Orientalism And The Jews

by Kalmar, Ivan Davidson; Penslar, Derek Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9781584654117
• ISBN10: 1584654112
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-10-26
• Publisher: Brandeis Univ

Summary

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.

Author Biography

IVAN DAVIDSON KALMAR is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His publications include The Trotskys, Freuds, and Woody Allens: Portrait of a Culture (1994). DEREK J. PENSLAR is Zacks Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Toronto. His most recent publication is Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction	xiii
Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar
1. Jesus Did Not Wear a Turban: Orientalism, the Jews, and Christian Art	3	(29)
Ivan Davidson Kalmar
2. Placing the Jews in Late Medieval English Literature	32	(19)
Suzanne Conklin Akbari
3. The Use of the Jew in Colonial Discourse	51	(17)
Tudor Parfitt
4. The "Kaifeng Jew" Hoax: Constructing the "Chinese Jew"	68	(12)
Zhou Xun
5. Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze	80	(14)
John M. Efron
6. To Pray Like a Dervish: Orientalist Discourse in Arnold Zweig's The Face of East European Jewry	94	(15)
Noah Isenberg
7. Rejecting Zion, Embracing the Orient: The Life and Death of Jacob Israel De Haan	109	(16)
Michael Berkowitz
8. Between East and West: Zionist Revisionism as a Mediterranean Ideology	125	(17)
Eran Kaplan
9. Orientalism and Jewish National Art: The Case of Bezalel	142	(20)
Dalia Manor
10. The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective	162	(20)
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin
11. Broadcast Orientalism: Representations of Mizrahi Jewry in Israeli Radio, 1948-1967	182	(19)
Derek I. Penslar
12. "We're Not Jews": Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature	201	(21)
Sander L. Gilman
Notes	222	(44)
Contributors	266	(3)
Index	269