From: Orientalism and the Jews, ed. by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005. Excerpt from last draft version, may not be identical with print. Please reference and quote the print version only. notes, illustrations, and some foreign-language names and words may not show properly in this web version.

The Old and the New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.
- William Blake

In Christian art, it is a common practice to represent biblical Jews as if they were Muslims. Perhaps the most striking examples are some of the works of Rembrandt van Rijn. In David and Uriah, for instance, the two men's Ottoman-style turbans play a dominant part in the composition (fig. 1). Later, in the nineteenth century, it became more common to imagine biblical Israelites wearing not the Turkish turban but the Arab headscarf or kaffiyeh.

American popular culture has continued to quote this tradition. When we see the kaffiyeh on the heads of the Israelites led to the Promised Land by Charlton Heston, we are not surprised. For in The Ten Commandments Hollywood builds on an artistic practice established during the previous five centuries and more. The Jews of Europe and North America have themselves accepted this pictorial language. Modern illustrators of Passover Haggadot often show the Children of Israel tending their flock in flowing robes and kaffiyeh, looking very much like traditional Palestinians.
It is, of course, possible that the ancient Israelites dressed somewhat like Palestinians or even Ottoman Turks. Nevertheless, it is clear that artists, with important modern exceptions, have not based their representations on archeological research in the Holy Land, but on contemporary images of the Muslim world. The history of Western thought about the Orient, rather than the facts of biblical couture, must therefore be our primary subject here:  a history not of "oriental" costume but of the orientalist representation of the Biblical Jew.
As a subject of research such representation has little history.  In general, recent analyses of orientalist art have ranged from Linda Nochlin's treatment of it as a "picturesque" religious ethnography of Islam in a colonial context (she pays no attention to orientalism in biblical representation) to Malcolm Warner's suggestion that "the issue at stake in the portrayal of Islam in nineteenth-century art was not Islam at all, but Christianity."  Both scholars' analyses deal practically exclusively with the nineteenth-century art movement known as "orientalism."  I would like to show that orientalist representations of the Bible have even longer roots.
The matter is of much more than antiquarian interest. The portrayal of biblical Israelites was not a marginal aspect of the orientalist imagination. On the contrary, it was a major arena where the nature of the Western image of the East as a radically different Other, opposed to the West, was first disclosed.
The parallel representation of Jew and Muslim in art, as in orientalism in general, underwent a number of major discontinuities, while maintaining a certain overall continuity. Changes in the use of Muslim attire to depict the Jew in Christian art have been symptomatic of the different stages of western representations of the Orient discussed in the introduction to this volume, from the conquest of Constantinople by the Muslims to the conquest of Muslim lands by European colonizers. What did not change was the representation of Jesus in contrast to his Jewish environment, in accordance with the fundamentals of Christian theology. The New Testament, in the authoritative Christian view, is rooted in yet surpasses and in that sense opposes the Old. Accordingly Christian art constructs a Jesus who is born Jewish but whose nature surpasses the limitations of Judaism. Challenged only in the modern period by a few Jewish artists bent on creating what in another context Susannah Heschel has labeled the "Jewish Jesus," the Jesus of Christian art over the centuries has been essentially a non-Jewish one. In the type of Christian art discussed here, the contrast between Jesus and his people is put in orientalist terms:  Jesus, and with him by implication the Christian West, rise above their spiritual origins in the Jewish East. The essence of religious orientalism is revealed by the fact that, in Christian art, most Israelites can be shown as Muslims, but never Jesus Christ.   

The History of Biblical Headwear

The Jews of the Bible came to be represented as orientals as soon as the Muslims did.
Until the fifteenth century the most serious Muslim threat to the Christian West came from the South and Southwest, not the East. And the East was not necessarily imagined as Muslim. In the early and high Middle Ages, the "East" and "Orient" referred to, in Western parlance, primarily to the Roman Empire in the East, to Byzantium, the Christian dominions of what was referred to in Western languages as the "oriental church."
Although oriental Christians were regarded as somewhat exotic, there is no reason to think that they were represented as in any way similar to Muslims or Jews; at least not until the fifteenth century when, it is true, there are some indications that the oriental Christian look was sometimes, so to speak, Islamicized. One of the most striking examples is found in the Limbourg Brothers' illuminated manuscript, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1413-16). The Emperor in The Virgin, the Sibyl, and the Emperor Augustus (folio 22 reverse) wears a long white beard, a diademed "Persian" hat, and a curved sword, all of them signs of the Muslim Orient. The figure is believed to be inspired by Manuel II Paleologus, the Byzantine emperor who traveled to Rome, Paris and London between 1399 and 1402, hoping in vain to drum up support for his struggle with the Ottomans. The same character reappears as the magus of the East in the Meeting of the Magi (folio 51, verso).
Manuel and his retinue were the subject of intense curiosity in Western Europe, fascinating their hosts with, among other things, their exotic attire. In Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes at the Chapel of the Medici-Riccardi Palace in Florence (1460), Manuel is believed to once again have provided the model for the Magus of the East. Benozzo, too, depicted him wearing the "Persian" hat, also used in portraying Jews (see below). Such exoticization of the Eastern Christians was symptomatic of the extent to which the West was beginning to write off the Orient. It bode ill for Manuel, who came to Italy in a desperate attempt to save his Empire from the Muslims, pleading the common heritage of Rome and Constantinople. His efforts were in vain:  his undertaking to unite the Western and Eastern churches failed to excite enthusiasm either among the Orthodox clergy (who rejected it) or in the West.
Depicting Manuel in terms evocative of Jews and Muslims was not indicative of any medieval tradition that conceived of an alien Orient that including not only Muslims and Jews but also eastern Christians. Rather, the "orientalization" of the Christian Orient betrayed an entirely new state of affairs that Manuel, to his detriment, failed to understand. The "East" had for the first time come to be imagined as lost to Christian rule, and as marked by the alien ways of the Muslim.
In other words, the Islamization of the image of the Emperor of the East is symptomatic of the rise of orientalism, in the same way as the Islamization of biblical images (though in considerably less obvious ways: for example, the Byzantine Emperor, unlike the Eastern King in Adoration scenes, does not wear a turban). The change of perception was forced on the West by the military successes of the Ottomans, crowned by their conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
Only now was it possible to picture the biblical story in an exotic setting modeled on the contemporary Muslim, and specifically Ottoman, East. For the biblical lands, now indelibly in Ottoman hands, came to be exoticized in the Western imagination as part of the Orient as a region with a religion. The inhabitants of biblical and contemporary Palestine were both visualized in the Renaissance (and for a while later) on the pattern of the "Turk."

Pre-orientalism

Nabil I. Matar showed how the turban was the main visual marker of Islam in the European Renaissance, eclipsing in importance the crescent and the scimitar.  That is not to say that the Ottoman turban was the first artistic device that equated Muslim and Jew. Earlier Christian portrayals of both, though less exoticizing, did equate these two religious Others. Some particularly literary examples are examined, in this volume, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari.   Another telling instance that has, to my knowledge, not previously been reported is from the famous Parzival by Wolfram of Eschenbach (who died in about 1230). Parzival's father, Gahmuret, leaves for the East, not as a crusader or a hostage, but voluntarily to enter the service of a personality that Wolfram thinks of as the spiritual leader, a kind of a pope of the Muslims, resident at Baldac (presumed by modern critics to be the city of Baghdad). The better known manuscripts describe this leader as baruc, which is a title or name that has not been attested at all independently and seems to make no sense.  Maxime Rodinson suggests that it is a corruption of mubarak, Arabic for "blessed."  It might make more sense to read it as baruch, or Hebrew for the same thing. Indeed, the manuscript owned by the Munich library does have barruch rather than baruc. The Hebrew term for "blessed" is very common in the Jewish liturgy, so that anyone with minimal familiarity with Hebrew might conceivably have used it.
As Debra Strickland has shown most recently, such early parallels between the depiction of the Muslim and the Jew are also found in the history of the visual arts.
During the earlier Middle Ages, biblical Jews were often portrayed wearing various kinds of so-called Jewish hats.  A yellow conical hat was perhaps the most common. Another type was a wide brimmed hat culminating in a small ball on a short stem. The painterly practice here corresponded, of course, to actual medieval custom. For in the Middle Ages Jews wore distinctive headwear as well as other elements of clothing, often as a result of papal or princely decree.
In some cases the depiction of the "Jewish hats," though modeled on what European Jews wore, may at the same time represent a link to the East. The "Persian hat" shown on Manuel II's was typical Jewish headwear, and appears in the Encyclopaedia Judaica with the caption, "France, 13th cent."  Yet it appears as well in Muslim miniatures from Iran and India. Perhaps it is indeed of Persian origin, and somehow found its way to Europe; possibly carried by Jews who came from the Byzantine Empire.
Another common style of "Jewish" headwear is only a little less obscure. It appears to have completely escaped the attention of art historians that, particularly in Italy, biblical Jews were often shown wearing a white headscarf wrapped around the head and neck. A thirteenth century example is Duccio di Boninsegna's altarpiece Maesta  (1308-11) in the Siena Cathedral Museum . From the fourteenth century one might cite Simone Martini's Passion (or Orsini) Polyptych (1333). In the "Road to Calvary" panel, now at the Louvre, a number of personages wear the headscarf in question. The scarf on the head of one of the Jews on Jesus' left is particularly interesting in that it includes several dark stripes (fig. 2). It may well represent the Jewish prayer shawl or talith (which is normally wrapped around the shoulders, but may also be used to cover the head). That, at any rate, is the opinion of one art historian regarding similar headwear seen on biblical Jews in Byzantine art. If she is right then we can identify the hood, both its striped and its plain variety, as an iconographic convention stemming from Byzantine depictions of the talith.   

Alternatively, the headscarf might not be of Jewish origin at all. It does resemble a type of headwear that is worn to this day by traditional North Africans - a white hood that protects both the head and the neck. At any rate, regardless of whether its origins are Jewish or Muslim, the headscarf is shown by Christian artists on both. For example, in the late 13th century  painting St. Clare Driving Back a Saracen Attack (fig. 3), attributed to Guido da Siena, the headscarves worn by the Saracens are practically identical to those worn by Duccio's or Simone Martini's  Jews. 

If it is true that the model for the headscarf is Muslim - something that at this stage must remain at the level of speculation - then we can conclude that in the thirteenth century the pictorial identification of Jew and Muslim was already on its way. If so, then the headscarf rather than the turban announces the Islamicization of the Holy Land in the Western Christian imagination, and the development needs to be located in the thirteenth century. The date would not be surprising. In 1187 Salah ud-Din ("Saladin") reconquered Jerusalem and after that, with the brief interludes of 1229-39 and 1243-44, the city was to remain in Muslim hands until the twentieth century. Though crusader rhetoric raged for a few hundred years more, Christian art betrays that Europeans slowly began to give up the idea of a Christian Jerusalem.

Turbans

If we can conjecture that the "orientalization of the Orient" began in the thirteenth century, we can be quite certain of it in the fifteenth, when the practice of depicting Jews in turbans became firmly established.
Before the late fourteen hundreds, one only rarely sees a biblical Israelite depicted with a turban. One exception is the 12th century (after 1187) bronze door of the Cathedral of Pisa by Bonanno (the architect of the "Leaning Tower.")  Bonanno shows some Prophets protected by the shade of palm trees, probably meant to index the oriental environment. These figures wear what looks very much like turbans. Such depiction was, however, very rare. Even the early fourteenth century work of Giotto avoids orientalizing the biblical Jew. He was familiar with the turban, and did place it on the head of the "Sultan" in his 1325 Scenes from the Life of St. Francis, the famous fresco in the Bardi Chapel of the Church of Sta. Croce in Florence. But he never placed a turban on the head of a Jew.
Among the first artists whom we know to have fancied Israelites in turbans on a regular basis is the very Lorenzo Ghiberti whose competition entry for a bronze door for the Florence baptistery is conventionally said to mark the beginning of the Renaissance. Ghiberti worked on the door between 1403 and 1424. Many of the panels include Israelite Prophets wearing turbans. One, indeed, is said be a portrait of Ghiberti himself. The popularity of the door earned the artist a commission to add another, featuring even more pronounced orientalist images of the biblical narrative. The Gates of Paradise, as this second Ghiberti door was later called, had a far-reaching influence.
It is certain that Ghiberti did not invent, but merely followed a trend that was already underway, including in Florence. At the Museum of the Church of Sta. Croce, is found, for example, a badly damaged fresco of Christ and the Adulteress by Gherardo Starnina, active until 1413, where a turbaned character is featured in the background.
More or less simultaneously, turbans also appeared in illuminated manuscripts in France and Flanders. These include the famous Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. In folio 44 verso (a Nativity), Joseph wears a turban with a pointed peak, probably inspired by Ottoman wear. Strikingly, the Virgin has a robe adorned with pseudo-Arabic writing!  The idea is developed even further in folio 156 verso, the Deposition. Here pseudo-Arabic writing decorates the robes of not only Mary but also of several other women and men.

Pseudo-Arabic writing is the result of the artist inventing a nonsensical script that is expected to be read as Arabic. Art historians have traditionally been happy to accept the illusion as reality. For example, an early twentieth century scholar described the pseudo-Arabic script on the armor of Verrocchio's David (1473-75, fig. 5) as "Arabic letters, so popular a decoration at that time."  But if the motif was "so popular" then why is it not found more often in contemporary secular portraiture and, more importantly, why is it never found on the garments of Jesus?  As we shall see, only a certain type of Israelite, and never Jesus, was portrayed wearing oriental clothing or headdress. Evidently, the role of the fake Arabic script, like of the turban, was to mark a personage as oriental, rather than as a fancier of exotic fashions.

Also in Northwestern Europe, the Triptych of the Crucifixion, better known as the Dijon Altarpiece (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon.), was created in the last decade of the fourteenth century (1393-99) by the Flemish artists Jacques de Baerze and Melchior Broederlam. On the right outer panel is featured a "presentation in the Temple" where a man, probably Joseph, is pictured wearing a turban. The High Priest himself has a skullcap and a flowing white beard that could perhaps be read as "Jewish" and may have alluded to the artists' living Jewish contemporaries. If so, then the High Priest, modeled on contemporary European Jewish models, represents the older artistic tradition, and can be contrasted with the turbaned character, representing the new. What is most remarkable about the altarpiece is, in our context, the tower that rises on the outside of the scene, evidently representing the Holy Temple. It has a dome topping two levels of crenellations that may be interpreted as "oriental."  On top of the dome is – a crescent!  Quite likely, the artists meant to represent a minaret. Their masterpiece is evidence that, in Flanders and Burgundy at the end of the fourteenth century, orientalism was already fully present.
It would make sense if this development had come North from Italy. Flemish and French artists were heavily indebted to Italian models. The Limbourg Brothers' Road to Calvary from the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (folio 147 recto), for example, is said to be indebted to the above-mentioned panel by Simone Martini (fig. 2).  It is remarkable, however, that in the Limbourg Brothers miniature the tallith-like hoods employed by Simone and characteristic of earlier depictions of the Jews, are gone. Instead, a bulky "Turkish" style turban is seen on a number of men in the crowd.
If the Limbourg Brothers "Ottomanized" the work of their Italian predecessors, they did not do so because the impress of the "Turks" was stronger in northwestern European art than in Italy. They were, rather, reflecting a trend that was underway in Italy as well. In the period intervening between the Sienese and the Burgundian work, orientalism had intensified in both parts of Europe and came to focus its imagination on the Ottoman Empire.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century turbans and other orientalizing features became entirely commonplace in Christian biblical art, as can be verified by a visit to any major collection of Renaissance works.
In the cinquecento, the prestige and influence of Venetian artists helped to make the Ottomanized depiction of biblical Jews even more common. (The experience of Venetian traders with the rising Ottoman power included a stint by Gentile Bellini as an official painter at the court of the Ottoman ruler.)  Consequently artists, who were more familiar than before with Ottoman costume, produced intricate ethnographic canvases for customers eager to own work with an exotic motive. The Louvre's anonymous canvas, Reception of the Ambassadors (c. 1488-96) shows a crowded parade of visiting mostly oriental notables before the Sultan, who is seated on a raised settee.   The work is believed to have had a great influence on a number of artists, including Albrecht Dürer, who may have been instrumental in spreading the orientalist fashion to German-speaking Europe.  He followed the example of the Venetian orientalist artists and indiscriminately applied his repertoire of turbaned characters to images of the contemporary Orient as well as of the biblical narrative. The invention of the printing press then facilitated the spread of his etchings throughout Germany and the rest of Europe. In this way, in the High Renaissance imagining the biblical Israelite as a "Turk" became a matter of course throughout Western Christendom.
Rembrandt's magnificent turbans, then, were nothing new as such; rather, they fit into a long tradition of orientalist biblical representation. It is a mistake to read too much in this respect into his contact with the local Jews. Steven Nadler does show, in his beautifully written book Rembrandt's Jews, that such contact was in fact of considerable inspiration for the artist.   Yet it is undeniable that his "orientalist' biblical canvases owe something to the German artist, Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610), as well as to Rembrandt's teacher Pieter Lastman (an admirer of Elsheimer) and to contemporaries such as Jan Lievens or the Flemish Catholic, Jacob Jordaens. No one has ever claimed any particular contact between these artists (or the scores of others who put turbans on the heads of Israelites) and local Jews; clearly they were motivated by the evolving tradition of painting and took as their reference known ethnographic detail about the Ottomans.
In the seventeenth century Ottoman power was still great. Commercial and diplomatic exchanges with the Porte were coupled with regular military clashes involving mostly Dutch and Ottoman ships in the Mediterranean, but also in the Atlantic. There is no evidence that seventeenth century Europeans dreamed of dominating the Muslim East. If they did they would have had to be satisfied with a dream. Dutch emissaries in Constantinople plotted to obtain commercial privileges by the grace of the Sultan, not to influence the course of his government.  Economically the Ottomans could still easily match the West. Militarily, they continued to be an ever increasing threat.
Presumably, an appreciable number of Muslims were actually physically present in the Netherlands as Nabil Matar has shown to have been the case in England.  It might be worthwhile, indeed, to research if any of these visitors, rather than the local Jewish marranos, provided live models who inspired the Rembrandt's conception of biblical attire.
Though French emissaries and Hungarian nobles were ready to flirt with the Porte in hopes of weakening the Turks' main Christian rival, Austria, when in 1683 the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa lay siege to Vienna almost all Christendom considered itself to be under a vital threat. The French promised not to take advantage of Austria by opening another front, and a coalition of various European powers succeeded in giving the Austrian capital a last-minute relief.
The show of Christian unity was particularly significant at a time when the bloody religious wars between Protestants and Catholics were of very recent memory. The defeat of Kara Mustafa marked the beginning of a slow but almost uninterrupted Ottoman retrenchment. In the eighteenth century, the Muslim "threat" was no longer a serious issue for Western and Central European Christians. And this, too, had its repercussions in Christian art. The Ottoman-esque portrayal of the Jews persisted, but it was less common than before. In the absence of the historical conditions that motivated it in the first place, it sometimes became a purely formal minor genre, employed for its value as an exotic conversation piece more than its power to evoke earnest religious sentiment. Privileged Europeans could now for the first time afford to imagine the exotic not as something to fear and admire, but as something to be amused by. (There were chinoiserie rooms and busts of Turks and Africans inside the chateaux. In the parks outside there were caged monkeys and free-roaming peacocks. Live "Turks" and "Tatars" often added to the exotic coterie, as in the case of the Kamerturken at the court of Prussia's Frederic III.)
A minor artistic fashion celebrated the image of the oriental potentate. The image of the oriental despot who ruled over men and had his way with women, yet ruled wisely to the benefit of all, articulated well the spirit of absolutist rule - and helped to ingratiate playwrights, artists, and composers with their sovereign.  Among Mozart's operas, a benevolent oriental ruler appears both in The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) and in The Magic Flute (1791). The 18th century painter Jean-Honore Fragonard's opus includes an undated work known tellingly as either The Pasha or as King Solomon. Here the ruler is inspecting some young women that have been presented to him at his order.  The biblical content of the work, if any, is as subservient as its oriental detail to the idea of portraying a male fantasy of unbridled sexual power. (A more traditional biblical subject is seen in Fragonard's painting Jeroboam sacrificing to the Idols (1752), where the apostate King Jeroboam's clothing and that of his companions evokes ancient Greece and Rome, and contrasts with the turban and oriental attire of his critic, a prophet who remained faithful to Israel's God.)
In general, in the eighteenth century artists tended, however, to revert to European antiquity as the model for biblical painting, in concert with the classicist fashion of the time.

Jewish Bedouin

Then, in the nineteenth through early twentieth century - that is to say, during the period that has been of most interest to Edward Said - orientalist depiction of the Israelite again became fairly popular. As always, Jewishness was indexed through headwear, but the style of headwear changed. Turbans were still seen, as in Adolphe-William Bouguereau's 1880 painting The Flagellation of our Lord Jesus Christ, where Jesus' torture is witnessed by an onlooker in a large yellow turban, presumably representing a Pharisee official. However, orientalist biblical depiction now took as its chief model not so much the "turban'd Turk" but the Arab, and especially the Bedouin. This is when the distinguishing characteristic of the male Israelite became the Arabic headscarf or kaffiyeh.
We see disclosed here a radical change in the perception of the East and its relationship to the West. The Ottomans, centered on Turkey though often ruling through non-Turkish officials, still ruled much of the Orient, but in the nineteenth century their tottering Empire was talked of as the "Sick Man of Europe."  Travelers and traders now paid ever less attention to the Ottoman rulers and understood the region in terms of its indigenous inhabitants, who were mostly Arab.
This essentially Arabic Muslim world was no longer seen as a meaningful competitor by a West obsessed with progress; a West that conceived of history as a race of human races in which the Europeans were far ahead. Arab and Muslim glory were still recognised and admired, but were located firmly in the past. It, much like the Old Testament, was seen as completely superceded by the civilization of the Christian West.
Often, Arabs were believed to represent a kind of a living fossil. "Who has not heard of the Arabs," asked the London illustrated magazine, The Quiver, in 1865, "that wonderful people who alone, perhaps, of all the races on earth, are to-day the same in almost every respect as they were in the very earliest times of which even Scripture history, the oldest of records, gives us any account? (…)  As his fathers lived, countless ages ago, so the Arab lives to-day, and so he will continue to live, it is probable, if not in all future time, at least for many a generation to come."  This panegyric (of sorts) was entitled "The Arab of the Desert."  And it was the desert that best symbolized the alleged unproductive, fossilized nature of the Arab and Muslim world. The ruins in the desert have interested most visitors (from Napoleon to our own time) more than the crowded urban market place. The Orient as an empty wasteland was easily imagined as a space inviting conquerors. For orientalism as an imperialist discourse, which it became in the nineteenth century, no other simile of the Orient could surpass the desiccated, empty desert.
But if the desert was effete it, at the same time, was the home of the one Arab people that most faithfully conserved the old ways of oriental living and thinking. These were, of course, the Bedouin, whom nineteenth-century writers frequently contrasted with the Arab of the city, who represented decadence and degeneration. There was an element in this aspect of orientalism of the European's longing for the pre-modern world:  the Arab city stood perhaps for all cities when it was imagined to represent not progress but decline from a more glorious past. The Bedouin, who represented the noblest Arab and the pure Semite, still lived in a simpler but more religious and more virile age. Indeed, many nineteenth century Jews turned to the Bedouin as proof of the qualities of the Semitic race. (None did so more enthusiastically than Benjamin Disraeli, a proud Jew in spite of his baptism, and as the author of the novels Tancred and David Alroy an ideologist of Jewish self-identification as an oriental desert race.)
The occidental conquerors always felt a sympathy for the Bedouin. There was little reason to fight these nomads:  the desert lands where they grazed their livestock offered no economic enticement and the West had no desire to establish direct control there. The attractiveness of the Bedouin was semiotic. To many a romantic Westerner the Bedouin represented the ancient glory of the Orient that has been spared the degeneration of contemporary Muslim urban life. They roamed the empty spaces without any concession (it seemed) to the "Arab of the city."  In this way they were just what the romantic Westerners wanted to be:  the carriers of oriental glory in an East conceived of as a desiccated emptiness. In the nineteenth century, Western popular fiction presented daring Bedouin warriors performing valiant deeds under the direction of a European "friend."  The most salient example of this international trend was the Orient Cycle, by Karl May, a writer of adventure whose books probably sold more copies in Middle Europe than those of any other popular writer. The hero of the Orient Cycle (1881-1888), an anthropologist, sleuth, and overall Übermensch, roams the Orient under the pseudonym Kara Ben Nemsi (Karl Son of the German). His side kick, Halef, is - predictably - a Bedouin.  Decades later, a non-fictional Briton, Thomas Edward Lawrence a.k.a. "El-Orens" or "Lawrence of Arabia" (1888-1935) more than filled Kara Ben Nemsi's shoes as he fought the Turks with, and often at the head of, his Bedouin allies.
The Bedouin as carriers of uncorrupted ancient glory were seen in contemporary pseudo-scientific terms as the most racially as well as culturally pure "Semites," a newly conceived racial-cultural-linguistic category that overlapped with the older, religiously conceived image of the oriental. The "Semite" was an invention that accompanied the "Aryan myth," as critics later called it:  the mistaken identification of the Indo-European language family, also known as "Indo-European" (and in Germany, indo-germanisch) with a racial group.   A necessary extension of this idea was the equally erroneous equation between the Semitic language family and a "Semitic race."  Just as Hebrew and Arabic were scientifically grouped as belonging to the same family - a classification that is still universally accepted today - so were Jews and Arabs lumped together as Semitic peoples, the most typical, as far as European scholars and the public were concerned, of the "oriental races."
In the mid-nineteenth century, the public probably considered the French orientalist scholar Ernest Renan as the foremost authority on the Semites. Renan was instrumental in recharging the old East vs. West / Muslim vs. Christian dichotomy with the new content of race. The biblical Jew, who had previously been seen as the religious Other, now came to be understood also as Other by race.
Renan caused quite an uproar with his hotly disputed 1863 Life of Jesus, where he described Jesus "realistically" (as he and sympathetic readers saw it) in his Semitic surroundings. Methodologically, Renan's followed typical nineteenth-century practice:  he believed that the Orient today would reveal what the Orient had always been. This resulted logically from the proposition that at least some Arabs carried the unchanging, fossilized Semitic spirit that infused the contemporaries of Jesus. It mattered little that they were Arabs and not Jews - both were Semites and their differences today were at any rate conceived of largely as due to the degenerative influences of post-biblical history, with the Jews much more "corrupted" in this sense, according to Renan, than the pure Bedouin.  On this premise, to a person interested in biblical history the Palestinians were an archive in flesh and blood, and Renan made a personal voyage to the Orient. The following passage is typical of the way Renan peppered his biblical narrative with subtle references to geographic and ethnographic knowledge that he presumably gathered during his visit:
Nazareth was a small town in a hollow, opening broadly at the summit of the group of mountains which close the plain of Estraedon on the north. The population is now from three to four thousand, and it can never have varied much. (...)  The town, like all the small Jewish towns at this period, was a heap of huts built without style, and would exhibit that harsh and poor aspect which villages in Semitic countries now present. The house, it seems, did not differ much from those cubes of stone, without exterior or interior elegance, which still cover the richest parts of the Lebanon, and which, surrounded with vines and fig-trees, are still very agreeable.
The assumption of timelessness coexisted, for Renan and most other orientalists, paradoxically with the presumption that the Orient was in decline. Renan follows the above passage with a report, most likely based on a personal investigation during his visit of Nazareth, that the fountain at which Mary and the other women of the town used to gather in "gaiety" no longer exists. Nevertheless, the "broken channels" of the town still contain a "muddy stream" and the women meet there in the evening.
Almost certainly Renan is referring to the open sewers running down the streets. It is hard to see why women would gather in the evening at a muddy stream. One has to suspect that we have here a figment of orientalist imagination rather than an excerpt from Renan's travel notes. The author included it to make a link between the present and the past, as well as to point, through the imagined drying up of Mary's well, to an overall desiccation of the environment:  where there was a fountain yesterday, there is today but a muddy stream. The geological barrenness of the landscape of course dovetails with its imagined cultural barrenness, and that was something that Renan associated with the Semitic character. (Renan declared that the Semites were monotheistic because - to put it with only a touch of oversimplification - they lacked the imagination to invent more than one god.) 
Renan's Jesus came out in 1863. He had a strong influence on the artists of the period, such as the pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, who had already began to depict Jesus and the New Testament in what they considered realistic terms, bolstered by the findings of travelers, archeologists and proto-ethnologists. As Malcolm Warner has argued, these artists were able to provide a quasi-scientific foundation for Christianity at a time when it was under severe challenge by scientific discovery. Furthermore, they saw their romanticized description of Islamic worship as a metaphor for the simple and sincere Christianity of the middle ages, for which many Christian conservatives longed.  In England, such tendencies found, in addition to artistic outlets, some political forms, as in the Young England movement led by Benjamin Disraeli. In France, political manifestations were less evident, but orientalist biblical art was even more prominent. Horace Vernet was prominent among the artists who flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century. But it was Gustave Doré's (1832-1883) Sainte Bible, published two years after Renan's Jesus in 1865, that, more than any other work, popularized the kaffiyeh-ed Bedouin look in representations of the ancient Israelites (fig. 6).

The time was propitious for Doré's book, for, as one observer put it, "in a period when illustrated books flourished as never before, the most famous of illustrators was working on the great best-seller."  Indeed, the mechanical reproduction of art that, to Benjamin, inaugurates the modern phase of public culture, had no finer early example that that of this Bible.
The popular impact of the Doré Bible is seen in the influence it had on the style of Christmas crèches. One can still witness Doré-derived Bedouin Israelites at Christmas in every corner of Western Christendom, from Polish village churches to Macy's windows in New York to the oversized mannequins on Ocean Avenue in Sta. Monica.
A nineteenth-century case study of Doré's international influence is that of Antonin Čeloud of Trebic, a quiet provincial town in Bohemia. Apparently, Čeloud loved the Doré bible and used it deliberately as an inspiration for his Christmas creches.  He read Doré's work as a realistic depiction of life in the Holy Land. To see it for himself, he went on a personal pilgrimage in 1905. Once there, he was quite shocked to find the reality to be quite different from what he had been imagining. His was perhaps the same kind of disappointment that had compelled the Tirolean creche maker Franz Pernlochner the Senior (1847-1895) to construct his work without any reference to the Orient, after he had been to Jerusalem to seek models for his art. Čeloud, however, preferred to solve the cognitive dissonance between orientalist fantasy and a visitor's reality in favor of the fantasy. He went on working as before, making orientalist references to the Doré tradition rather than to what he himself had seen. He grumbled, for example, that there were too many black sheep in Palestine, and decided to stick to making white ones.
Unlike Čeloud, Pernlochner and many other artists Doré did not seek to legitimize his biblical art by a research trip to the Orient.   Nevertheless, his Bible illustration was certainly influenced by contemporary "knowledge" such as the researches of Ernest Renan. For Doré's goal, like Renan's, was to give the public a taste of what Jesus and his period were "really" like.
As is known the desire to be realistic usually had at least a tinge of a social agenda to it. Realists wished to depict ordinary life rather than just the exalted lives of kings, heroes, and saints. Doré was typical in this sense, and aimed to tell the story of Jesus among "ordinary" Jews and in a historically accurate context, just as Renan (whose liberal religious views were otherwise anathema to the conservative Doré) had done.
A contemporary put this as follows:
[Doré's biblical personages] are men and women, moved by the same passions, subject to the same infirmities, impressed by the same grandeur, cast down by the same sorrows, and elated by the same joys as ourselves. There is an intense vitality in his pictures, that gives to them a realism unapproached in the works of any other artist. His Eastern pictures are a-glow with oriental splendor.
Interestingly, the commentator saw no contradiction between Doré's personages being just like the occidental reader, yet living in a setting glowing with oriental splendor. What the writer means is that what comes across here is the common humanity of people living in different surroundings, and it comes across convincingly because both their human condition and their distinctive environment are portrayed realistically.
The realistic style, as we know, presents an ideologically constructed object (in this case a painting) as if it were the representation of unconstructed fact.  The authority of the realistic portrayal gave orientalist work the aura of factual knowledge. As Said has argued, the Western claim of knowing the East was a prime prerequisite of imperialist domination.
The nearly photographic hyper-realism of orientalist artists like Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) - whose 1883 Snake Charmer fittingly appeared on the cover of the 1980 paperback edition of Said's Orientalism - was a powerful support for the orientalist claim to know. Reflecting the relative secularization of orientalist discourse during the period of empire building, orientalist artists like Gerome preferred contemporary oriental subjects to biblical ones. Yet Gérôme, who spent long periods in the Orient and was in Palestine in 1868, did produce some depictions of biblical subjects. When he did so he modeled his Israelites on his Arabs and Bedouin.
Gérôme's Flight from Egypt pictures an angel leading Joseph and Mary, dressed like Bedouin, in the desert. In his Entry of Christ to Jerusalem (1890), a blond Jesus approaches on a white donkey, accompanied by another blond male and a white donkey colt.   The welcoming party is led by Magdalene, the ex-prostitute, a richly adorned character prefiguring the artist's Woman of Cairo (1897). Behind Magdalene, a little hard to discern in the shade of the oscuro part of the painting, several male Jews prostrate themselves to the Son of God in the Muslim fashion.
What clearer image could there be of the overlap between Christian conversion and European expansion?   The white man Jesus has here risen above his swarthy Jewish-oriental surroundings.
In traditional Christianity both the poverty of the manger and the spiritual limits of Old Testament Judaism are contrasted, as points of origin and metaphors for the human condition, with the higher level of the Spirit achieved and preached by Christ. In orientalist Christian art since the Renaissance this point of view received a new twist:  Jesus' life is now understood as transcending not only the limits of the Old Testament but also, in a perfectly parallel manner, the confines of the Orient. Renan and Gérôme's art indexes a further transformation:  now the superiority of Christianity over the originary Judaic East is expressed in addition as the superiority of the Aryan over the Semitic race. Of course, Jesus' Jewish birth was a problem for Aryanists, who were forced to improvise solutions to reconcile his apparent racial origins with his purportedly Aryan spirituality. It certainly posed a problem for the artist seeking to give what the public considered to be a realistic picture of Jesus and his times. Should the artist picture a "racially" Semitic Christ?  The answer given was either no - or yes, but not too much.    Artists dedicated to a "realistic" portrayal of the New Testament occasionally showed a Jesus whose facial features were rather oriental, but always within the range of "European types," i.e. not too dark-skinned, with not too curly hair, and never with a "Semitic" nose. In his unfinished Christ Before Pilate, David Wilkie, who traveled to the Holy Land in 1841, used a European-looking Jesus modeled on a Persian prince because, although he believed that Jesus would have looked "Jewish," he thought that showing him that way would not have "served" the Christian faith.  Christian artists occasionally showed Jesus in an "oriental" tunic and sash, as in The Finding of the Savior in the Temple by William Holman Hunt (1854 to 1860), but never with a turban or a kaffiyeh.
Portraying Jesus visually as part of rather than a contrast to his Semitic people was limited to a small number of Jewish artists (none of whom, it seems, chose to encode his Jewishness as an oriental one). In 1873 Mark Antokolsky, the Russian sculptor, provocatively represented Jesus as a traditional East European Jew. Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879) created a number of canvases where the crucified Jesus's shroud is a Jewish prayer shawl, the talith.  He may have inspired the much more famous Marc Chagal, whose White Crucifixion (1938) uses the same visual device tomake a similar point against an Aryanism that was, in Nazi Germany, already beginning to reach its logical conclusion.
Such Jewish artists followed a Jewish counter-tradition, authoritatively described by Susannah Heschel, of representing Jesus as emphatically a Jew. This Jewish counter-discourse developed in difficult dialogue with the effort by many Christians to dejudaize and "Aryanize" Jesus.  Indeed, Renan was one of the earlier proponents of the theory that Jesus was not a Semite, which later became a standard of antisemitic writing in the nineteenth century. Christ's racial forebears, he suggested, likely included "even Greeks."  And he opined that
The inequality of men is much more marked in the East than with us. It is not rare to see arise there, in the midst of a general atmosphere of wickedness, characters whose greatness astonishes us. So far from Jesus having been created by his disciples, he appeared in everything as superior to his disciples.

Continuities:  The Rules of Orientalist Representation

Having traced the discontinuities in the orientalist representation of the biblical Jews - from turbans in the age of Ottoman power to kaffiyeh in the period of imperialism and racial antisemitism - we are now ready to examine the underlying continuities that define this type of representation throughout its varied history.
First of all, in all historical versions of orientalist biblical art it is enough for one or more characters to be shown in oriental costume - the rest can be European. The oriental-looking personages are then metonymic for the oriental character of the entire scene. Artists have often depicted in the background of biblical scenes local crowds equivalent to Hollywood's extras. In a typical orientalist Christ Before Pilate or Road to Calvary only some of the Jews are shown wearing distinctive oriental headwear.
There is an ideological reason for this. Showing some but not all Jews as oriental expresses the religious position that they had, at the time of Christ, the option of joining or rejecting him.   In the code of Christian orientalist art, encrypted in the form of dress and headwear, Judaism is oriental and Christianity is occidental. But while the Jewish religion was oriental, the Jews at the time of Christ had the choice of surpassing it and adopting, as Christians, what was to become the religion of the West. To European viewers the Jews clad in oriental costume represented the Jews wedded to their oriental religion, either because they were born before Christ or because, as contemporaries of Jesus, they have not yet fully embraced him, or indeed rejected him. The de-orientalized Jew is, on the other hand, represented the Christianized Jew whom the Western Christian viewer read as a spiritual ancestor. At the Christian theological level, the choice the artist has in representing a biblical personage as oriental or otherwise is meant to encode the choice we, the viewers, continue to have:  either to embrace Christ or to refuse him.
One of the most dramatic contrasts between the non-believing Jews and Christ's disciples is seen in Paolo Veronese's 1563 Marriage at Cana (fig. 7 - [may not reproduce well here; image is widely available on the internet]), the orientals are on our left and the disciples in Western garb on our right, separated in the middle by Jesus who has just turned water into wine. It is as typical as it is unfortunate that the literature, which is little interested in the history and extent of orientalizing portrayals of the Jews, usually gives Veronese's work a purely local interpretation, as if the artist had been inspired entirely by contemporary Venetian and Italian society. The married couple becomes simply rich Venetians. The pearls on the bride's necklace, which were known as "oriental pearls," like the groom's Islamic-inspired Venetian hat, are taken as merely examples of a whimsical orientalist fashion in the Venice of the time. There is even a kind of art historian's legend that one of the turbaned figures at the table of the wedding party (sixth from the left) is "the Turkish ambassador."  Needless to say, there is no foundation for such an interpretation in the contemporary sources, such as Vasari.

One should give Veronese his due as an interpreter of the New Testament. In the story of the Marriage at Cana Jesus and his disciples attend essentially incognito, hiding his identity as Messiah until the moment when he astonishes the crowd by turning water into wine. It was in keeping with an already established iconographic tradition that Veronese gave an oriental appearance to the participants who do not yet know Christ, but not to the party of Christ.
Elsewhere even the disciples of Jesus can be portrayed as oriental if it is a matter of contrasting them with their master. The conversionist narrative of Christianity stresses points at which the individual becomes Christian; consequently, the same individuals are sometimes shown changing their attire from oriental to occidental as an expression of their deepening link to Christ.
Doré's Bible provides a rather charming illustration. In the artist's Ascension (fig. 8), Jesus rises to heaven while his disciples look on, dressed as "typical" Bedouin. When the Holy Spirit subsequently descends on these bereaved worshippers, the event has a very curious effect on their wardrobe. In the Descent of the Spirit (fig. 9) we see, under the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, a gathering no longer of Bedouin but of classic Western figures. Though a long beard here and there, or the central figure's hood, may conceivably be read as "Jewish," they do not disturb the overall reference to traditional images of saints, monks and nuns. Problematizing Thoreau's injunction to "beware of enterprises that require a change of clothes," Doré represents the ultimate stage of the disciples' Christian spiritual journey as a divestiture of headscarves and staffs. Only now do the seekers finally manage to no longer be oriental - or shall we say, no longer Jewish?

A different message is encoded the medieval example from the Limbourg Brothers' Très Riches Heures, where Joseph is first shown with a peaked turban in the Nativity (fig. 4), but then bears a head of long, golden Nordic hair in the Adoration of the Magi (fig. 10). Here the intent is not to represent a religious conversion, but more simply a contrast. Joseph belonged to the generation before Christ, and in contrast to Christ remained a representative of the Old Testament. Church exegesis traditionally points out that he was extremely faithful to Jewish Law, following its commandments meticulously. Indeed, in the case of the redemption of the newborn, a ritual act that could be satisfied by presenting a priest with the means to offer a sacrifice, Joseph went beyond the call of duty and presented the baby Jesus to the High Priest at the Temple.   His role in the New Testament narrative is that of forging a link between the Old Testament and the New. That he, the paragon of religious responsibility, can be pictured as an oriental (indeed, medieval art often pictures him with a "Jewish hat") proves that it is a mistake to equate oriental representation with a disparaging attitude on the part of the artist:  Joseph was, in Christian terms, definitely a "good guy."  What we see here, rather, is evidence that oriental representation was relative. In the case of  Doré's Bible the Disciples are shown as no longer oriental when they are filled with the Holy Spirit. In the case of the Limbourg Brothers' manuscript, Joseph, standing for the Old Testament, is shown as oriental in contrast with Christ, but he is shown as occidental in contrast to the Magi and their retinue. His golden locks contrast with the turbans of the visitors from the East.

 

The Implicational Hierarchy of Orientalist Representation

The above discussion shows that the choice of whom to represent as oriental in orientalist biblical art is rule-governed, and that its underlying rules remain the same even as its forms change historically, reflecting different geopolitical and ideological relations between the Christian and the Muslim worlds. I suggest that these underlying rules can be described in terms of two very simple principles, which together can generate all the varied choices that artists have made throughout the history of the type of representation we are discussing. One concerns the exceptional status of Jesus, and the other presents a hierarchy of choices concerning how to represent the rest of biblical characters.

1) The Occidental Jesus Rule

As has been stated before, Jesus is never portrayed with oriental head-dress, i.e. with a turban or kaffiyeh, in Christian biblical art.

The Implicational Hierarchy of Biblical Orientalism

The choice of who, among the characters other than Jesus, is depicted as oriental is relative. In other words, a character may or may not be depicted as oriental. The choice of oriental depiction serves to contrast a character with others. It is governed by a kind of formula that linguists call an "implicational hierarchy," of the following form:

Gentile Orientals > "Judaic" Jews  > "Christian" Jews > Jesus
 

[Sorry, to see the graph correctly you have to go to the print version!]

What I mean here by "Judaic" Jews are Jews who are represented as clinging to the Old Testament (as we have seen this can be either because they were born before Christ or, if they are his contemporaries, they have either not yet fully embraced him or rejected him). "Christian" Jews, on the other hand, are those who have fully given themselves over to the New Testament faith.
The formula is a hierarchy, in which each category to the left is more oriental (i.e. more likely to be pictured in oriental attire) than any of the categories to the right. The formula is implicational for the following reason:  If any of the categories is represented as oriental, then all the categories to its left must be represented as oriental as well. In other words, choosing to mark any of the categories as oriental implies that all the others to the left are marked oriental as well.
The implicational hierarchy predicts that if a "Christian" Jew is orientalized (for at no time were artists obliged to represent any Israelites as oriental) then so will be any personages that may be present from the categories to the left:  "Judaic" Jews or Gentile orientals. If "Judaic" Jews are orientalized, then so will be any Gentile orientals present.
Another way to look at the hierarchy is that it prohibits representations that mark a category as oriental without so marking the categories to its left. We do not have any examples of "Christian" Jews such as the disciples of Christ shown with a kaffiyeh while the Pharisees or the skeptical crowd wear exclusively Western attire.
The implicational hierarchy is the unchanging formal underpinning of orientalist art with biblical subjects. It expresses a lasting, indeed defining feature of Christian thought: that Old Testament Judaism was a preparation for Christianity and that the highest degree of spiritual fulfillment is in Christ. The West has understood itself as risen from, and above, its oriental roots in the same manner as Christ rose above his Jewish ones. This is why, in Christian art, Christ never wears a turban.

Notes