Introduction ♦ 1

Introduction: The Cultural and

Historical Stabilities and Instabilities
of Jewish Orientalism
Ranen Omer-Sherman
University of Miami

My objective in soliciting the essays for this special issue of Shofar was to in-
crease the awareness among scholars of a wellspring of neglected affinities be-
tween the discursive field that the late Edward Said (1935–2003) identified
as “Orientalism” and what has been occurring with some urgency of late in
the field of Jewish Studies. Only recently have scholars begun to probe the
contours of what holds immense promise as one of the greatest potential lines
of inquiry for the future of a vigorous and self-interrogating Jewish Studies.1 I
heartily concur with Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar’s insistence that “oriental-
ism has always been not only about the Muslims but also about the Jews . . .
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.”2 Indeed, the key tropes of Orientalism evolved as crucial motifs em-

1
A year after the “Call for Papers” went out for this project, an essay collection edited
by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar entitled Orientalism and the Jews (Brandeis
University Press, 2005) first appeared; an important but by no means exhaustive collection,
it was the first of its kind but surely not the last. It must be a hopeful sign of the true vitality
and promise of this field that both volumes feature the work of different communities of
scholars, with no duplication. Both essay collections are exploratory as our shared topic is
huge and ranges widely.
2
Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Hanover
and London: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press, 2005), p. xiii.

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2 ♦ Ranen Omer-Sherman

bedded within Jewish self-fashioning much as they did within the discourses
of host cultures with significant populations of Jewish Others. This issue of
Shofar illuminates some of those crucial interstices, particularly in the realm of
literary research but in other spheres of representation too, and hopefully will
inspire still further investigations.
As a skeptical but engaged reader of Said (who is widely credited with
pioneering the field of contemporary postcolonial studies and much more that
has both invigorated and troubled academia in the last few decades), I have
long been provoked by a glaring blind spot in his Orientalism3 insofar as his cri-
tique of the Orient’s “imaginative geography” does not fully account for either
representations or the positions of Jews in Occidental culture. My sense of
necessity in soliciting innovative work from scholars able to demonstrate the
function and dynamic effect of Orientalism in Jewish cultural, social, and po-
litical life has been influenced in part by a new generation of Israeli critics such
as Judd Ne’eman who have begun to argue for the need to perceive that “one of
the roots of Zionism, and thus of Israeli cinema, that has not been appropri-
ately recognized was a hidden identification of the European Jew with Arab
Islamic peoples. As early as 1912, Martin Buber wrote that ‘while adopting
the customs and the languages of their hosting peoples, [European Jews] have
nevertheless considered themselves historically the children, and sometimes
even natives, of the Near Eastern Orient.’ The sensibility of the Orient that
the Jews always preserved in their hearts has become the deepest foundation
of Jewish self-consciousness.”4 As Ne’eman suggests, there is a striking con-
trast between Buber’s observation about the Jewish “sensibility of the Orient,”
his claim that it is “the deepest foundation of Jewish self-consciousness”—and
Said’s perception that Europeans consistently assume “a position of irreducible
opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own . . . failing
to see it as a human experience.”5 By largely omitting important German and
Russian scholarship, Said, whatever his motives, conveniently excluded a great
deal that might have significantly complicated his thesis, namely that, from
the eighteenth century on, the “West” (though he analyzes only the works of
English, French, and American scholars) produced distorted or static descrip-
tions of Arabs and Islamic culture in order to shore up its own false image and

3
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).
4
Judd Ne’eman, “The Jar and the Blade: Fertility Myth and Medieval Romance in Is-
raeli Political Films,” Prooftexts 22 (2002): 142.
5
Said, Orientalism, p. 328.

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Introduction ♦ 3

political or military ambitions. One of the prominent examples I have in mind

is the intellectually charged cosmopolitan environment of Weimar-era Berlin.
In his recent study of the strange life of Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey,
Tom Reiss calls this vital cultural milieu a virtual “hotbed of Jewish Oriental-
ists” who justified their vocations as interpreters and translators of the myste-
rious “East” by regarding themselves as the West’s resident Orientals.6 There
were even Zionists in that unique time and place who envisioned the historical
Muslim “Orient,” extending from Andalusia to the Middle East, as a realm
that had somehow eluded the ethnic and sectarian demarcations that had bru-
talized modernity. Early Zionist literary narratives in Europe and the United
States alike often shared a perception of the contemporary Jew as belonging to
“Eastern civilization.” For example, a fiery character in M. Z. Feierberg’s 1898
novella “Whither?” fervently declares that it is “unnatural that we Hebrews, we
Easterners, should throw in our lot with the West as we set out for the East.
. . . The great East will revive from its slumber and the accursed people will
march at its head, at the head of the living East.”7 Interestingly, at the same
time, the American Zionist Josephine Lazarus (sister of the proto-Zionist
poet Emma Lazarus) articulated a similarly mystical argument that the Judaic
Orient would redeem the faltering West. The “greatest gift” that the Ameri-
can Jew can offer means not the assimilated (what she called the “modernized,
occidentalized, liberalized”) Judaism of the congregations but rather the au-
thentic Oriental essence that is, she contends, the Jew’s eternal nature. In their
somewhat racialized discourse, Lazarus and other Zionists of her generation
concluded that ultimately the Jew belongs “more to the East than to the West.”8
By such a syncretic consolidation of the Eastern and Western worlds, Jewish
national romanticism was torn between advocacy for the smooth rationalism
of American democracy and for a discourse (that had already established its
enormous appeal for Emerson and other Transcendentalists) that proclaimed
the dismembered, supernatural “truth” of the Orient, the authority that only
antiquity and the essentialized exotic can bestow.

6
Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (New
York: Random House, 2005).
7
Ehud Ben-Ezer, Sleep Walkers and Other Stories: The Arab in Hebrew Fiction (Lon-
don: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), p. 4.
8
Josephine Lazarus, “Zionism and Americanism,” Menorah: Monthly Magazine for the
Jewish Home (May, 1905): 265.

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4 ♦ Ranen Omer-Sherman

I have in mind also Martin Kramer’s sadly neglected study The Jewish
Discovery of Islam,9 where we meet a plethora of late nineteenth-century Jew-
ish artists and writers who portrayed Islam and the East in highly sympathetic
ways, even as a potential cultural and spiritual corrective for a Europe grown
materialistic and smug. Similarly, in Palestine throughout the 1930s and 1940s
there were scholars at the Hebrew University who sought evidence from the
Bedouin’s practices and oral legends to prove that the contemporary nomads
were direct descendants of the twelve tribes or at least of later “Jews who had
abandoned their religion because of persecution,”10 hoping to provide utopian
bridges of connection between the Arabs and Jews of modern Palestine. Even
the great lexicographer of the reborn Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda,
adhered to this view, demonstrating the visible links between Arabic and He-
brew to “prove” the ethnic ties between the Arabs of Palestine and contempo-
rary Jews. In sharp contrast to Said’s insistence that European Orientalism
was almost always a singularly pernicious and hostile tradition, these Jewish
intellectuals sought to link “Judaism and Islam, East and West, in a common,
harmonious past, and sought to conceive of a common, harmonious future.”11
Yet among them it is also true that there was often a romantic tendency to
celebrate Islam as a desert faith of primitive Bedouin and tribal warriors, ig-
noring its hospitable environment for diplomats and intellectuals. Inevitably,
there also arose cultural instances of condescension, embodied in the poet Uri
Zvi Greenberg’s unfortunate declaration: “Believe: our race’s sister, the Arab, is
here/. . . we will come to instruct him, great in wisdom and experience.”12
Why did so many Ashkenazi Jews of German-speaking countries har-
bor such intense sympathy for the Islamic grandeur of historical Andalusia?
Their pro-Arab sentiment appears to have had deep historical roots. There is
a poignant sense of their taking a perverse pride in fully embracing the odi-
ous essence they were accused of; as one antisemitic polemic of the day de-
clared, Jews “may talk about Goethe, Schiller, and Schlegel all they please; they
nonetheless remain an alien Oriental people.”13 Or perhaps, in a more positive

9
Martin Kramer, The Jewish Discovery of Islam (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1999).
10
Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, transl. Haim Watzman (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 186.
11
Tom Reiss, The Orientalist, p. 227.
12
U. Z. Greenberg, “The Word of the Son of Blood” [Hebrew], in Shield Area and the
Word of the Son of Blood (Tel Aviv, 1930).
13
Reiss, The Orientalist, p. 235.

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Introduction ♦ 5

sense, in wishing to express their “at-homeness” elsewhere, such intellectuals

sought to forge cultural bridges to the previous time that Jews had been most
“at home” in Europe. Moreover, in an age that saw the decay of the dream of
assimilation and the hasty retreat from liberalism, they vigorously overturned
the negative European stereotype of persecuted ghetto dwellers, reinventing
themselves as being “of ” the Orient, embracing a somewhat wishful pan-Asian
identity. Regrettably, these vibrant and groundbreaking scholars have been
largely forgotten, perhaps precisely because they destabilize the strict demar-
cations between the “West” and the “Orient.” Subsequently, of course, as has
often been pointed out by Said and others, Jews and Palestinians have both
been Europe’s victims, the former as the target of fascism and the latter bear-
ing the brunt of Western colonialism and imperial expansion in the Middle
East. Recognizing this complexity, the essays here illuminate the myriad ways
that, in the early European context, Jews as well as Muslims could be made
to appear as the precise antithesis of the values represented by modern secu-
larism, nationalism, and civic communitarian virtue—altogether incapable of
comprehending the value of universalism.
To complicate matters further, it must be stressed, as several of the essays
here do, that Jews have often romanticized the “East” and touted themselves
as that space’s most ancient and quintessential representatives as if possess-
ing an unchanging, unalterable essence. In Victorian Britain, prime minister
Benjamin Disraeli, though raised by a family of converts, boldly celebrated his
ethnic origins. Years before leading the greatest empire he wrote immensely
popular novels that proclaimed the essential unity of Jews and Muslims (ro-
manticizing Jews as “Mosaic Arabs” in his novel Coningsby), creating an exu-
berantly idiosyncratic discourse about the spiritual and creative superiority of
all Semites. His sentimental ideology anticipated the complicated intertwined
destinies of Jews and Muslims, Zionists and Palestinian Arabs in the decades
that followed, for, as Arthur Hertzberg recently argued, “From the very begin-
nings of modern Zionism those who were coming to the land of Israel were re-
galed with stories about themselves as an Oriental tribe returning to the home
and culture of its ancestors. Countering this romantic notion was the hard
truth that a majority of Jews had lived for so long in the European West that
the culture, habits, and political and economic archetypes they were bringing
with them belonged to the European world.”14 In this regard, it is crucial to

14
Arthur Hertzberg, The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel & Palestine (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), pp. 169–70.

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6 ♦ Ranen Omer-Sherman

come to terms with the insidious ways that Israeli Orientalist assumptions
complicate relations with both the Arab Other and the Mizrahi Jews within
the Jewish state.
♦♦♦
One of the pressing consequences of the brief western Haskalah was the
paradigm that Western Jewry would find acceptance by radically increasing
its adoption of modern Western values and norms. Hence, traditional Jewish
models that still flourished in Eastern Europe were disparaged in the West,
while a growing interest emerged in earlier periods of “enlightenment,” par-
ticularly the Judeo-Islamic culture of Andalusia. For German Jews of the nine-
teenth century, the notion of a Judeo-Islamic symbiosis formed an idealized
mirror of the hopes and aspirations of the present. And in a later period of
nascent Zionism, the Arabs of Palestine, in their enviable organic relation to
the land and its past, provided a model for hopeful Jews who sought redemp-
tion from the abnormality and degradation of Diaspora. If only for these cru-
cial reasons, whatever its shortcomings, it is entirely apt that Said’s critique of
how the fear of the “East” justified imperialism and colonial adventures in the
Middle East continues to challenge and inspire Jewish scholars. Academics
working in a variety of disciplines within the broad rubric of Jewish Studies
have had to think within and beyond Said’s East/West divide, reading the
relations between Semitic and Orientalist discourses as another grid through
which modern European identity emerges. In some cases, such critics have
sought new ways of understanding how European nationalism, and its mascu-
line subjectivity and racialist discourses, became the model for political Zion-
ism of the late nineteenth century. At other times, the key tropes of Oriental-
ism evolved as crucial motifs embedded within Jewish self-fashioning as well
as discourses of host cultures with significant populations of Jewish Others.
Hence it remains to the field of Jewish Studies to acknowledge the promise
of Said’s groundbreaking intervention and, more important, to strive to over-
come Orientalism’s glaring failure to account for either representations or the
positions of Jews in Occidental culture.
This special issue offers readers an unprecedented opportunity to delve
into these issues by presenting some of the most innovative of recent Jew-
ish scholarly investigations of “Orientalism” as a field of discourse imposed on
Jewish culture by host societies and sometimes applied by Jews, whether to
themselves or to Arab Others. These essays not only answer questions of how
Orientalism as a practice of knowledge and sometimes violence works but will
raise important new questions by vigorously addressing the multifarious ways
in which it functions. This special issue offers readers an unprecedented op-

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Introduction ♦ 7

portunity to compare interdisciplinary perspectives representing a range of

Jewish scholarly responses to Orientalist discourses. In these discussions the
Jew often occupies a precarious position between Orient and Occident; such a
falling-between-two-stools paradigm at times lends itself to discursive acts of
self-essentializing while at others it enables him to break down these bound-
aries. At times, the tragic nature of the schism between literary Jews of Arab
origin and their culture will be delineated. Other contributors consider the
position of the Oriental Other within Israeli culture. Beginning in the 1950s,
a vast immigration from Arabic-speaking countries like Morocco, Tunisia,
Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere created a new dy-
namic in the Jewish state which still poses problems for the basic dichotomy of
Jew/Arab and invites thoughtful work on the traditional categories of “Third
World” and “First World.” As Sephardic scholar David Shasha argues:
Due to the stigma against all things Arab propounded by classical Zion-
ism and Ashkenazi modernism under a Eurocentric bias, the Sephardim have
become an invisible presence in modern Jewish life. Many Arab Jews have sur-
rendered their native Levantine perspective in favor of the ruling ideology in
Israel; some Israeli Sephardim in frustration have divorced themselves from
the mainstream of the traditional Jewish community; and still others have sub-
merged their ethnic rage in a thunderous barbarity vis-à-vis the Arab Muslims.
The issue of anti-Arab prejudice among Israeli and American Sephardim has
made many observers question the very propriety of even raising the issue of
the Levantine nativity of Arab Jews; many of whom have become among the
most militant followers of the Likud and other Right Wing parties in Israel.
The movement of Jews out of the Arab world and into the orbit of the Jewish
state has greatly disrupted the traditional ethos and bearings of Arab Jewry. This
has translated not merely into Sephardic political intransigency, but a complete
abandonment of the traditional Sephardic cultural and religious legacy. But we
can indeed recall a time when Jews lived productively in the Middle East and
developed a material and intellectual culture that proved amazingly durable and
robust.15

Guided by the terms of Shasha’s cultural critique, I am pleased to pres-

ent essays that consider the fraught role of Orientalism in diasporic Jewish and
Israeli literature, that examine the problematic interconnection of orientalism
and political Zionism representing the potential future of Jewish nationalism
through mediation and reconciliation across seemingly impenetrable borders.
Four essays offer rich explorations of the construction of Jewishness in the

15
David Shasha, personal communication, May 12, 2005.

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8 ♦ Ranen Omer-Sherman

Orientalist discourse of the Romantic and Victorian imagination, demon-

strating that British power often asserted itself by subsuming Jewish identity
and history.
In “Reading Hebrew Melodies,” David Ben-Merre offers a striking reading
of Byron’s poetry and cultural politics, arguing that the poet sought a new un-
derstanding of the East through verse that would create a metaphorical bridge
between ostensibly disparate civilizations, mediating between Jewish national-
ism and Calvinistically inclined readings of the Old Testament. Next, Rachel
Oberter discusses the unusual interplay between text and illustration in the
popular Victorian novel The Rebel Queen by Walter Besant, examining the
writer’s philosemitism as well as blatant Orientalist assumptions about Juda-
ism as ancient and static, hence admirably bearing a commitment to patriarchy
lapsing in the British culture at large. In Oberter’s illuminating account of the
cultural politics embedded in Besant’s 1893 novel (which includes a useful
discussion of the duplicitous phenomena of “passing”), we see how a Moorish
veil “masks” Jewish identities. In his “‘Mosaic Arabs’: Jews and Gentlemen in
Disraeli’s Young England Trilogy,” Russell Schweller intensifies our explora-
tion of Judeo-Islamic heritage in his provocative reading of Disraeli’s trium-
phal philosemitic representations as a cultural strategy for winning over the
Tory aristocracy. Schweller ably demonstrates how Disraeli’s canny manipula-
tion of Orientalist discourse effectively reversed its stereotypical privileging of
West over East.
Offering a rich analysis of an early Victorian Evangelical novel, Heidi
Kaufman’s “A Provocative Blind Spot: Orientalism and Charlotte Tonna’s
Judah’s Lion” persuasively argues for recognizing the unusual liminal position
of Victorian Jewish subjects who ultimately remained outside the classifica-
tion of Occidents and Orients. In ways that initially seem reminiscent of but
ultimately diverge sharply from the narrative logic of George Eliot’s proto-Zi-
onist novel Daniel Deronda (1876), Tonna’s Jewish protagonist, possessing the
“body of a Jew and the spiritual attachment of a Christian,” “returns” to Pal-
estine in a way that (though ostensibly resembling late 19th-century Zionism)
both produces the biological stigma of Jewish racial differences and legitimizes
the practices of British Imperialism in the Middle East. In other words, the
problem of Jewish “infiltration” of Western Christian culture as well as their
function as “surrogates” for Empire form the competing terrains of this com-
pelling discussion which offers a nuanced account of the strengths and limita-
tions of Said’s theoretical work.
In later periods, as the following essays in this issue demonstrate, Zion-
ism and Western Christianity seemed to have shared an excluded Arab Other,
for reasons relating to ideology, politics, and power. In the early decades of the

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Introduction ♦ 9

State of Israel, the logic of Orientalism’s key terms was intrinsic to hegemonic
Hebrew literature that situated the Jew between the threatening Arab and
Auschwitz. Beginning in the 1980s, in light of both Said’s critique of Orien-
talism and the rise of multicultural literature, a critical literature in Israel also
began to consider the way that the hegemonic Ashkenazi society of the 1950s
had absorbed Arab-Jewish intellectuals and other immigrants from the ne-
gated “East.” Accordingly, in “Till Spring Comes,” his consideration of the fate
of Iraqi Jewish writing and identity, Israeli critic Reuven Snir explores crucial
debates among Iraqi Jewish writers in relation to the way that the cultural and
literary establishment of Israel closely parallels the hegemonic Zionist struc-
ture of the state itself, as predominantly Western-oriented. Snir discusses
a range of important writers of Iraqi Jewish origin whose contributions to
both the Arabic literary canon and modern Jewish literature are formidable
in spite of their neglect, and whose response to their Arab-Jewish identities
encompasses a range of intriguing cultural choices. Ultimately marginalized
by literary elites in both Israel and the Arab world, Snir ably demonstrates
the quixotic struggle of such writers to affirm solidarity among members of
the three monotheisms (even as exile and Middle East wars overturned their
utopian aspirations) and also provides an intriguing and lucid introduction to
the complex intellectual, cultural, and political positions (including stridently
Communist and anti-Zionistic affinities) of Baghdad’s notable Jewish com-
munity in the early decades of the twentieth century. Finally, in another essay
focusing on the ethnic wars of Israel in the 1950s, Hannan Hever considers
the unusual case of Yitzhak Shami in “Ethnicity As an Unresolved Conflict.”
Hever sees Shami, who was born in Hebron in 1888, as valiantly striving for
an impossible symbiosis of Hebrew and Arabic culture, Western and Mizrahi
traditions and values. Occupying a complex authorial position of intermedia-
cy, Shami aspired to represent Arab culture with a lyrical voice even while he
remained thoroughly committed to the Zionist enterprise. Hever’s argument
ably demonstrates the complex politics of identity resulting from Shami’s poi-
gnant early struggle to articulate a Jewish-Arab discourse within the Hebrew
Eretz-Israeli canon that pointed the way to a utopian unification of the lan-
guage of Arabs and Jews, an expansive definition of Palestinian “nativeness,”
that was never to be achieved.
Though it is perhaps too early to tell whether we will ever witness a com-
plete reversal of this dichotomy, there have been promising signs in Zionist
culture in recent years, not least among them A. B. Yehoshua’s penetrating ex-
amination of both Arab-Israeli identities and the nature of the Zionist Orien-
talist scholar in his recent novel The Liberated Bride (Kalah ha-meshaòhreret
[2001]).16 It is interesting to speculate on just what Said might have made of

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10 ♦ Ranen Omer-Sherman

Yehoshua’s affectionate portrayal of the Jewish Orientalists whose inquisitive

worldview is presented as a benevolent attempt to demonstrate the essential
rootedness of the Mizrahi Jew in the Arab world. In a similar spirit of in-
quiry, this issue bears witness to how, at their best, Jewish Orientalists have
illuminated the past and enriched our self-understanding, by delineating the
contradictory, hybrid, and diverse nature of Jewish identity.

16
A. B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride, transl. Hillel Halkin (New York: Harcourt,
2003).

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies