Chapter One

Introduction: A Case of Mistaken Identity

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Read the incomparable, Shylock and Othello.

Gil Anidjar[1]

We thought that the globalized, post-colonial, post-communist, post-modern, post-everything twenty-first century would turn a page on which something radically new was to be written. But the first major story of the century, the tragedy of September 11, 2001, was read by many as part of a very old tale. When George Bush called the American response a “crusade” he had trouble convincing Muslim listeners that he did not see himself as an heir of Richard the Lionhearted. The terror and the Western response were not, our politicians rightly insisted, a “clash of civilizations” or a “war between religions.” Yet when Bush declared that “we are right and they are wrong,” there were plenty of people, ranging from barbershop clients to academics to the prime minister of Italy, who thought that “we” were the Western world and “they” were the regions of Islam.

In this – presumably incorrect – image of a Muslim-Christian fight there is ample room for the followers of the oldest major monotheistic tradition. The Jewish State and its supporters, among whom American Jews loom largest, are firmly ensconced on the side of the West. One dissenting American writer, speaking to a Saudi audience, validated his President’s maladroit crusader metaphor from the opposite side. Palestinians attacking Israelis, said James Reston, fought the same jihad as Saladin.[2] So the Jews, once prime prey to the Crusaders, are now themselves pictured as the front rank of the Western forces ranged against the jihadis. And not only by the Arab side and their friends. Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel, too assessed the Middle East conflict in East-West terms, qualifying Israelis as a “first-world people” facing the “third world” Palestinians, and depicting the latter as habitual liars whose “mendacity” is due to the fact that they are outsiders to Judeo-Christian norms of morality. [3]

Jews as Muslims

Ironic indeed. The term “Judeo-Christian” is a twentieth century watchword. For most of the Christian Era westerners thought of the Jews as a foreign element of rather the same ilk as the Muslims. Even in the nineteenth century it seemed more natural to picture Jews in Saladin’s camp than in that of Richard the Lionhearted. Gotthold Lessing had done so in Nathan the Wise (17**), a play about a Jewish owner of camel caravans who advises Saladin on both financial and religious matters. The play had a major influence on German-speaking Jews, who in the nineteenth century accepted quite cheerfully the view of themselves as, in Herder’s words, “the Asiatics of Europe.” The legal emancipation of the Jews of Europe, which began in stops and spurts at the end of the eighteenth century, was articulated by friend and foe alike in terms of admitting an oriental people into the western polity. When in 184* the liberal Jews of Hamburg gathered to lay the foundation stone of their “Second Temple,” they sang, in the form of a specially composed dedicatory hymn, of “East and West, beautifully united.”[4]

If the term “Judeo-Christian” would make any sense to these Jews, it would have been in the sense of “uniting East and West” and certainly not in the Ehud Barak’s sense, who used it practically as a synonym of “western” and contrasted it with all that is Islamic or eastern. The wished for East-West union was deemed impossible by the enemies of Jewish emancipation, who would eventually choose for themselves the term “anti-Semite” advisedly, arguing as they did that the Jews were unassimilable because as Semites they were congenitally unable to understand and follow the ways of the Aryan West.

“[H]ostility to Islam in the modern Christian west has historically gone hand in hand with, has stemmed form the same source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism.”[5] The quote is from Edward Said, from a rejoinder Said issued to the critics of his much talked about 1978 work, Orientalism. He was setting his aim at those mainly Jewish scholars who, as he saw it, rejected his work for the pro-Palestinian conclusions that he, a leading Palestinian-American activist, drew from it. Instead, he suggested, they ought to have explored the common ground that orientalism could provide for studying unfair portrayals of both Arabs and Jews.

The suggestion is a very constructive one. As we follow where it leads us, however, we will find that it requires us to come to an even more radical conclusion than Said probably had in mind. The essential argument of this book is that not only “hostility to Islam,” but the entire centuries-long history of western attitudes to the East is firmly rooted in a background of Christian attitudes to Christianity’s Jewish origins in the Orient.

If the debate about Jewish emancipation and about anti-Semitism took place within the context of orientalism then this has important consequences for Jewish history. It would, however, be a pity to brush off the matter, as is too often done with any “Jewish” topic, into an academic ghetto where it concerns only those whose primary interest is the Jews. For the same reason that orientalism is important to “Jewish studies,” western debates about the Jews are important to orientalism. Both debates about the Jews and debates about the Muslims have originally been debates about religion. As western civilization is a Christian civilization, this means that they have been debates about Christianity’s relation to its religious Others. It is evident that when it comes to Christian-Jewish relations the Bible is of central importance. The relationship of the life of Jesus as described in the New Testament to the narratives of the Old Testament is among the most important foundations of Christian religiosity, and of course the Old Testament is a Jewish text. It may be less obvious, however, that depictions of the Muslim worlds have also, in the Christian Occident, been painted with a biblical brush.

Muslims as Jews

In time there will be an opportunity in this book to expound on the varied consequences of this proposition. For now it may suffice to quickly invoke a few of the images of the Muslim Orient that have invaded the consciousness (or perhaps, Jameson’s “political unconscious” is a better term)[6] of all of us in the West. All that has been said, imagined, painted or sculpted of the Muslim Orient in the Christian West has likely been bent through the prism of the biblical tradition.

The Bible is, to the western reader, an exotic tale of palm trees, oases, veiled damsels with nose rings, and – camels. One of the camel-rich scenes appears in the "Zionist" prophecy of Isaiah 60. It has been used to support Christian millenarians who see the “restoration” of the Jews to Jerusalem as a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ:

For the wealth of the sea shall pass on to you,

The riches of nations shall flow to you.

Dust clouds of camels shall cover you,

Dromedaries of Midian and Ephah.

They all shall come from Sheba;

They shall bear gold and frankincense …[7]

Camels are one of the most common icons of the Orient that evoke the Bible, biblical Israelites, and the Muslim world with equal force Christian religious painting has used camels to mark biblical scenes as oriental at least since the Renaissance. (A randomly chosen example from the Renaissance would be *.) The wise men of the New Testament bearing gifts to the baby Jesus, whom medieval tradition turned into the Three Kings or Magi, very often present their gold and frankincense with the King of the East’s camel parked nearby. Few nativity scenes, few movies on biblical themes, few Christian coloring books would be complete without at least one of these “ships of the desert.”

If today the camels – and donkeys - of Arab villages cannot be imagined independently of the animals that had brought visitors to the Nativity and the Adoration, neither can oriental deserts be imagined in the West independently of the “desolation” where the Israelites wandered and Jesus meditated, nor the orientalist painter’s odalisque independently of the “harlot” of Scripture – nor even, perhaps, the turbaned mullahs of the Taliban independently of the Pharisee scribes who condemned the Lord. This insistence on imagining the Muslim East in biblical terms is absolutely central to the orientalist tradition.

The biblical narrative sets the geographic limits of the Orient

Indeed, an unspoken rule has restricted the scope of scholars of orientalism, including Said, almost entirely to lands that we imagine on the pattern of biblical Palestine. Not all of what one is used to calling the Orient is necessarily included in the scope of the debate on orientalism that has followed Said’s seminal work. It is a fact that what Orient scholars of orientalism write about includes parts of the world that are not east of Europe (Muslim North Africa is included though it is to the south); and excludes for the most part lands that we routinely call “oriental,” such as Japan, Korea, China. Of course, in drawing the borders of the Orient thusly, scholars are merely following the older usage, still more evident in Europe than in America, when people thought first of the Middle East (or in France of North Africa) when they heard the word “Orient.” Even when it comes to “orientalism” there are precedents that support the restriction to west of Burma. The nineteenth century genre painting known as “orientalist” was also uninterested in the Far East.

I suggest that orientalist painters chose their focus on the same grounds as scholars of orientalism do today. There is indeed a consistency to western discourses about the Orient that excludes the regions of the Far East. For the Far East unlike the Near East and North Africa has not customarily been imagined in terms inspired by the Bible. Western discourses about the Far East are of course related to western discourses about the lands between Morocco and India. But so are western discourses about Africans, American Indians and, within Europe even about East Europeans – related, but sufficiently different for us to catalogue them outside the scope of orientalism proper. The history of colonialism (China or Thailand have never formally become western colonies), or the frontiers of Islam (Burma is not Muslim) do not, incidentally, help to draw the boundaries of orientalist interest, for Malaysia or Indonesia, both Muslim and both former colonies, are both excluded. The clearest criterion on which the regions and the peoples of the world can be included in the category of “target of orientalism” is whether or not they have been imagined in biblical terms. And if this does not posit impermeable boundaries (could it not be said that Chinese mandarins were thought of, like Arab sheikhs or Turkish pashas, as oriental despots on the pattern of Bible’s Solomon?), then so much the better. It is interesting to see when orientalist thought embraces China and beyond, and to inquire about the reasons. But evidently it does not always embrace it. It does always embrace Egypt and Syria, and certainly Palestine.

If we were to apply here the principles of prototype semantics (“a sparrow is more of a bird than is a chicken,” “an apple is more of a fruit than is a tomato”, “a beluga is more of a whale than a dolphin”), then I would argue that the prototype of the oriental environment is biblical Palestine, and the prototypical oriental people are the biblical Israelites.[8] That is not to say that every time one says “Orient” biblical Palestine springs to mind – today Japan is more likely to do so. Biblical Palestine is prototypical, rather, in the sense that its narratives, people, and land are the model that structures all those discourses and representations that the academic literature has identified as “orientalist.”

If, then, we take biblical Israel to be to other oriental regions and peoples what a sparrow (or robin) are to other birds, then we can identify as the prototypical locus of the Orient Jerusalem, the “center of the world” of medieval religious topography, and the surrounding territories from Egypt to Damascus that are directly mentioned in the Bible. A little less typically oriental (in the sense of prototype semantics) is the Muslim world from Morocco to Afghanistan, all of which the orientalist imagination pictures against an “oriental” backdrop (palm trees, camels, sheiks, and harems) that it likens to the setting of the biblical narrative. India is less oriental in this sense of being less bible-like: its jungles are better known than its deserts, for example. Still representations of South Asia belong to the orientalist discoursive field, and not only because it was, until partition, naturally recognized as largely Muslim. It is also because Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism have stood, in their impact on western thought, in a dialectical relationship to the biblically tinged Muslim Orient: at times these religions and civilizations play a role in the western imagination that is identical to that of the Muslim Orient, but at other times, especially where “eastern spirituality” is concerned, orientalism gives them more of a luster that it typically denies Islam. The reasons are explored in Chapter *. One of them is that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Indians (or, at least, Brahmins) and Persians as “Aryans” were understood to be on the right side of an opposition then made between the Indo-European (“Indo-Aryan,” “Indo-Germanic”) and the Semitic (Jewish and Arab) “races.”

Once one, however, gets east beyond India there is little sense in which the region is habitually related to the biblical narrative. The religions of the Far East are completely dispensable in the telling of the history of Christianity. The exception is perhaps when it comes to various alternative spiritualities that, like Vedic wisdom, have had a following in the West since the early nineteenth century. But Zen, Tao and the like are later entries whose propagation and impact depended on the path blazed for them by “Indian spirituality,” even if they are not themselves of ultimately Indian origin. (No wonder the early Japanese propagandist interpreter of Eastern spirituality to the West, *. * visited his idol, Rabindranath Tagore, for support and inspiration.) Either that, or they are connected to the discursive field of “martial arts,” which one can consider either as independent of India or as dependent on the earlier spread of yoga, but which is in any case remote from anything that has to do with the Bible. To appreciate the difference between the Orient of orientalism and the Orient beyond, it is in fact quite instructive to consider that there is and could not be any such thing (at least within western concepts of eastern spirituality) as Arab, Turkish, or Jewish martial arts. On the other hand, to the western imagination (though not necessarily in fact), in Japan and China there are no camels.

Orientalism: Discourse or Language?

Unlike “Orient” the term “orientalism” has never been part of popular parlance, but as in the case of “Orient” it has not always had the meaning established for it by Edward Said.

In France the Grand Encyclopaedia defined orientalism as the "system” of those who thought that the essential part of western civilization came from the East. In England, in the early nineteenth century, it referred to those who believed in the merits of native Indian civilization: the "orientalists" opposed to the “Anglicists” who who wished to replace Indian ways of living, thinking, and worshipping with imports from England. In the second half of the nineteenth century "orientalist" also came to refer to artists who depicted people and scenes from the Orient. And it began to be applied, most importantly, to scholars engaged in studying the languages and cultures of the Orient, from Morocco to Japan. Then Anouar Abdel-Malek, in an influential 1960’s article argued that this academic orientalism was not radically different from popular conceptions about the Orient. Edward Said included such conceptions in his characterization of orientalism as Western “suppositions, images and fantasies.”[9] It is in this last sense that I am using the term "orientalism" in this volume. Like Said, too, I recognize that the Orient is a region of “imaginative geography” rather than a naturally given division of the planet’s surface and that therefore orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with `our’ world”[10] so that in studying it the “things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original.”[11]

I do have some reservations about the characterization of orientalism, by Said and many others, as “discourse.”

When Said uses the term “discourse” he is without a doubt evoking the use of the term “discourse” by Michel Foucault. To Foucault a language was a finite set of principles that can generate an infinite number of discourses, while a discourse was a finite corpus of historically located texts.[12] Since Said it has been commonplace to speak of orientalism as a “discourse,” but surely neither he nor most other writers on the subject mean to equate orientalism with the complete collection of texts about the “East.” More likely, they are thinking of some sort of an ideational system that has generated those texts, and could potentially generate an infinite number of others. In other words, though the term “discourse” is liberally used to include orientalism among its referents, orientalism would, in Foucauldian terms, be more correctly referred to as a language.

Looking at orientalism as language opens it up to theorizing in terms of the Bakhtinian notion of slovo. According to Bakhtin, slovo, a Russian term typically translated as “the word,” is a stage on which changing and competing, socially conditioned views are played out.[13] And indeed, orientalism has, like words, kept a continuity of form while recharging itself periodically with new content. In terms of the early Foucault, who posited a principal epistemological contrast between the Renaissance and modernity, this itself makes orientalism more of a language than a discourse. Foucault believed that modernity generally required radically new discourses. Languages, however, obviously maintain their continuity across epistemological as well as economic or political revolutions. This is as true of a “real” language like Latin or English as of a non-verbal “language” such as orientalism, which underlies the western production of texts about the East the same way, mutatis mutandis, as English grammar underlies the production of English sentences.

I would suggest that orientalism qua language, that is as a generative ideational complex, has had a continuous if evolving existence since the Renaissance. On the other hand, orientalism as discourse in the narrow Foucauldian sense – i.e., a collection of texts - has probably had several rather discontinuous incarnations, which I distinguish in this book as the religious, the romantic, and the imperial. The continuity of the three is ensured not only by the survival in each period of the earlier orientalist discourses as such, but by the fact that all three are generated by an orientalist language that, although evolving (like any language) stays recognizably the same. In other words, orientalism is a language and there are discourses we can call orientalisms in the plural.

This formulation may perhaps exonerate Edward Said of the charge that in Orientalism he was being a bad Foucauldian in spite of his self-professed debt to Foucault. Aijaz Ahmed is correct in criticizing Said for using the Foucauldian term “discourse” for orientalism, which according to Said began in antiquity and has lasted to our own day: “For, the idea that there could be a discourse – that is to say, an epistemic construction – spanning both the pre-capitalist and the capitalist periods is not only an un-Marxist but also a radically un-Foucauldian idea.”[14] Ahmed’s argument hinges on the article, which he was write to emphasize: a discourse. A discourse (a collection of like texts) cannot span periods characterized by a radical discontinuity of social organization. But there can be discourses on each side of the divide, and these can be generated by the same language. Aside from the issue of whether anything in antiquity can reasonably be called orientalism, Said’s fault may therefore lie not so much in identifying a continuity in orientalism that spans the pre-capitalist and the capitalist periods. It may lie instead in mislabeling that continuity as a discourse rather than a language. As discourses, orientalisms show radical discontinuities from one period to another. What unites them is that they continue to be produced by the same orientalist language.

Incidentally, within these constraints orientalist language can generate not only overtly hostile, anti-oriental texts, but also such apparently “positive” outcomes as romantic portrayals of “a world from the Thousand and One Nights,” in orientalist art.

Unfortunately vulgarizers of Said, both among his friends and his detractors, have not recognized this and added yet another sense to "orientalism," which may well be its most popular meaning among non-specialists today. "Orientalism" in this distorted sense is always an overtly expressed, conscious hostility to the Orient and its people (or, in the sloppiest of such usages, an overtly expressed, conscious hostility to any non-western or non-white group). But while one can quite sensibly defend the argument that all orientalism expresses prejudice against the East, only those completely uninformed about its history could believe that it has always, or even most of the time, expressed that prejudice deliberately and openly. Most orientalist painters, writers or scholars felt that they admired at least some aspects of the East, sometimes using a romantic notion of the Orient to criticize the way of life - and the prejudices - of the West.

From the start there has been a streak in orientalism that was progressive rather than reactionary in its relation to the religious, political or economic status quo, and even, at least potentially, to ideologies of western, Christian domination in the world.

If, as I maintain, orientalism began in the Renaissance when the biblical region began to be imagined, rather than in eschatological terms, in terms of knowledge about the actual (then Ottoman-ruled) Orient, then what we are seeing in the rise of orientalism is an incipient secularization, a supplementing of religiously based knowledge by secular, in this case ethnographic, facts. Likewise, in the Enlightenment orientalist deism such as that of the Freemasons (see Chapter *) represented a powerful critique of the surviving premodern privileges of the Church. And if it is true that Zionism incorporated orientalist notions such as western progress and eastern backwardness, it is also true that it often saw itself as the liberation movement of an oriental people, stranded in Europe and wishing to "return" to its home in the Orient. To the bewildering complexities of the relationship between orientalism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I explore in more detail in *, must be added the fact that some Palestinian discourses of liberation have themselves often included orientalist assumptions. So had, earlier, the liberation discourses of diverse oriental regions such as Turkey and, especially, India.[15]

Such processes of subverting hegemonic orientalism are not adequately captured by the contrast made by some writers between “discourse” and “counter-discourse.” When Mahatma Gandhi espoused the orientalist notion of India as premodern and developed it into a sign not of backwardness but of a spirituality capable of constructing an alternative modernity, he was not simply taking a western discourse and standing it, as Marx is said to have done to Hegel's dialectics, on its head. He did not need to create a “counter-discourse" from a “discourse.” He was, rather, appealing to a counter-hegemonic strand that has always existed in orientalism. Eastern spirituality" had been, as I show in Chapter *, conceived of as a critique of western materialism - in the West.

All the more reason to recognize that orientalism (as opposed to specific orientalisms) is not a discourse, but a language – a language in the Foucauldian sense of the term, capable of generating very different texts and representations in different historical circumstances.

It would be premature at this stage to attempt an exhaustive description of what orientalist language is. However, among the major features (all of them referring to the imagination and not to the “real world”) it will include are 1) a radical division of a part of the world into an East opposed to a West and 2) a set of characterological oppositions between these two “halves,” such as “the West is masculine and rational, the East is feminine and fanatical”. To these I add 3) an imaginative “vocabulary” derived from western representations of the biblical setting: the deserts, camels and veiled damsels mentioned above.

The Bible, Palestine, and the Orient

My fundamental claim is that Palestine as the land of the Bible, and the Jews as the people of the Bible, have always been absolutely central to the orientalist imagination. Probably the main thing that Renaissance Christians, nineteenth century orientalist scholars, librettists and novelists, imperialist politicians and generals, Christian and Jewish Zionists, and indeed the general public in the western world today all have in common is that they have always imagined the Orient in terms of Palestine, and Palestine in terms of the Bible. Even in our secular age a western child is more likely to first hear about camels and deserts from biblical stories, picture books and Christmas nativity crèches than from travelogues about the Muslim world; and at any rate, the travelogues are heavily influenced by the tradition of popular bible illustration. The Bible, and therefore the Land of Israel or Palestine, are the model, the source, the common denominator, the organizing principle of all that has been said about the worlds of Islam in the West.

This was almost literally so when western discourses were dominated by explicitly Christian feelings, thoughts, and images. I shall argue that it is still so today. Why, for example, is it that almost any news about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes the first page in newspapers all over the western world (even where few Jews or Arabs are resident), at the same time that similar cruelties, intrigues, and rivalries are barely noticed when Israel and Palestine are not involved? There are no doubt many reasons. But surely the fact that we are here dealing with the biblical homeland of Christian tradition is a very major one among them. Today, the “sediment” as Said put it of Christian discourse continues to be central to orientalism, which remains a Christian language even without Christ.

Said considers his Orientalism to be the first of a trilogy whose second installment is Culture and Imperialism and the third The Question of Palestine. The sequence shows that Said recognized the ultimate importance of Palestine in orientalism. Some may have criticized Said, the Palestinian-American activist, for placing too much emphasis on the Palestinian issue. I would like to argue that he did not stress it enough.

Palestine is orientalism’s alpha as well as its omega. But Palestine did not come onto the scene of orientalism with the Arab liberation movements and with Zionism. Before it was central by virtue of its place in international politics it was central by virtue of its place in the Christian historical imagination.

Biblical Palestine, the ultimate source of the Christian imagination about the Orient, was not an Arab, but a Jewish Palestine. Therefore for much of western history Christians projected onto the Muslims (who owned the Holy Land) what they thought of the Jew (who lived there in biblical times).[16] On the contrary today, because of the long conflict in the Middle East and its international context, it is the Muslims who count as the most typical orientals (in the sense of “orientals” studied by scholars of orientalism, excluding those of the Far East), and the Jews appear well nigh as atypical of the “oriental” category as is the tomato of the category of fruits. Ehud Barak agrees with most anti-Zionists when he claims that Israel is a western nation whose ways contrast with those of the Third World around it. Could Said have been right when he said that the Jews have been able to free themselves of the “oriental” label but, so far, the Arabs have not? And if so, is “Judeo-Christian” Israel now facing, in the shape of the Palestinians, a people who continue to play alone, in the “political unconscious” of the West, the old orientalist role of the Old Testament Israelite? Probably: It is the Muslims (including the Palestinians) now who appear variously as the backward fanatics, the uncompromising zealots, the treacherous beguilers, the enemies of progress, or, alternatively, as the humble people of Christ. This is the latest and most ironic twist in orientalism, a centuries-long tragicomedy of mistaken identities.

Much, then, has changed since the Bible was first “orientalized” and the Muslim world “biblicized” in the Renaissance. Between then and now lie centuries of cultural history - the subject of my book. The next chapter divides that history into its salient periods, determined by the socioeconomic, political, and military context. The chapter that then follows discusses the concept of secularization that makes it possible to relate these periods to each other: to link the early, explicitly religious and biblical orientalisms to the modern colonial and post-colonial orientalisms with no obvious religious content.