From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East: Orientalism through a Jewish Lens

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 490–520 From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East Orientalism through a Jewish Lens JOHN M. EFRON THE NINETEENTH CENTURY saw the emergence of historians among the Jewish people who were dedicated to casting a reflective and introspective eye on the Jewish past, one that sought to apply critical methods of scholarly analysis to texts, where once such texts had principally been the focus of religious devotion and exegesis. Inspired by the birth of historicism , the inner intellectual and institutional impetus for the critical and secular study of Jewish history came with the rise of the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums), an undertaking that began in Germany in the second decade of the nineteenth century.1 In the turn to history among Jewish intellectuals, many of them directed their scholarly gazes to the pasts of other peoples and religious traditions. Such a development saw the birth of Jewish Orientalist scholarship , whose principal focus was the world of Islam. Jewish historians concentrated on Islamic history and theology, the connection between Judaism and Islam, and Jewish life in the Muslim world. In the latter case, it was the cultural and intellectual achievements of Jews in Muslim Spain that especially attracted the attention and indeed admiration of nineteenth-century Jewish historians. Jewish historians were seduced by the rich philosophical and poetical traditions of Spanish Jews. They sensed the social implications of such lives led at the intellectual vanguard. Nineteenth-century scholars were deeply impressed by the degree to which Jews in the Islamic orbit had long since fulfilled the demand of nineteenth-century Russian Jewish poet Judah Leib Gordon, that one be ‘‘a man abroad and a Jew in [one’s] tent.’’ For the earliest generations of Jewish historians, the lives of medieval Jewish poets and philosophers under Islam bespoke the promise that 1. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH, 1994). See also David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York, 1995). The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. FROM MITTELEUROPA TO THE MIDDLE EAST—EFRON 491 modern Jews too could give full expression to their Jewishness while reveling in the culture of the dominant society. As such, Islam and Judaism appeared mutually fructifying rather than potentially dangerous and antagonistic.2 Of the many Jewish historians who recognized the harmony of Jewish and Muslim culture, three are the focus of this inquiry: Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher. They are linked in several ways. All three were from Central Europe; they all made towering historiographical contributions; they shared similar intellectual inspirations— Hegel’s philosophy of history, the so-called higher biblical criticism, and a commitment to the critical study of the Jewish past. Finally, these three scholars also serve as significant counterexamples to those offered by Edward Said in Orientalism (1979). A quarter of a century ago, Said asserted that Orientalism is mainly a ‘‘British and French cultural enterprise.’’3 This claim was based on his belief that the determining motive behind Orientalism was European imperialist pursuit. Said observed that Orientalism expressed a fascination with the Muslim Near East mixed with unalloyed condescension. Notwithstanding considerable criticism, Said’s position attained a sort of hegemony within the academy, one effect of which was to exclude those scholars who did not fit the Franco-British colonialist mold from contemporary discourse and scholarship about Orientalism . Nineteenth-century Jewish Orientalists are just such scholars, and they are so because their unique position in European society places them outside a scholarly paradigm that runs along an East-West axis with room only for Christian subjects and Muslim objects. I would like to suggest that while Jews were certainly part and parcel of the modern European state and, moreover, were often in the vanguard of political, artistic, and intellectual developments, they were also Europe ’s Other par excellence. Residing on the social periphery, the Jews were Europe’s own Orientals, with whom Europeans...