There is an apocryphal story that when the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II visited Brody in 1774 to relieve it of the burden of collecting taxes and proclaim it a freistadt, he conferred another honour on the town. Seeing the throng of blackclad Hasidim in the streets he exclaimed: ‘This is my Jerusalem, so I can rightly call myself “King of Jerusalem”, the title claimed by the kings of Austria.’ From that moment until the town’s privilege as a tax-free zone was withdrawn a hundred years later, the Kaiser’s poetic epithet stuck to Brody like glue.

Another celebrated Ukrainian teller of tales, the Israeli S. Y. Agnon, set his novel The Bridal Canopy there and perpetuated its mythical status as the Galician Jerusalem. The combination of Jewish, Ruthenian and Habsburg culture which Roth encountered in the years before he began his studies in Vienna left a symbolic residue in almost everything he wrote. Jewish experience – their displacement, their need to have multiple identities and their marginal position in society – provided endless material for both his fiction and his reportage. Jewish life lies at the heart of Job and Leviathan. Jewish characters dominate Hotel Savoy and Tarabas. His most powerful collection of essays concerns itself entirely with Ostjuden, both in their Slavic homelands and in the ghettoes of Berlin, Vienna, Paris and New York’s Lower East Side. The further he travelled from Galicia, the more Jewish values penetrated his prose. Even after his supposed conversion to Catholicism, they haunted his final tales. Above all they held up a mirror to the fractured world he continued to witness throughout his wanderings.

It is not surprising then that in the last few decades, Jewish commentators have claimed Joseph Roth as one of their own. Apart from the American scholar Sidney Rosenfeld, the celebrated playwright and screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood has also made out a powerful case for Roth as primarily a Jewish novelist. We should be circumspect about this claim and not confuse the teller with his tales. When he wishes to, Roth can evoke Yiddishkeit with as much sensitivity as Agnon or Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer, but he always remains at one remove from his subject matter. He was never a child of the stetl. He was an Austrian of Jewish extraction from a predominantly Polish region. Although he was born into a Jewish family and lived largely among Jews until his mid-twenties, even in his youth he stood outside Orthodox Jewish life. His mother tongue was not the Yiddish which was the lingua franca of Galician Jews but hochdeutsch  – the High German which his mother taught him as an infant and which was the teaching medium in his primary school. Maria Grübel Roth was an ambitious single parent from an educated family and she made sure that her son was enrolled in the Baron Hirsch Grundschule in Brody. Here he learned Polish and German and studied Goethe and Schiller alongside Hebrew and Jewish history. Bronsen tells us that he also read the Psalms and the prayers in the original but mainly in order to translate them into German. Roth’s grandfather was a stonemason who lived close to the Brody Jewish cemetery and whose first language was almost certainly Yiddish. However, Roth’s possessive mother brought her son up to be a German Jew – or more accurately, an Austro-German Jew – rather than a Galitzianer. When Bronsen interviewed family friends and relatives, many of them remarked that Maria always kept Joseph distant from his contemporaries, and described her accompanying him on his journey to school until well into his teens. Bronsen paints a picture of a family which was insecure socially and financially, living in genteel poverty and probably wishing to keep a distance between themselves and the stetl-juden who made up more than 60 per cent of Brody’s population. Whatever the reason, this placed young Moses Joseph Roth half inside and half outside his Jewish origins – a position he occupied for the rest of his life.

It also fostered an ambivalent sense of his ethnic identity. In The Wandering Jews, he never once reveals his own Jewish origins. Even when he writes of the border stetls or of the Jewish district of the Josefstadt in Vienna, he scrupulously avoids the first person singular or plural. Nor does he sentimentalise the life of the little Jewish villages on the Russo-Polish-Austrian frontier. His landscape is harsh and his portraits severe. His most traditional Jewish character, the poor infant teacher Mendel Singer in Job, beats his sons, mistrusts his daughter and fails to empathise with his increasingly desperate wife. Like his biblical model Job, Singer’s role in the novel is to suffer and to curse the uncomprehending deity. The society he portrays is far distant from the comfortable communities depicted in the tales of Sholem Aleichem. Until its redemptive ending, the only tenderness shown in the narrative comes from the Christian peasant carter Sameshkin, a drunken reprobate, who comforts Mendel on his journey to acquire the papers which will allow him to emigrate to America.

There is no special treatment in any of his fiction for the marginalised Galician Ostjuden. Rosenfeld suggests that Singer’s serial disasters are somehow the product of his failure to live the simple pious life of his fellow Hasidim and his punishment for emigrating to the unfeeling modernity of the New World. This is certainly one reason for his guilt, first when he learns of his son’s death in the war and then when he witnesses his wife dying of a broken heart and his daughter’s mental disintegration. However, this is Mendel’s perception of himself and not the author’s. Throughout his work, Roth balances cultural sensitivity with cool objectivity.

The primary role of Jews in his fiction is to suffer. Almost all of his Jewish characters live in deep poverty. There are only two prosperous Jews in his entire output and their function is to highlight the gulf between their own good fortune and the fate of their compatriots. Bloomfield the expatriate American businessman in Hotel Savoy and Shemeriah in Job both offer redemption, but paradoxically they intensify the pain of those around them. Bloomfield (né Blumenfeld – another name-changer) returns to his Galician homeland but not to fulfil the hopes and dreams of his desperate fellow countrymen. He has come to the borderlands to visit his father’s grave because ‘home is above all where our dead lie’. In Job, Mendel Singer’s oldest son also changes his name – from Shemeriah to Sam – and prospers when he settles in New York. He sends for his family to join him from Zuchnow and for a moment it seems as if the family’s suffering might end. Yet when he dies as an American soldier in the Great War this actually precipitates the novel’s catastrophic climax – encapsulated in his mother’s death and his sister’s schizophrenia. When redemption finally arrives it is in the shape of Singer’s disabled and slow-witted third son, Menuchim, now rather improbably reborn as a musical genius. He brings salvation to his father not from the new world but from the old. He is now leading a group of players from Eastern Europe on a tour of the West and it is only when they reach the USA that father and son are reunited. For Rosenfeld this symbolises the superiority of ancient stetl values over the shallow modernity and materialism of Jewish New York. He sees Roth as an unresolved migrant Ostjude reaching back to his own Hasidic roots for reconciliation. But if we examine the final pages of Job closely we can see that there is another counterpoint running beneath the novel’s principal melody and it provides a clue to the novel’s symbolic structure.

It is no accident that Menuchim is a musician. Roth prepares us carefully for his re-entry into the story throughout the final third of the novel where the sound of music is heard on almost every page. When Mendel contemplates returning to his homeland to fetch his damaged child he sings and dances the Psalms like a good Hasid at the festival of the Rejoicing of the Law. In his Lower East Side garret he sings regularly ‘on good days and bad ones … when he had thanks to offer to heaven and when he feared it’. When his wife Deborah hears of Sam’s death, she sings ‘in a deep male voice, as if there were another singer in the room’. In the blasphemous depths of his despair, as Mendel burns his prayer shawl, phylacteries and holy books, he ‘calls a terrible song after them’. His therapy for his loss is to look after neighbours’ children, and as he rocks their cradles he sings ‘an old, old song’: ‘Say after me Menuchim: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth …’

His one comfort is a phonograph on which he plays a collection of ‘new songs from Europe’. But they are not new songs. The music which soothes his pain is klezmer, the wedding music of the Pale of Settlement which was born on the borders of Romania, Austria, Ruthenia and Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its instruments are those of itinerant musicians – violin, clarinet and double bass – and its melodies borrow from the folksongs of every place of passage from Transylvania to Odessa, blended with the cantorial melisma which Roth would have heard every Saturday morning in Brody. One tune captivates Mendel: ‘It ran like a little brook and murmured softly; it was vast as the ocean and roared. Now I am hearing the whole world, thought Mendel.’ It is called ‘Menuchim’s Song’ and it is the key which finally unlocks and releases Mendel’s misery.

Why is music the metaphorical thread which binds the closing chapters of the novel? Why is Mendel’s surname Singer? Roth gives us the answer in The Wandering Jews, when he remarks that unpronounceable Jewish names were a constant burden to their owners. A Russian name would become German in Vienna and would then be Anglicised in London. Often the name denoted a function in society – a Schneider was a tailor, a Handelsman was a trader, and so forth. I can add a brief personal note. My own father’s cousin, born near Kiev, was called Muskant. He became an orchestral cellist in the UK. His brother was a band leader. Muskant is a contraction of the German/Yiddish word musikant. Perhaps Mendel’s surname conjures up his spiritual origins both in the synagogue and under the bridal canopy? We hear no music in the Russian first half of Job but when Mendel is adrift as an alien in New York it becomes a recurring leitmotif. It may be fanciful to suggest that music cast a similar spell over Roth’s subconscious but it is worth remembering that one of his Brody relatives was a cantor. Some of the most affecting pages in The Wandering Jews describe Yiddish music and the Yiddish theatres where it was often performed. Here is his description of it in the section which deals with the Jewish communities of Berlin:

Klezmer is wedding music and its fusion of smiles and tears is the aural equivalent of the wine glass which the couple smash when marital vows are exchanged. The shattered glass stands for all the contradictory elements in a wedding, from the broken hymen of the virgin bride to the mixture of joy and sadness with which the parents part with their daughter. Most of all it represents the omnipresence of misfortune and the human capacity to overcome it. He uses similar language a couple of pages earlier, where he presents Jewish customs and traditions as a metaphor for the instability of diaspora life. What binds these communities together is not faith but fatalism:

Those Jews observe the religious customs more out of pious habit than religious need; they think of God only when they need him, and given their luck, they need him fairly frequently …

There is nothing sentimental about this passage. It has the sour pragmatism of a stand-up comic in the Borscht Belt. When Roth writes of stetl life he makes no exceptions. If Jews have a tough time it is because they are an acute case of the sickness suffered by all of Europe’s displaced peoples. As we know from The Wandering Jews they are ‘always the third party and always lose’. Trawling through the cast lists of his fiction, it is often difficult to decide whether a character is Jewish or not. When Andreas Pum argues angrily with his Maker in Rebellion there are echoes of the milkman Tevye haranguing God in Sholem Aleichem’s stories, but Roth never suggests that Pum is a Jew. He is merely a specific example of a general case. In Hotel Savoy and the Neue Sachlichkeit fiction of the 1920s, he often gives his protagonists Jewish characteristics and sometimes Jewish names but his primary concern is their destiny rather than their origins. He rarely attributes the fate of his characters to the fact that they are Jewish. Apart from his descriptions of burgeoning Nazism in The Spider’s Web and a few passages in The Radetzky March, he hardly ever makes direct mention of anti-Semitism.

One might expect a book with the title The Wandering Jews, published in Germany during the rise of Hitler, to depict the hatred and suspicion of Jews which Roth must have witnessed on the streets of Berlin. What we see instead are the common indignities of migrant life perceived through Jewish eyes. He observes quarantine and border controls as they impact on all stateless persons rather than individual minorities. Consider his use of the first person plural in this passage:

Who are ‘we’ in this sentence? Not immigrants, let alone Ostjuden. Roth the Galician expatriate with an Austrian passport is accepting responsibility for the way his temporary German home infringes the human rights of all migrants whatever their origin. It is the same when he writes about cards of identity. In the preface to the second edition of The Wandering Jews, published in 1937 when the Nuremberg Laws had already been passed, he turns from lamenting the specific fate of German Jews to a general condemnation of all the oppressive by-products of the nation state:

… a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have now come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plainclothesmen. No one loves victims, not even their fellow victims.

Of course, by this time direct reference to institutional anti-Semitism was dangerous, and indeed in 1932 a reference to Jews in his essay Die Scholle was actually suppressed by his Munich editors. However, like everything else in his writing, his presentation of Jewish experience is underpinned by paradox. While Roth the polemicist condemns their displacement Roth the journalist celebrates the vibrant culture which they import into the West. This fusion of opposites is particularly evident whenever he writes about Orthodox Jewish religion. What attracts him to Galician Yiddishkeit is not faith but tradition – what he calls their ‘pious habit’. His description of the festival of Simchat Torah, which marks the annual completion of the reading of the Pentateuch, is a vivid example. He depicts the Hasidim, hand in hand, swinging the Torah scrolls around like dancing partners and kissing them with tears of joy. He is moved by the eroticism of their dance and the way in which it unites physical pleasure with spiritual joy. His evocation of Yom Kippur is equally sensual. Even though he is depicting the darkest day in the Jewish year, it is another illustration of ‘smiling through tears’. On Kol Nidrei – the evening before the festival when Orthodox Jews compute their sins and prepare their vows of expiation – he describes stillness so tangible that it is almost musical:

The great silence that deafens an otherwise almost orientally noisy town oppresses even the lively children, whose shouting and crying plays such a prominent part in the symphony of the streets.

Roth was so pleased with this piece of descriptive writing that he incorporated it almost verbatim into the later work entitled The Antichrist.

There is one particular place where Roth is a very Jewish writer indeed. His taste for paradox is virtually Talmudic. The essence of the Talmud lies in its rigorous questioning of every aspect of Judaism – every belief, proscription and practice. It is based on the dialectical method of ‘either/or’. Every proposition in the Bible is placed beside its opposite and tested to destruction. We know that even in the enlightened Baron Hirsch school which he attended in his early years, Roth followed a traditional Jewish course of study. We also know that his grandfather was a devout Hasidic follower of the rabbi Baal Shem Tov. In the photographs of Brody from the early 1900s in the town museum, the streets are full of sallow kids with greasy side-locks, no doubt fresh from the local yeshivot – the tiny seminaries which are often located in private houses. You can see their modern equivalents in London’s Stamford Hill or Crown Heights in Brooklyn, with the same curls and black skullcaps and fringed prayer garments peeping out from under their long black jackets. From the age of six they are divided into pairs and learn their religious faith by arguing violently with each other in heightened sing-song Yiddish. As they dispute, they rock backwards and forwards, exactly like the Hasidim depicted in The Wandering Jews.

Talmudic processes inform Mendel Singer’s and Andreas Pum’s arguments with God in Job and Rebellion. When God’s ways defy logic, Roth becomes a temporary Talmudist and turns logic on its head. As in the biblical story of Job, he reframes God and makes Him mirror his own damaged creation. Similar paradoxes inform the plots of other tales, particularly when they involve the very devout or the very wicked. The narrative proceeds by contrary motion; the faithful are dragged down by their piety and the sinful are redeemed by their transgressions. Mendel Singer rises above his despair only after he burns his phylacteries and prayer books. He is a holy blasphemer. While Job is consciously constructed along the lines of a biblical parable the same ironies are evident in other stories less immediately concerned with issues of faith. The pogrom in Tarabas, when drunken Ruthenian soldiers smash up a Galician village, reaches its climax when a painting of the Virgin is revealed hidden beneath the plaster on a pub wall. Tarabas is a holy anti-Semite.

Talmudic paradox also creeps into such stories as Rebellion and Confession of a Murderer, both of which feature criminals as protagonists. Spiritual paradox pursues Roth to the end of his creative life. It is so central to his final completed novel that it informs even its title. The Legend of the Holy Drinker tells of yet another former murderer who achieves salvation as a destitute alcoholic under the bridges of the Seine.

Roth’s relationship to Jewish belief is as counterintuitive as the man himself. Some commentators have used the irritating phrase ‘self-denying Jew’ to describe his ambivalent relationship with his own Ostjude background. In the final chapter of Understanding Joseph Roth Sidney Rosenfeld writes:

… the evidence of his private letters and journal contributions show that he too was infected by the virus of German-Jewish self-hate, or a strain of it that might be better described as German-Jewish self denial, which, however, often found hostile expression when projected outwards.

It is an important distinction but it begs an equally important question. If Roth is in denial, what or who is the self that he is denying? At one level his fabricated autobiography, with its fantasy father and fictitious birthplace, denies his roots in the down-at-heel outskirts of Brody. This is convincing as amateur psychology but it is scarcely earth-shattering.

Roth is not the first writer to obscure his own origins. It might be more accurate to see his failure to acknowledge his own Jewishness in The Wandering Jews as a statement of journalistic integrity. In his foreword to the book he tries to identify his intended audience. He says that he is writing for those who ‘might have something to learn from the East’. In other words, he hopes that they will be as openminded as he is. In return he will be even-handed when he depicts the dark and light sides of Jewish culture.

Growing up on the margins of Austro-German civilisation, Roth was ideally placed to introduce his readers to a still neglected culture. As a Jewish Galitzianer he knew the narunim of Brody from the inside. By the same token he could also move almost invisibly from one segment of society to another. With his Viennese higher education, his war service and his various postings as a foreign correspondent he could adopt the perspective of urbane cosmopolitans and working-class Austrian foot-soldiers. The photograph of him taken in 1926, wearing a rather elegant suit and sitting on a railway platform with a goods wagon in the background shows the Joseph Roth that he always wanted to be, poised between two worlds and observing both with equal clarity.

This is not the picture of a stetl Jew in self-denial. Rather, it is the portrait of a congenital non-joiner. This is a man who applies for an Austrian passport and then lives in Berlin and Paris. This is an author who enjoys the life of a flâneur in 1920s Western Europe and then writes feuilletons pouring scorn on consumerism and the materialism of Weimar Germany. This is a penetrating film critic who spends three pages of newsprint celebrating the latest movie by Murnau and then satirises the vulgarity of contemporary cinema. More than anything this is Muniu faktisch, whose literary masterpiece The Radetzky March is marinated in nostalgia for the Empire destroyed a dozen years earlier and at the same time anatomises the self-delusion which destroyed it. How very Jewish. How characteristic of someone who was born astride two worlds and decided to remain extra-territorial for the rest of his life.

Roth was not compelled by poverty to live out of suitcases in hotels in the years before his Parisian exile. He was one of the most successful and best-paid journalists writing in the German language. If he was a wandering Jew, it was by choice. Even in Paris after the Anschluss, with his books banned and then burned, with his publishers closed down and his money draining away in the bars of the 7th arrondissement, he turned down invitations to emigrate to the USA. Was this because he still believed a miracle would restore the old Empire? In joining the circle which surrounded the Habsburg Crown Prince was he denying the reality of the post-imperial world? Or was he congenitally unable to belong anywhere? Was he like the central character in The Capuchin Crypt, who concludes the novel with the words ‘Where could I go now, I, a Trotta?’ Once again, it is easy to play the amateur psychologist and see his displacement coming from his unresolved Ostjude identity. Yet it can as easily be constructed in cultural or political terms. Just as the multicultural Habsburg Empire provided an alternative to the nationalism which tore Europe apart at the end of the 1930s, so Ostjude values offered another equally positive model for a society without frontiers.

Of course there was one further option for Roth apart from emigration to the USA. Like many of his fellow German Jewish artists he could have settled in Israel. But true to form he turned his back on that escape route with equal resolve. Indeed, throughout his journalism of the 1920s and particularly in The Wandering Jews, he conducted an angry campaign against Zionism. He dismissed Theodor Herzl’s putative Jewish state as vehemently as he rejected the nation states created after Versailles. In the opening section of the book he characterises Zionism as just another mutation of the nationalism which pulled the old empire apart. He reminds us that Eretz Yisroel was the invention of an Austrian journalist. He satirises the competing nationalist claims of Czechs, Magyars, Poles and Ruthenes before finally spinning off into his celebrated riff on how Jews are always the third party and always lose. These paragraphs are dismissive enough but they are nothing compared to what follows. A couple of pages later he discusses the expropriation of Palestinian land by early Jewish settlers:

The Arab’s fear for his freedom is just as easy to understand as the Jew’s genuine intention to play fair by his neighbour. And despite all that, the immigration of Young Jews into Palestine increasingly suggests a kind of Jewish Crusade because, unfortunately, they also shoot.

In the mid-1920s his use of the word ‘crusade’ is remarkable. It predates the Arab riots against the settlers by several years and it even anticipates the Palestinian response to the founding of the Jewish state. There is more to come. He reserves his deepest scorn for the idea of Jewish armies:

The European mark of Cain won’t wash off. It is surely better to be a nation than to be maltreated by one. But it’s a painful necessity all the same. Where’s the pride for the Jew, who disarmed long ago, in proving once more that he is capable of squad drill!

This would be alarming if it had been published in the Guardian after the war in Lebanon in the 1980s or the invasion of Gaza in 2008. In 1927, when the democratic Weimar Republic government was hanging on to power by its fingernails and Hitler was waiting in the wings, it is totally prophetic, particularly from a writer who still thought of himself as Jewish. It is only when we reach the following paragraph that the underlying logic of Roth’s argument becomes clear. In rejecting a Jewish state in Israel he is anything but a self-hating Jew. He is embracing the traditional values of the Jewish diaspora as practised in the eastern borderlands. For Roth Ostjude society and the multicultural Empire which sheltered it were symbiotic. To create a Jewish state was to deny Jewish history. In support, he cites the Galician Hasids who in the 1890s were already asserting that Israel was a blasphemy because it had been prophesied that Jews would only return to their homeland in the days of the Messiah. A century later Roth might have savoured the irony of the great-grandchildren of Galician stetl Jews now colonising the Mea Shearim district of Jerusalem, dressed like Polish Hasids, accepting Israeli passports but refusing to serve in the Israeli army and living under the protection of a nation whose very existence they denied. Roth’s own rejection of Israel eighty years earlier was political not spiritual; it was grounded in history rather than faith:

Trust Joseph Roth to dismiss the Jewish state in the form of a very Jewish paradox.

There is one further savage irony which Roth did not live to witness. In a letter to his friend Stefan Zweig in 1935, he wrote that ‘A Zionist is a National Socialist, a Nazi is a Zionist.’ This is a shocking claim and some have put it down to his growing despair in exile and the effects of alcohol. However, it echoes passages in The Wandering Jews written eight years earlier when he was relatively healthy and successful. Describing the pious Hasids of Galicia, he says:

… this Jew is not a ‘nationalist’ in the Western sense. He is God’s Jew. He does not fight for any Palestine. He detests the Zionist … His Jewish nation would be along the lines of a European state. The outcome might be a sovereign nation, but it wouldn’t have any Jews in it …

In other words, for Roth the true Jew is diasporic. In 1927 when this was written, he could still imagine stetl values continuing into the foreseeable future. He had recently visited independent Poland and the young Soviet Union, and although he was worried about the prospects for the USSR he had witnessed surviving Jewish communities similar to his own Galician birthplace. He could see no reason why their robust Slavic diaspora should not survive for many generations.

When I visited Brody ten years ago, there was not a single surviving descendant of the communities Roth met in the 1920s. Brody synagogue was a rain-streaked ruin and the Jewish cemetery was a crumbling wasteland of gap-toothed graves. Western Ukraine was second only to Poland in the numbers of its inhabitants transported to the death camps. At the time of my first journey to Galicia I was considering making a film about Roth and his ‘flight without end’. I asked the distinguished journalist Neil Ascherson, himself of Polish extraction, if he would collaborate with me on the project. He replied that after the Shoah such a film would now be impossible. He was sadly correct. The Final Solution had comprehensively denuded Eastern Europe of Jewish life and culture. In a further irony, a portion of its few survivors were now settled in an Israeli state that during its conception had generated almost as many refugees and extra-territorials as Roth encountered in Austria, Germany and Russia in the 1920s. Today his vision of the life of ‘the good Jew’ is confined to the Brooklyn suburbs, the 4th arrondissement in Paris, Stamford Hill in London and the occupied territories of the West Bank. The lifestyle he celebrated in The Wandering Jews is only visible in the very places he despised.

What does this mean for the readership Roth was seeking when he wrote the preface to The Wandering Jews – ‘the readers who feel they might have something to learn from the East’? It is a complex question. To begin with, Roth himself was a messenger, not a representative. He never lived the pious, deprived life of the Ostjuden. After his departure in 1913, he never revisited his birthplace. His own sufferings were self-inflicted, through exile, depression and drink, and he experienced them in Paris and not Brody. He was a creative writer and not a politician. His Galician model for community life is no more a prescription than his retrospective vision of the multicultural Empire. His dispatches from the borderland stetls offer a distillation of diaspora life not a prognosis. Even more, his fictional evocations of stetl communities are metaphors rather than documentary accounts. In asking his readers to learn from the East, he is suggesting that they absorb its values and spirit rather than re-create its social structure. In writing The Wandering Jews, Roth was continuing his lifelong search for an alternative to the nationalism which he saw poisoning the world in which he grew up. This is where his two main preoccupations – the vanished multicultural Empire and the lost world of borderland Jewry – join hands. His search for supra-nationality encompasses the whole legacy of his early years, from his identification with migrants to his mistrust of nationalism to his Talmudic love of paradox.

This gives us another reason why Roth demanded the right to be extra-territorial. He could no more acknowledge a State of Israel than he could accept being a citizen of Poland. Nevertheless he always maintained his respect for the rooted values of the communities which surrounded him in Brody. Just like Menuchim’s song, which makes a redemptive journey from Zuchnow to East Houston Street, he transcended the stetl. His meditations on Jewish life are as contradictory and inconsistent as anything else in his work; they vacillate between tenderness, irony and anger according to his mood.

Yet there is one place in his writing – two thirds of the way through The Radetzky March – where he synthesises his two supra-national models, the imperial and the multicultural. Here he brings its two symbolic incarnations face to face. Shortly before the assassination of his heir in Sarajevo, Kaiser Franz Joseph decides to attend manoeuvres in the Galician district where Carl Joseph von Trotta is stationed. The old man’s purpose is nostalgic rather than military. He simply wishes to revisit his early years as a young commander-in-chief. As he is shaved on the morning of his inspection, he recalls that as a Habsburg monarch his supreme rank is that of King of Jerusalem. He therefore has a duty to greet the local Jews. In a single sentence, Roth unites his own Jewish patrimony with the iconic roots of the Habsburg dynasty. When the Emperor meets his Jewish alter ego, the old rabbi holds up another crowned symbol – the scrolls of the Torah – and greets him with a prediction in the form of a Jewish prayer:

‘Blessed art thou,’ said the Jew to the Emperor. ‘Thou shalt not witness the end of the world.’

At this moment the rabbi is both a prophet and a batlan. Roth knew that his readers would understand the irony of the rabbi blessing one of the culpable authors of the slaughter shortly to follow in the fields of Flanders and on the Russian frontier. The Emperor did not live to see the bloody end of his world. But his loyal and conflicted Galician subject Moses Joseph Roth did.