Orientalizing the Jew

This relatively short book by Julie Kalman consists of three main chapters, each corresponding to one of the items in the subtitle. Chapter One is on religion. Chapter Two is about literature, and is also meant to be about painting and, to an even lesser extent, architecture. Chapter Three is dedicated to France’s imperial enterprise. In fact, although Kalman claims to make a broad foray into such general topics, each chapter is quite limited in its focus on very specific subtopics. Chapter One, which has the broadest scope of the three, concentrates on Christian pilgrimage, more than on any of the many other topics that belong to the general problematic. Chapter Two is very substantially devoted to the writer and traveller to the Orient, Théophile Gautier. Chapter Three has the narrowest focus, on the House of Bacri and Busnach, the Italian-Algerian financiers. The value of Kalman’s book increases with the decreasing general import of the successive chapters. A reader interested in Bacri and Busnach will find much of interest here; a reader interested in Gautier is likely to find many interesting facts; a serious reader interested in Christian pilgrims meeting the Jews of the Orient will perhaps take a few notes, while other material may be familiar. But on the whole, unfortunately, there is very little in Kalman’s book for the generalist who wants to find out about religion, culture and imperialism in France as it relates to the ‘orientalizing’ of the Jew. This disappointing fact is due to the silences produced by Kalman’s narrow focus and minimal reference to the now fairly extensive literature on orientalism and the Jews. The volume, Orientalism and the Jews (2005), co-edited by Derek Penslar and myself, gets one dismissive mention, while the rest of my work on orientalism, the Bible and the Jews is omitted altogether, resulting in Kalman missing the all-pervasive nineteenth-century orientalisation of all Jews, in Europe and in the Orient, as racial relatives of the Arabs. Lest it appear that my complaint is personal, here is a partial list of other authors who have directly or indirectly dealt with Jews and orientalism: Gil Anidjar, Sander Gilman, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, James Renton (zero mention), Suzannah Heschel, Jonathan Hess, James Pesto (one or just a few mentions). Kalman pays just a little more attention to Jonathan Boyarin, and even suggests that she is influenced by him, yet she hardly engages with his work in any detail at all. The same nonchalance characterises her reading of Edward Said, but this is of even more consequence because Kalman actually presents her book as a criticism of Said’s notion of imperialism. If there is a theoretical framework in Kalman’s work, it has something to do with ‘reality and fantasy’, her point being that those two things were blurred when it came to the Oriental or Orientalised Jew (p. 108). The blurring of the imagination and fact is, of course, considered as inescapable by the majority of historians and others today. Indeed, it could be argued that such blurring was the very point made about orientalism by Said. Kalman, unfortunately, takes the widespread but mistaken position which I have called ‘vulgar Saidism’, that is, that Said thought that the Orient was all fantasy. Another vulgar Saidist classic is that Said described all Orientalism as explicitly denigrating the Orient, and that he ignored Orientalism’s romantic and idealising aspects. But no one who reads his work can miss that he was aware of the fact that the imperialist import of orientalism was not always explicit. If anything, the most shocking discovery by Said was that what previously seemed like admiring orientalism was also, if only implicitly, part of the same Foucauldian ‘discourse’ as the explicitly supremacist texts. One could conceivably object to this reading of orientalism, but it will not do to simply ignore it on the basis of a misconstruction. It is certainly legitimate to ‘seek to disentangle Orientalism from the teloi of colonialism and Zionism’ (p. 11), where Kalman rightly sees Said as having placed it. But that should be done by either dismissing Said’s archive as irrelevant, or by putting a better interpretation on it. As it is, Kalman deals with plenty of facts that a properly Saidian reading would place squarely in the problematics of colonialism and Zionism. Indeed, she herself speaks of ‘Imperialism’ as the relevant context of her chapter on Bacri and Busnach. In her own words, ‘Bacri and Busnach were agents in the French experience in Algiers’ (p. 118)—a fact that she amply demonstrates. How is this not a matter of colonialism? Only if one thinks that ‘colonialism’ must be a black-and-white tale of domination and resistance, with no room for the kind of middle ground served by the Jews of the Orient. Had Kalman taken Said and the subsequent decades of writing on colonialism seriously, rather than simply dismissing them, she might have made an important contribution to understanding the role of the Jews—complex, ambiguous—in it. Equally regrettable is her refusal to engage with Zionism as relevant to orientalism. She does make repeated references to Christians seeing Jews in the Holy Land as being in their ancestral home, but seems not to see how this is relevant to the history of Zionism, probably because she fails to consult the clearly relevant literature on that topic. The most regrettable omission, however, is the fact (to which I, among others, have paid ample attention in print) that not only the Jews of the Orient but also the Jews of Europe were thoroughly Orientalised: ‘Asiatic refugees’, as Christian Dohm put it as early as 1781. Kalman apparently does not know the literature on this. For the most part, what she means by ‘Orientalized Jew’ is simply ‘Oriental Jew’, a term that she may be avoiding simply as a misplaced bow to political correctness. She certainly does detail how the French considered oriental and European Jews as being the same at times, and different at other times. But she misses a chance to draw from this fact the conclusions that might have made her book, useful as it is on many areas of empirical fact, more generally instructive about Orientalising the Jew

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