A Few Comments on Orientalism, Jewish Studies and Israeli Society

الملخص

One allegation leveled against Edward Said's Orientalism has been its neglect of the German Orientalist tradition. This study does not focus on the allegation itself but uses it as a departure point for discussing some aspects of Israeli-Zionist consciousness. While it is true that unlike British and French Orientalism, German Orientalism was not directly involved in colonial activity, it was nevertheless from within the German Orientalist discourse that the debate on the relationship between Germany and the Jews had been waged. The question was whether the Jews were Oriental, and thus alien to European culture, or whether they were strictly a religious group and thus able to become part of that culture. This study contends that Jewish modern, national-territorial identity was based on the adoption of the same German Orientalist discourse that enabled the exclusion of the Jews and on Orientalist images of the east, which developed within the German context. Furthermore, based on previous scholarship, this study attempts to highlight how this very same Orientalism shaped Zionist attitude toward the Arabs and toward Oriental Jews. Lastly, it tries to arrive, from within the corpus of Orientalist scholarship, at some different definitions of Jewish collectivity in Palestine.