The Polish Jew, writer, and artist Bruno Schulz wrote that the purpose of art is “to plumb the depths of what has no name.” That certainly describes the fiction of Franz Kafka, whom Schulz translated. Kafka attempted to fathom psychosocial forces that are visible only in their effects: agglomerations and collisions of charged human particles caught in their massive gravitational fields. The characters of his novel The Trial orbit a terrifically opaque organization: the court, whose innumerable ranks of anonymous officials apply unpublished laws to bring unspecified charges against citizens who, apart from periodic interrogations, are tried and sentenced in absentia, in secret proceedings. Yet Joseph K, The Trial’s protagonist, is the only character in the book who explicitly questions the court’s authority, and he does so only briefly.

　　Kafka writes that K “lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force.” But K, who is stripped and executed in a stone quarry at the end of the book, at one point sees a picture of Justice that a painter is fashioning according to the instructions of the court. His crayon drawing portrays the figure of Justice as blindfolded and flying with the aid of wings on her feet—a bad combination, K remarks, because “Justice must stand quite still, or else the scales will waver and a just verdict will become impossible.” The painter explains that the image depicts “Justice and the goddess of Victory in one.” As he adds shading to the drawing, the figure begins to look “exactly like a goddess of the Hunt in full cry.”

　　This monstrous transformation of justice is nothing less than a prophecy of the replacement of ordinary legal rights by official bureaucracies of murder under Fascism and Communism. And it is the reemergence of bloodlust under the guise of justice that should most concern readers of The Trial today. Many people, grouped according to various criteria—economic, racial, ethnic, religious, sexuality—have been judged and harshly punished by their societies since Kafka’s death in 1924. But the Jews, endlessly confronted by charges that are unanswerable because they shift to fit changing circumstances, lead the list. As with the defendants prosecuted by the court, every judgment of them is provisional; every case against them, subject to being reopened.

　　The extreme disfiguration of Justice that Kafka describes presupposes a degree of societal complicity in tyranny that leaves almost no one with clean hands. In fact, The Trial implicates virtually everyone in know-nothing attitudes and self-serving behaviors that are advantageous to the court. In the book’s opening scene, K is in bed when a strange man enters his rented room. He turns out to be one of two warders who’ve been sent to arrest him; and although they can’t produce a warrant, they are confident that the “high authorities” they serve have made no mistake. The warders confiscate his nightshirt and underwear (which, they make clear, they will keep for themselves) and eat his breakfast. K is then called into the room of the absent Fraülein Brüstner, another lodger with whom he is barely acquainted, where an inspector sits at her desk, and three clerks from the bank where K works are going through her photographs.

　　These functionaries claim to know nothing about his case, not even whether he has been charged with an offense, and they seem quite bored with their work. The whole time, some neighbors watch K with intense curiosity from their windows. Kafka thus describes a society in which corruption is blatant, warrantless detentions are routine, and there is no expectation of privacy—a situation that K has evidently been conditioned to accept, judging from his feeble protests.

　　Scapegoating is an equal opportunity activity; a glance at social media makes it clear that anyone can participate, anyone can be targeted.

　　Yet K himself exploits these circumstances in an ugly way. Having missed his weekly visit to a prostitute, and noting his landlady’s gratuitous complaint that she’s seen Brüstner on the street with two different gentlemen, he stays up late waiting for the young woman. Ignoring her protests, he insists on entering her room on the pretext of reenacting the way the inspector commandeered her quarters. To her dismay, he awakens the landlady’s nephew when he shouts “Joseph K!” as the inspector had. When she insists that he leave, he suggests that she besmirch her reputation by claiming that he assaulted her while she was alone with him in her room. After she tells him that “I need more than ever to be left in peace,” he kisses the weary and defeated woman on the lips and all over her face. We are later told that K “knew that Fraülein Brüstner was an ordinary little typist who could not resist him for long.” Kafka could hardly be clearer: moved, perhaps, by some mimetic instinct, K violates the peace and privacy of his relatively powerless neighbor, doing to her what the officers of the court did to him.

　　Indeed, victim and victimizer, court and society, are virtually indistinguishable in The Trial. A preliminary inquiry into K’s case takes place in a room in a residential building, one of many “high grey tenements inhabited by poor people”; all the court’s offices turn out to be in such buildings and neighborhoods. Finding that the atmosphere in the packed room resembles “a local political meeting,” K proceeds to grandstand, playing the role of defender of the people against an unjust system. He tells the examining magistrate that the proceedings are “only a trial if I recognize it as such”; declares that “I take up my stand” for “other people”; and, elated at the “breathless attention” of his audience, claims to have uncovered a “great organization” that persecutes innocent persons. But he storms out of the hearing when he discovers that everyone in the room is wearing the same badges as the magistrate. It seems that the court reflects, and probably inflames, the inquisitorial and punitive passions of the public.

　　The painter who depicts Justice later tells K that even the debauched, depraved girls who eavesdrop outside his door belong to the court—for “everything belongs to the court.” That arguably includes K, whose complaint about the thieving warders earns them a seemingly endless whipping in a storage closet at his bank—a punishment that, one complains, destroys his prospects for promotion to the rank of whipper, and which K covers up to protect his own career. Little wonder that The Trial’s gloomy rooms thick with smoke, where low ceilings force people to bend their knees and bow their heads as if in shame, give the impression of a society polluted by universal guilt.

　　What, then, is the court? The great difficulty of interpreting Kafka stems from the fact that the experience of his protagonists is as fluid and obscure as a dream. Dreams are intrinsically underdetermined and ambiguous; even to recount one is to give its vaporous evanescence a spurious definiteness. To be sure, the court reflects the modern administrative state’s impersonality, inaccessibility, and bureaucratic compartmentalization, just as its fickleness—it might acquit a defendant and rearrest him the same day—captures something of that shapeshifting, media-driven abstraction, the public. But the state and the public are merely partial manifestations of the mysterious depths at the heart of The Trial.

　　Two related features of dreams nevertheless offer clues to the interpretation of The Trial. Dreams give free play to extremes of anger, hatred, fear, and sexual desire that are ordinarily kept in check during waking hours. What is more, the dreamer usually accepts without question circumstances and events that reveal themselves to be contradictory and absurd in the light of wakeful reflection. That’s because the logic of dreams is that of what Sigmund Freud called the it (das Es, the id): the basement of the psyche where its rawest impulses lurk. As everyone knows, facts, contradictions, and rational arguments are irrelevant to someone in the grip of a great passion; and societies in which they cease to matter have entered the realm of delusion and nightmare.

　　I suggest that the court, whose operations are notably opaque and contradictory, symbolizes any organization which, by maintaining a veneer of liberality and procedural, rule-bound rationality around a core of primal aggression, convinces people to accept the logic of dreams. K is free to go about his normal activities after his arrest, a degree of leniency that might be confused for admirable broad-mindedness. Then, too, the court has the appearance of a rational organization: its structure is hierarchical and bureaucratic, in accordance with modern management science. Regrettably, there are mistakes, and even some corruption, at the lower levels; but acknowledging these facts merely highlights the scrupulousness of the higher ones. A similar strategy is now followed by all sorts of organizations—political parties, media outlets, human rights watchdogs, international bodies, NGOs—that claim to be champions of justice, yet disgracefully omit facts and countenance blatant inconsistencies so that they may stoke animosity toward their preferred scapegoats. And today, their favorite targets are Israel and the Jews.

　　In the painter’s depiction, Justice has wings; it is in motion. Instead of standing still, it becomes “social justice”—Justice as social and political activism. In this guise, it merges with the goddess of Victory, because it is concerned with achieving goals that are incidental to its proper work of distinguishing right from wrong in each case that comes before it. But it must still maintain legal formalities that constrain its impulses; it must provide arguments that ground its decisions and findings in the law. The final stage, the transformation of Justice into the goddess of the Hunt, occurs when it is possible to abandon these trappings of reason altogether—when naked aggression needs no justification.

　　Kafka’s image of the metamorphosis of Justice captures the progression of antisemitism in the Internet age. Universities had been seedbeds of leftist activism for decades, and after the death of George Floyd in 2020, cultural institutions and corporations also began to promote racial equity, economic and environmental “justice,” trans rights, and a host of other causes. After the Hamas pogrom of 2023, these merged into an omnicause, in which the plight of the Palestinians assumed a leading role. Anti-Zionism exploded on campuses and among the young.

　　These developments have opened the floodgates to visceral Jew-hatred that is immune to refutation because it is packaged as entertainment. Politically extreme Internet streamers have monetized praise of Hitler and Holocaust denial by attracting millions of viewers who are thrilled by the mockery of moral norms as “pearl-clutching.” Social media algorithms that maximize user engagement on platforms like TikTok feed endless streams of “rage bait” rants and cartoonish, AI-generated videos of Jews and swastikas to anyone who clicks on similar content. Even worse, troll farms and AI bots create an illusion of broad popular consensus by filling the comment sections on such videos with approving remarks from nonexistent users: good-looking, ordinary American mothers and fathers who are concerned with what the Jews are doing to their country. As Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin have documented in their article “The Death of History,” young people are being memed into Jew-hatred, one 5-to-7 second clip at a time. And just like that, the oldest and ugliest hatred is made to look not only young and beautiful, but patriotic and cool.

　　In condemning the whole wretched reality it describes, the novel offers only a literary solution to the problem of thinly disguised aggression.

　　Does Kafka wish to suggest that K is a Jew? Kafka never uses the word “Jew” in his published fiction, but would it not be like him to indicate a central issue by an absence—by what is not said? There are, in any case, a few possible clues to K’s identity. He is arrested on his 30th birthday and executed on the eve of his 31st, which seems to connect his trial with attributes he inherited at birth—who he is, not what he’s done. The defendants K sees in the offices of the court “obviously belonged to the upper classes”; like K, a banker who “was in full career and rapidly becoming a rival even to the assistant manager,” most of Prague’s Jews during Kafka’s lifetime were ethnically German, middle- and upper-class professionals. But the most suggestive evidence concerning K’s identity is his resemblance to another, more famous Joseph.

　　The first thing the Bible tells us about Joseph is that he tended the flock with his brothers and “brought ill report of them to their father,” which some commentators take to mean that he slandered them. Joseph incites the hatred of his brothers by relating dreams in which they bow down to him, and they repay him by throwing him in a pit. Sold as a slave in Egypt to Potiphar, whose wife slanders him after he refuses to sleep with her. Pharaoh later takes him from prison and makes him his prime minister; in that office, he cleverly uses a great famine to consolidate the state’s power, stripping the Egyptians of silver, land, and livestock and turning them into pharaoh’s sharecroppers.

　　Like his biblical namesake, K is inclined obtusely to lord it over others. The Trial’s first sentence reads: “Someone must have slandered Joseph K, for without having done anything evil, he was arrested one morning.” Maybe so, but he himself is not above stooping to calumny: that very evening, he forces himself on Brüstner and proposes, with Potipharian presumption, that she slander herself. Like Joseph, K has sexual charisma; a washerwoman offers herself to him, and his lawyer explains that merely being accused makes men attractive to women. He is arrogant in his dealings with the court, just as Joseph was before his brothers. Like Joseph, he is an ambitious and capable administrator who boasts to his landlady of his importance at the bank, where he is chief clerk. And like Joseph, he incurs the strong animosity of the family he has; his uncle and onetime guardian harshly reproaches him for destroying his prospects by leaving a meeting of the chief clerk of the court to have sex with his lawyer’s mistress.

　　If K is a Jew, he is (like Kafka) an assimilated one, existing between two peoples—Czech-speaking Catholics and Yiddish-speaking Jews—and an outsider to both, much like Joseph in Egypt. And if his being a Jew figures in the court’s decision to single him out, K would, through his work at the bank, have aided and abetted the society that persecutes him based on the very identity he has rejected. The Trial would then be marked by something like the irony we see in the story of Joseph, who uses his energies to benefit the Israelites’ future oppressors—except that the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt was part of God’s plan for His chosen people, while in K’s case, the irony is purely tragic.

　　But why would Kafka shroud the question of K’s Jewishness in fog? Perhaps because doing so makes it more difficult to dismiss his premise of universal guilt. By enticing readers to try to ferret out an identity that K has deliberately or thoughtlessly disavowed, Kafka implicates them in the sordid work of the court—or, what is the same thing, of a nosy and suspicious public, whose sheer, anonymous mass makes its opinion the weightiest of all. And while “Jew” is an all-too-common value of x in the not-so-innocent question “Is s/he an x?”, it is by no means the only one. Scapegoating is an equal-opportunity activity; a glance at social media makes it clear that anyone can participate, anyone can be targeted.

　　What is to be done when bloodlust becomes socially acceptable? Thanks to social media and AI, that historically recurrent question has now returned with new urgency. The only solution Ferguson and Levin can think of is somehow to overcome our “wrathful impulses,” “short attention spans,” and addiction to “flattering lies”—something K couldn’t manage, even when his life depended on it. The Trial leaves us with little hope that we will be able to do so, not least because, in condemning the whole wretched reality it describes, the novel offers only a literary solution to the problem of thinly disguised aggression. For in the last analysis, Kafka’s writings are one great moral ledger; and when it comes to settling accounts, Der Prozess is the punishment.