Orientalism and the Jews

At the turn of the twenty-first century, in spite of growing globalization there remains in the world a split between the West and the rest. The manner in which this split has been imagined and represented in Western civilization has been the subject of intense cross-disciplinary scrutiny, much of it under the rubric of “orientalism.” This debate, sparked by the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism identifies the “Orient” as the Islamic world and to a lesser extent Hindu India. “Orientalism” signifies the way the West imagined this terrain. Going beyond Said’s framework, in their introduction to the volume, Kalmar and Penslar argue that orientalism is based on the Christian West’s attempts to understand and manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others—Muslims and Jews. According to the editors, Jews have almost always been present whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East; and the Western image of the Muslim Orient has been formed and continues to be formed in inextricable conjunction with Western perceptions of the Jewish people. Bringing together essays by an array of international scholars in a wide range of disciplines, Orientalism and the Jews demonstrates that, since the Middle Ages, Jews have been seen in the Western world as both occidental and oriental. Jews formed the model for medieval depictions of Muslim warriors. Representations of biblical Jews in early modern Europe provided essential sustenance for Western fictions about the Muslim world. And many of the Western protagonists of imperialism “discovered” real or imaginary Jews wherever their expeditions took them. Today orientalist attitudes by Israelis target not only Arabs but also the mizrahi (“oriental”) Israelis with roots in the Arab world as Others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684580606

Book preview

Orientalism and the Jews

edited by

Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS

Brandeis University Press

© 2005 Brandeis University Press

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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58465-411-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68458-060-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Orientalism and the Jews / edited by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar.— 1st ed.

   p.   cm.—(The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jews series) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1–58465– 410 – 4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 1–58465– 411–2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Orientalism—History. 2. Orientalism in art. 3. Orientalism in literature.

4. Jews—History. 5. Jews in art. 6. Jews in literature. 7. Jews—Public opinion. 8. Public opinion—Western countries. I. Kalmar, Ivan Davidson.

II. Penslar, Derek Jonathan. III. Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry series (Unnumbered)

DS61.85.O753 2004

909′.04924—dc22

2004017416

Chapter 9 is from Eran Kaplan, Jewish Radical Right. ©. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.

The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series

Jehuda Reinharz, General Editor

Sylvia Fuks Fried, Associate Editor

The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, established by a gift to Brandeis University from Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber, is dedicated to the memory of the victims of Nazi persecutions between 1933 and 1945. The Institute seeks to study the history and culture of European Jewry in the modern period. The Institute has a special interest in studying the causes, nature, and consequences of the European Jewish catastrophe within the contexts of modern European diplomatic, intellectual, political, and social history.

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Orientalism and the Jews

Contents

Acknowledgments

Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction

Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar

1. Jesus Did Not Wear a Turban: Orientalism, the Jews, and Christian Art

Ivan Davidson Kalmar

2. Placing the Jews in Late Medieval English Literature

Suzanne Conklin Akbari

3. The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse

Tudor Parfitt

4. The Kaifeng Jew Hoax: Constructing the Chinese Jew

Zhou Xun

5. Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze

John M. Efron

6. To Pray Like a Dervish: Orientalist Discourse in Arnold Zweig’s The Face of East European Jewry

Noah Isenberg

7. Rejecting Zion, Embracing the Orient: The Life and Death of Jacob Israel De Haan

Michael Berkowitz

8. Between East and West: Zionist Revisionism as a Mediterranean Ideology

Eran Kaplan

9. Orientalism and Jewish National Art: The Case of Bezalel

Dalia Manor

10. The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin

11. Broadcast Orientalism: Representations of Mizrahi Jewry in Israeli Radio, 1948–1967

Derek J. Penslar

12. "We’re Not Jews": Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature

Sander L. Gilman

Notes

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and Victoria University in the University of Toronto for supporting the preparation and publication of this manuscript. Many of the chapters grew out of presentations at a conference on Orientalism and the Jews. This conference, held in Toronto in May 2001, was sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught Foundation, the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies (University of Toronto and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), the University of Toronto (Victoria College, Victoria University, and the Department of Anthropology), and the Leopold Zunz Center for the Study of European Jewry at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg.

Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction

IVAN DAVIDSON KALMAR AND DEREK J. PENSLAR

At the turn of the twenty-first century we are painfully aware that in spite of growing globalization there remains in the world a split between the West and the rest. The manner in which this split has been imagined and represented in Western civilization has been the subject of intense cross-disciplinary scrutiny, much of it under the rubric of orientalism. The term orientalism has in this debate referred to the Western image of the Orient, usually with a focus on the worlds of Islam (and not, as the uninitiated might suppose, the Far East). In this book we maintain that orientalism has always been not only about the Muslims but also about the Jews. We believe that the Western image of the Muslim Orient has been formed, and continues to be formed in inextricable conjunction with Western perceptions of the Jewish people.

The major objective of this volume, consequently, is to demonstrate the urgency of making connections between the study of orientalism and the study of Jewish history. We seek to throw light on these connections, to raise new questions relevant to both fields of inquiry, and to stimulate future research. Each contribution—written, we hasten to add, from a variety of vantage points, not all of which necessarily agree with the editors’—has been selected not so much because it says the last word on its subject, but rather in order to invite further discussion and expansion.

Central to all debate on orientalism and the Jews is that, historically, Jews have been seen in the Western world variably and often concurrently as occidental and oriental. Even today, when the Jews are generally thought of as a Western people, that perception is nuanced by the fact that Israel (home not only to Jews of European background but also to millions of oriental Jews and Arabs) is located in the East. More important, the Jews are identified, both by themselves and by the Western world, with the ancient Israelites who established themselves, and the monotheistic tradition, in that same oriental location. It is this latter identification with the biblical lands that allowed Jews to be seen during the centuries as an oriental people, a perception challenged only in the twentieth century as the result of Jewish-Arab strife in the Middle East. The German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder expressed the once standard Western conception of the Jews when he wrote that they were the Asiatics of Europe.

Orientalist representations of the Jews have always been at the very center of orientalist discourse (which we believe to be based historically in the Christian West’s attempts to understand and to manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others). Strangely, perhaps one benefit of studying the Jews as a topic in orientalism may be discovering how much orientalism has been not only a modern Western or imperialist discourse, but also a politico-theological, Christian one.

The Literature: Orientalism, Colonialism, Zionism, and Beyond

Following the 1978 publication of Orientalism by Edward Said, the overwhelming importance of the Muslim Orient to Western history was driven home by a good number of excellent contributions by Said himself (he died in 2003), his followers, and his critics. In contrast, orientalist sensibilities about Jews may appear to be a minor issue, comfortably treated as a relatively autonomous appendix to what really matters.

The historical record, however, does not justify such an ancillary role for orientalist representations of the Jews. In fact, Jews have almost always been present in one way or another whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East. How biblical Jews formed, since the Middle Ages, the model for Christian depictions of Muslims is demonstrated in this volume by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, who deals with medieval English literature, and Ivan Davidson Kalmar, who surveys the history of Christian orientalism in the visual arts.

The heyday of orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by even greater concern with the Jews. It is important to note that the modern versions of imperialism and antisemitism were both born at about the same time, in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were other correlations between imperialism and the image of the Jews: Tudor Parfitt’s essay provides an astonishing range of examples of how many of the Western protagonists of imperialism discovered real or imaginary Jews, including the Lost Tribes of Israel, almost wherever their expeditions took them. Xun Zhou details the process as it affected China and its supposed Jews (who, she argues boldly, were nothing but a Western invention encouraged by enterprising locals). Last but not least, Zionism developed in the context of, and in many ways as a response to, this twin concern in the gentile West with both overseas expansion and the Jewish people. Today modern Israel is at the vortex of turbulent East-West relations and (as Dalia Manor, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, and Derek Penslar point out) orientalist attitudes by Israelis target not only Arabs but also the Mizrahi (oriental) Israelis with roots in the Arab world.

Given, then, that Western discourses about Muslims have almost always had something to do with Western discourses about Jews, why has more work not been done on orientalism and the Jews? Of the historical correlations just listed (and there are others, as we shall soon see) only that between orientalism and Zionism has received vigorous attention by scholars.

There can be little doubt that one reason is political. Edward Said was a leading spokesperson for the Palestinian cause, while most Jewish Studies specialists identify with Israel. Said was very likely right when he complained that many of his critics have seen in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism, support Israel and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism.¹ On the other side, there is a converse lack of enthusiasm for talking about the Jews among students of orientalism. This, too, is partly politically motivated.

Said himself well recognized, as would anyone familiar with the facts, that Jews as well as Muslims had been the target of orientalism; indeed, he called orientalism the Islamic branch of anti-Semitism.² Focusing on Jews as targets rather than perpetrators of orientalism, however, decreases (in rhetorical terms though certainly not in logical ones) the effectiveness of the argument that Zionism is a form of anti-Arab orientalism. It is, therefore, perhaps understandable if writers primarily concerned with a critique of Zionism overlook other aspects of the relationship between orientalism and the Jews. They generally see Zionism as an example of orientalist ideology in the service of Western colonialism, and consequently link the creation of Israel to the West’s imperial expansion in the Orient. In Said’s own opus, his essay Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims set the tone for this type of argument, which has also been popular with Israeli scholars of the post-Zionist school, such as Baruch Kimmerling, Ilan Pappé, Gershon Shafir, and Ronen Shamir.³

As Derek J. Penslar has argued elsewhere, the link between Zionism and colonialism is undeniable. On the other hand, there is more to Zionism than that: it has also been a response to racist discrimination, and the discrimination has often been expressed in orientalist terms.⁴ Martin Kramer has argued that nineteenth-century European Jews questioned the East-West dichotomy because it excluded them, as Easterners, from the national polity.⁵ Such questioning is also evident in the attitudes to Islam of such nineteenth-century Jewish thinkers as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher, as explored by John Efron in this volume. Also in this volume, Raz-Krakotzkin challenges, it is true, the conclusions Kramer drew from the record to deny the complicity of Zionism in anti-Arab orientalism. Yet—as Raz-Krakotzkin’s contribution also makes clear—there can be no doubt that in the nineteenth century the Jews were much more the targets than the perpetrators of orientalism. To reconcile this fact with Said’s emphasis on orientalism as a colonialist ideology, some authors, most notably Susannah Heschel and Jonathan Hess, have produced interesting work that explains the parallels between imperialist and anti-Jewish orientalism on the premise that European Jews were a kind of colonized population, subject to quasi-colonial domination by the Gentiles.

Hess provides some concrete support for the Jews-as-colonials argument. The German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) was an orientalist and an anti-Jewish polemicist. Hess notes that Michaelis came up with a colonialist solution to the problem of the Jews as the Asiatic residents of Europe. He suggested turning Europe’s Jews into real colonials—by exporting them to sugar islands in the West Indies, where they would labor to benefit the German economy.

Hess’s work, while demonstrating the value of the colonialist paradigm, also points beyond its limits. As anyone examining the sources must realize, orientalist depiction of the Jews was common in the late eighteenth century (and indeed, as several essays in this volume demonstrate, much before). Michaelis’s proposed deportation of the Jews to the Caribbean was a quirk: clearly it did not motivate more than a small part of the debate on Jews as orientals, a debate that was common to all Europe and to a lesser extent America. Hess posits that in eighteenth-century Germany there were two parallel orientalisms, one dealing with the Jews and the other with the Muslims. Though these parallel lines meet in Michaelis’s idiosyncratic sugar islands suggestion, the broader question of what they had in common is not answered. It is unlikely that orientalist discourses with identical features—excluding their object as Other, presenting it as either eternally unchanging or as degenerate, feminizing it, and so on—could have developed in the West regarding the Muslims and the Jews in unconnected ways. As Bryan Turner put it, there have been two related discourses for Semites: one about the Jews, the other about Muslims and Arabs.⁶ But what is the link between them?

While studies of orientalism and the Jews on a more or less Saidian pattern—whether looking at Zionism as orientalism or at the history of antisemitism as colonialism—can be crucial to our understanding of specific issues such as were investigated by the authors mentioned above, the full depth and breadth of the connection between orientalism and the Jews reaches well beyond the limits of the Saidian paradigm, especially as it has been developed in the last two decades or so.

In this respect, the assumption that orientalism can be entirely subsumed as a specific instance under the general topic of colonial discourse has been a hindrance. Many writers have defined orientalism not by its formal content as a set of Western representations of the Orient, but in functionalist terms as a discourse of western domination. The tendency has been to minimize differences and maximize similarities and historical connections between examples of Western domination over various parts of the world. To some authors, indeed, any discourse of Otherness that is associated with domination merits the label of orientalism. Ernest J. Wilson III, for example, writes of African-Americans as targets of America’s internal orientalism.⁷ A more complex example is Ella Shohat’s position, according to which American colonial discourse was constituted by orientalism; the colonial discourse of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and East and South Asia generated a specific form of orientalist discourse directed at North Africa and West Asia during the later part of the imperial era.⁸ There is, then, a broader orientalism that does not (yet) have much to do with the Orient, and a more specific orientalism that does. Both are Western discourses of domination, constructing an Other that will be, or is already, ruled by the West.

This broadening of Said’s Orientalism to the study of colonialism in general as a discursive phenomenon has already proved to be among the most important achievements of scholarship at the turn of the twenty-first century. Many of the scholars furthering this line of inquiry (though sometimes in ways emphatically contrary to Said’s) themselves have non-Western, colonial antecedents and are writing from a postcolonial position as residents either of the former colonies or of their diasporas in the West. Some, like Leila Abu-Lughod or Talal Asad stem, as Said did, from the Arab world, but most are South Asian: Aijaz Ahmed, Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Spivak, Gauri Viswanathan, and others. Apart from various intellectual reasons, these authors’ subcontinental filiation may be why they have shied away from the term orientalism, generally preferring to focus on local Indian conditions in the context of global influences, with potential comparisons made not only to the hub of Said’s Orient—Islamic North Africa, and West Asia—but to any other part of the Third World and even the Third World diaspora in the West.

The project of subsuming orientalism under the rubric of imperialism, however, has important limitations. Orientalism has certainly played a large role in the building of Western empires. But if there is nothing other to orientalism than that, if orientalism is seen merely as a special case of imperial domination, then why maintain a separate topic of research labeled orientalism at all? (Indeed, in the last decades of his life, Said himself preferred to focus on imperialism and colonialism rather than orientalism per se.) Orientalism is an instance of colonial discourse, but it is also more than that. This holds true for orientalism in general, and certainly for orientalism where it concerns the Jews.

The Jewish Response to Orientalism

Jews responded to the anti-Jewish orientalism of the late eighteenth to early twentieth century in three different ways (typical, we believe, for other targets of orientalism, including Muslims, as well): first, by rejecting it wholesale; second, by idealizing and romanticizing the Orient and themselves as its representatives; and third, by setting up traditional Jews as oriental, in contrast to modernized Jewry which was described as Western. The wholesale rejection of an oriental identity for the Jews was common among segments of both liberal and orthodox Jewry in Europe; it does not particularly concern us here. A more nuanced rejection, among right-wing Zionists who opted for an Italian-centered, Mediterranean identity for the Jewish state, is however explored in the fascinating article on this little-known topic by Eran Kaplan.

The romantic self-image of a noble oriental Jew can be seen in part in Abraham Geiger as explored by Susannah Heschel⁹ and in this volume by John Efron. Efron’s portrayal of Heinrich Graetz and Ignaz Goldziher fill in more of the picture, as does Michael Berkowitz’s study of the enigmatic Dutch-Jewish-Hebrew poet, Jakob de Haan. Outside this volume the reader might want to consult Ivan Davidson Kalmar’s study of the Moorish-style synagogue, a building style that encodes modernizing Jewry’s romantic image of the medieval world of Islam.¹⁰ Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany also includes material that may be relevant.¹¹

The internal orientalism of Jew versus Jew, practiced by modernizing, Western or Westernized, Ashkenazic Jews vis-à-vis their more traditional brethren was not unrelated to the romantic self-orientalization just mentioned. Ismar Schorsch and others have shown that the identification of nineteenth-century liberal Jewry with Judaism in medieval Muslim Spain was to a significant degree a way to avoid the stigma of identifying with the Ostjuden of eastern Europe.¹² For the most part the half-Asiatic Ostjuden were abhorred in, paradoxically, typically orientalist terms; nonetheless, they too could be the target of romantic orientalism. Of more relevance to recent history is another version of Jew-toward-Jew orientalism: that of the Ashkenazic Jews (originating in the West) toward the oriental Jews in Israel. A considerable part of this volume is dedicated to deepening our understanding of this internal orientalism of the Western Jews versus the east European and the Mizrahi Jew. Noah Isenberg’s study of Arnold Zweig’s work expands in important ways on the theme of the Ostjude as in some romantic sense oriental, a subject that had previously received attention from Paul Mendes-Flohr, Daniel Schroeter, Steven Aschheim, David Biale, and other scholars. As for the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relationship, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin surveys the work of Ella Shohat and others who draw parallels between orientalism directed toward Jews by Christians and orientalism directed toward Mizrahim by Ashkenazim.

Clearly, romantic Jewish counter-orientalism as well as internal Jewish orientalism toward Eastern Jews of one kind or another has something to do with the colonial context of orientalism. Equally clearly, the colonial context is not the issue that is central to it.

If the transition from orientalism to postcolonialism has left important elements of our topic of orientalism and the Jews by the side, the same is true of another (and related) switch from Said’s original reading of orientalism as positing a rigid structural opposition between East and West, to a new recognition that here as elsewhere boundaries are flexible and permeable. Recent work has focused in Turnerian fashion on the liminal region between Occident and Orient as a most productive source of orientalist discourse (and performance) and the counterdiscourses it generates. Following upon the work of Frantz Fanon and drawing on the Lacanian process of subjectification through the incomplete singling out of an Other, Homi Bhabha has been perhaps the most effective proponent of the thesis that Western and colonial/postcolonial subjects define their selfhood through the same set of discourses—in our case, orientalism. The result are hybrid discourses of identity that may reflect social and cultural patterns that are no longer easily recognized as purely occidental or oriental.¹³

It is perhaps surprising that scholars concerned with postcolonial hybridity have paid so little attention to the Jews (and vice versa). Indeed, in this volume Sander Gilman argues that, for the multicultural writers whose works are so much the focus of postcolonial literary studies, the Jews seem to be the eternal exception: a people who, far from being hybrid, have an essence that is both unchanging and distinctive (as have all orientals in the orientalist conception).

Yet if ever there was a people that lives at the borders between cultures and civilizations it is the Jews. In the history of the modern West, the Jews have certainly been regarded in accordance with the formula Bhabha used to describe the westernized colonial: Almost the same [i.e., almost Western] but not quite.¹⁴ Moreover, we suspect that, at some level, the liminal region among Arab/Muslim, Jew, and Christian—what Jacques Derrida and others have called the Abrahamic¹⁵—must be central to any understanding not only of the Jewish aspects of orientalism, but of orientalism tout court. Derrida speaks of "the fold [pli] of this Abrahamic or Ibrahimic moment, folded over and again [replié] by the Gospels between the two other ‘religions of the Book.’¹⁶ This volume’s essays by Akbari and Kalmar show how from medieval times Jews and Muslims constituted a silent referent for each other in Western texts and art. Other authors, as we have said, explore how in Israel today this explosive mixture of the Jewish and the Arab is the stuff of relations between the dominant Ashkenazi elite and the Mizrahim who (like Derrida himself) combine Jewish identity with roots in the Arab world. In Derridean terms, the Jew and the Arab are always traces of the other when only one of the pair is addressed. Touching on both simultaneously causes an explosive and therefore always scattered, diffuse, and never completely decipherable, eruption of the unspeakable" into representation.

For the reasons listed above, although both the colonial/postcolonial and the related hybridity paradigm of research on orientalism stand to profit from incorporating the relationship between Jews and orientalism, we emphasize that the current volume is not meant to be primarily a response to the existing literature on orientalism and postcolonialism. Apart from the fact that we considered it preferable at this stage to establish the breadth of the issue without prior theoretical, political, and other restrictions, we recognize, too, that the existing paradigms may have to be broadened to do justice to the historical facts.

One area deserving of more serious attention is the role of religion as one of the primary referents of orientalist discourse. Indeed, it is the Christian religious tradition that forms the missing link explaining the necessary, rather than accidental, connection in orientalism between representations of Muslims and representations of Jews.

Clearly, discourses about the Islamic world were what most interested Said in Orientalism, and Muslimism might have been a more correct, if also more awkward, term for his subject matter. Yet that the oriental Other Said’s book deals with was for the most part an Islamic Other gets much less play than would seem to be merited by the facts. Here this underrepresentation of Islam is the consequence of Said’s underrepresentation of Christianity as a major (and perhaps historically the principal) factor in orientalism. True, Said realized that present-day Orientalism was a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and reformed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian super-naturalism.¹⁷ But Said was content to leave the implications of this aperçu more or less unexplored: he no more than touches, for example, on the missionarizing rhetoric of imperialism, and minimizes the personal involvement of missionaries along with colonialists and imperialists. Was he as a Christian protecting his religion from the charge of complicity in orientalism? Or was he just, as a secular thinker, underestimating the deep power of religion over discourse both in the East and in the West? The answer matters little. The importance of recognizing the Christian foundations of orientalism is an intellectual necessity, dictated by the facts rather than by elements of any scholar’s personality.

Recognizing how important Christianity has been to orientalism might actually have helped Said to justify a decision that otherwise appears rather problematic: excluding the Far East from the focus of his analyses. Among the good reasons for the exclusion would be that the dominant religions of China or Japan do not share the Judaic roots of Christianity and Islam. Consequently their ideological otherness was of a very different nature from that of the Muslim world—or of the Jews. Western discourses about the Far East are not part of the Abrahamic. Western discourses about the Jews are.

In this volume the Christian foundations and enduring Christian undertones of orientalism become clear in the contributions by Akbari, Parfitt, Zhou, Kalmar, and Raz-Krakotzkin. To fill in the picture, the reader unfamiliar with the issue should also consult James Pasto’s remarkable investigation of the roots of modern orientalism in German biblical criticism (in the context of the Jewish Question in Europe)¹⁸ as well as the above-mentioned body of work by Jacques Derrida on the Abrahamic.¹⁹ In his preface to the collection of Derrida’s essays the editor, Gil Anidjar, stresses the link between Islam as the West’s political enemy and Judaism as its religious one. Indeed, to those on whatever side of the political or intellectual spectrum who object to linking Jews to orientalism we can do no better than give them Gil Anidjar’s advice: Read the incomparable, Shylock and Othello.²⁰ To understand orientalism, we must read discourses about Muslims and Jews together, however embarrassing or disturbing the task may be politically, religiously, or emotionally.

This is not to say that orientalism was the same regardless of whether it dealt with the Orient itself or with the Jews as the orientals of Europe. The exact nature of the relationship between orientalist images of Jews and Muslims has undergone, like orientalism itself, substantial historical variation. One has to guard against positing eternal semiotic systems that survive regardless of the social and political context. Although Said professes to be a follower of Foucault, his account of orientalism diverged radically from the historiographic habits of his professed master. Foucault, who focused on radical discontinuities in history, would not have subscribed to Said’s view of orientalism as spanning antiquity, the Middle Ages, modernity, and beyond. Indeed, his essentialist and idealistic conception of a timeless orientalism permanently inherent in some sort of a Western mind has been accused of preventing Said from formulating an effective anti-imperialist position.²¹

Orientalism itself can be regarded as a form into which various contents can be cast. We shall suggest below a periodization of orientalism in general and of its relationship to representations of the Jews, rooted in continuities and discontinuities in the history of the Western world. In this sense it is more like what Foucault called language (a finite set of principles that can generate an infinite number of discourses), rather than discourse, a word that Foucault used to refer to a finite corpus of historically located texts.²² (We shall, however, continue to follow Said’s lead in referring to orientalism as a discourse—meaning ways of representing the Orient—as this has now become a common practice.) Looking at orientalism as language rather than discourse would open it up to theorizing in terms of the Bakhtinian notion of slovo. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, slovo, a Russian term quite homologous with the French parole and typically translated as the word, is a stage on which changing and competing, socially conditioned views are played out.²³ And indeed, orientalism has, like words, kept a continuity of form while recharging itself periodically with new content.

New ideas require new language at times; more often they take hold more easily if clad in familiar forms. New content infuses old form, and the earlier content does not quite disappear but leaves traces that are recognizable in the new. When imperialism became the new content of orientalism the old Christian content continued to structure its form. Imperialist rhetoric continued to be accompanied by Christian rhetoric, and the talk of waking up the dormant East through Western intervention was often accompanied by the proselytizing discourse of missionary societies eager to bring true religion to the ignorant oriental Muslims and Jews.

A Periodization

We suggest a periodization of orientalism that recognizes its changing content as consonant with changes in the geopolitical and economic relations between East and West as well as between Christians, Muslims and Jews. We distinguish four periods. First, the Saracen period, from the rise of Islam until the end of the fourteenth century, when comparisons between Muslims and Jews were founded on religious grounds with no necessary geographic correlation, and the Islamic enemy was referred to generically as the Saracen. Second, the Turkish period, from the late fourteenth until the late eighteenth century, when the prototypical Muslim in the Western imagination was a Turk. Third, the Arab period, from the late eighteenth century until the 1960s, when the Turk’s place as the stereotype of the oriental was replaced by the Arab and specifically the Bedouin; orientalism was characterized by both romantic notions and progressively more openly racist vituperations; and both secular anti-Semitism and Zionism were organized as social and political movements. Fourth, the postcolonial period, when discourse about Muslims becomes primarily political and only Jews with roots in the Arab world continue—though most of them now live in Israel and the Western world—to be called oriental (Mizrahi). These periods overlap greatly. They also show considerable internal development. All relate to the changing sociopolitical and economic realities of the relationship between the Christian West and the Muslim East, as well as Christian relations with the Jews.

Proto-Orientalism: The Saracen Period

In the proto-orientalist imagination of the early Middle Ages, the Jew was imagined in terms of the oriental location of the Holy Land before the Muslim. The East was at the time constructed mythologically and theologically rather than ethnographically. It was the site of sacred biblical history, and also of apocalyptic events heralding the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. To the extent that Western Christians had a clear vision of the contemporary Orient, they imagined it as the locus of the Roman Empire of the East, the Christian realm that had a precarious hold on the sites of Christian history, including at times the Holy Land. To the East beyond these sites, which Western Crusaders succeeded in holding from time to time, were alien peoples inhabiting murky magical lands. The legend of Prester John, the hero who was to come from faraway East to revitalize Christian faith, illustrates the belief that the Orient continued, even after the death of Christ, to be imbued with a holiness that was capable of recharging a spiritually lax Christendom to its West (it also highlights the fact that the Christian presence in the Orient was part of Western Christendom’s image of the East). This eschatological Orient had everything to do with the fact that it was thought to have witnessed the events of the Hebrew Bible and the life of Jesus, the King of the Jews.

True, from almost the beginning of Islam in the seventh century, Jerusalem and the biblical lands came under Muslim control. But this event did not immediately define the image of the Orient as Muslim. For one thing, Constantinople rather than Jerusalem was the major city of the Orient in the Western mind, and it remained in Christian hands until 1453. For another, even under Muslim rule there was a substantial Christian presence in the Holy Land, which the Crusaders attempted to use as a tool for the establishment of political domination. They were seldom very successful (with the Latin Kingdom, 1099–1187, the most notable exception) but they won enough skirmishes to make the idea of a Christian-ruled Palestine appear feasible to reasonable Christians until as late as the fourteenth century.

Although the Crusaders were fighting for a real land and their decline has typically been blamed on venality (they plundered Christian Constantinople) and carnal sin (many died of sexually transmitted diseases) they conceptualized their fight in biblical-historical rather than geopolitical terms. Akbari shows how some medieval tales of the Siege of Jerusalem conflate conquest by the Crusaders with conquest by the Romans, equating in complex ways the Christians with the Romans on one hand, and the Jews with the Muslims on the other. There was in these accounts, however, no indication that the Other under siege, be it Jew or Muslim, was thought of as oriental, that what was under siege was the Orient. The Saracen forces were at least as firmly established (and more menacing) in the southern and southwestern than in the eastern Mediterranean. Imaginative geography, as