Kafka wrote the Rede über die Jiddische Sprach as an introduction to a declamation by Löwy, actor and leader of aYiddish travelling troop from Lemberg, Warsaw. Philipsen finds this preface noteworthy, not in the least because it sketches compactly and accurately the linguistic phenomenon of Yiddish. Kafka defines the central idea of his introduction as the fear of the ‘Jargon’, fear with a certain resistance at its basis. With this statement Kafka broaches the hermeneutic problem, deeply grained into psyche of the Jewish audience, which places the linguistic dilemma of untranslatability in a wider frame. Kafka’s concise historical and structural analysis of the Yiddish phenomenon and the ambivalent relationship between Yiddish and German creates an open space in which the tracks and borders of translation meet. The Law of Untranslatability seems to coincide with the discursive and existential structures and borders (Toit/Tod) that cannot be transgressed but have to be faced, according to Kafka.