Traditionalism as History, Culture and Theory

Some Reflections on the Writings and Biography of Elie Kedourie

Abstract

The Jewish intellectual Elie Kedourie was a leading historian of the modern Middle East, and a political scientist who studied nationalism and European modern political thought in the post-WWII British academia. In this article, I demonstrate that traditionalism as a historical-cultural context, an expression of Jewish modernity in the Middle East, and as a theoretical means of explication, opens up possibilities for an innovative reading of Kedourie’s biography and evolving perceptions. Traditionalism, as an “in-between” position, facilitated Kedourie’s critical observations, which ran against the grain of prevailing discourses in which tradition contradicted modernity and progress. The category of traditionalism will support my contention that, in spite of his conservatism, Kedourie’s ideas corresponded to salient critical academic discourses—first and foremost the critique of secularism and modernity. Traditionalism also enabled Kedourie to undermine, deconstruct, and reconstruct common modernist dichotomies and conceptualizations. This ability was also a product of a series of historical circumstances that formed his cultural and intellectual worldview. It included the social and cultural history of Baghdadi Jewish elite families; and the experience of political and cultural transitions, from the Ottoman and British imperial worlds to nation states, with their extreme manifestations in the Iraq of the 1930s and 1940s. An additional context was the complexity of modern Jewish-Iraqi self-perceptions, blending Babylonian, Arab, Spanish, and English elements. Kedourie’s awareness wandered between ancient Jewish Baghdad, al-Andalus, Christian Spain, and the London of modern times.