Pan-Asian ideal. Hoeflich’s identification of the Jewish national
struggle with the revolt of the subjugated subaltern never matured into a concrete
political program, yet the symbolism of this affiliation constitutes a pointed polit-
ical statement concerning Zionism’s ideological and cultural horizons. By valoriz-
ing the emancipatory potential of the Jews’ racial and cultural identification with
Asia, Feuer im Osten creates a space for cross-national solidarity among the Jews
of Europe and the oppressed of the Orient. Hoeflich’s identification of the Jew and
the Asian reorients Jewish national identity away from its cultural, political, and
intellectual ties to Europe.

C ONCLUSION
The Occidentalist image of Zionism—commonly identified as a Eurocentric
ideology—obscures the ideological diversity that characterized its prestate var-
ieties, many of which challenged Jewish nationalism’s grounding in European pol-
itical thought, and saw Zionism as the means of differentiating Jewish identity and
culture from its European counterpart. In recent years, scholars such as Derek
Penslar, Arie Dubnov, Hanan Harif, and Stefan Vogt have sought to complicate
this wholesale identification of Zionism as a European political movement,
driven by the desire to imitate the West.82 As Noam Pianko observes, “Jews
have remained largely invisible in the writings of scholars” dealing with “trans-
national associations, minority rights, and the moral limits of sovereignty.”83
Pianko contends that because Jews have been perceived as too statist, white,
and integrationist, “few scholars have considered the history of Zionism in
tracing the evolution of political critiques of national sovereignty or in locating
the early and influential expressions of collective solidarity within and across pol-
itical boundaries.”84 In a similar vein, Santiago Slabodsky notes “the scarcity of
postcolonial Jewish thought,” arguing that this is the result of a radical

82. Penslar, “Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?”; Dubnov, “Notes on the Zionist Passage to
India”; Harif, For We Be Brethren; Stefan Vogt, “The Postcolonial Buber: Orientalism, Subalternity,
and Identity Politics in Martin Buber’s Political Thought,” Jewish Social Studies 22, no. 1 (2016):
161–86.
83. Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2010), 5.
84. Ibid., 6.

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Abraham Rubin

transformation in the Jews’ racial image since 1945. Once seen as foreign Orien-
tals on European soil, Jews are now extolled as model Westerners. “This discur-
sive reclassification,” he explains, “militates against investigating the decolonial
aspects of their conceptual programs or correlating their historical resistances to
imperialism with contemporary anticolonial struggles.”85
Revisiting Eugen Hoeflich’s forgotten legacy illuminates the subaltern sol-
idarities that formed the basis for his thinking about Jewish nationalism, allowing
us to recover the global imaginary that nurtured certain visions of Zionism before
the establishment of the state. If Hoeflich’s writings seem naive from a contempor-
ary standpoint, they nevertheless constitute an original voice in the landscape of
German Jewish Orientalism and interwar Zionism. The significance of Hoeflich’s
vision does not consist in its practicality but in its perceptive grasp of the political
implications and moral dilemmas underlying the realization of the Jewish national
project. While Hoeflich’s Pan-Asianism fails to articulate a programmatic political
vision, it is nevertheless an immanent critique of the Eurocentric and colonial
influences that Hoeflich recognized in mainstream Zionism. Hoeflich also chal-
lenges the exceptionalist narrative, which regarded Zionism from an exclusively
“Jewish” perspective. He rejected the uniqueness of the Jewish national cause
and aimed to articulate it in terms of interwar anticolonial nationalism in the
subaltern.
Ultimately, Hoeflich’s work from the 1920s brings the history of Zionism
into closer proximity to the history of anticolonial nationalism among the subal-
tern, demonstrating the parallels and intersections between the two movements
that were in the process of consolidation at the same time. His thought sheds
light on the transnational solidarities that informed Zionist thinkers in the interwar
era, thus shedding light on what Leela Gandhi describes in another context as the
“multiple, secret, unacknowledged friendships and collaborations between antico-
lonial South Asians and marginal and anti-imperial ‘westerners.’”86

Abraham Rubin
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel

85. Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–18. See also Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind:
Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2013).
86. See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism,
and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 10. Gandhi argues that lim-
iting 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.

142