Internal Outsiders – Imagined Orientals? Edited by Ulrike Brunotte – Jürgen Mohn – Christina Späti DISKURS RELIGION BEITRÄGE ZUR RELIGIONSGESCHICHTE UND RELIGIÖSEN ZEITGESCHICHTE Herausgegeben von Ulrike Brunotte und Jürgen Mohn BAND 13 ERGON VERLAG Internal Outsiders – Imagined Orientals? Antisemitism, Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Jewish Identity Edited by Ulrike Brunotte – Jürgen Mohn – Christina Späti ERGON VERLAG Umschlagabbildung: © Wylius <http://www.istockphoto.com/de/portfolio/Wylius?mediatype=photography> – iStock by Getty Images Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 2017 Ergon-Verlag GmbH · 97074 Würzburg Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb des Urheberrechtsgesetzes bedarf der Zustimmung des Verlages. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen jeder Art, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und für Einspeicherungen in elektronische Systeme. Umschlaggestaltung: Jan von Hugo Satz: Thomas Breier, Ergon-Verlag GmbH www.ergon-verlag.de ISSN 2198-2414 ISBN 978-3-95650-241-5 Table of Contents Ulrike Brunotte / Jürgen Mohn / Christina Späti Preliminary Remarks................................................................................................ 7 Colonialism, Orientalism and the Jews Steven E. Aschheim The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism.............................................................................. 11 Ulrike Brunotte “The Jewes did Indianize; or the Indians doe Judaize”: Philo-Semitism and anti-Judaism as Topoi of Colonial Discourse. A Case Study.......................................................................................................... 35 Jewish Orientalization and Self-Orientalization Hilegard Frübis The Figure of the Beautiful Jewess: Displacements on the Borders between East and West........................................ 61 Mirjam Rajner A Turbaned German of Mosaic Faith: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s Visual Self-Orientalization .....................................73 The Jew in Literature: Antisemitism, the Colonial Paradigm and the Orient Cecilie Speggers Schrøder Simonsen Colonialism in the Ghetto: Reading Aus dem Ghetto as Self-Colonizing Literature ..........................................87 Christine Achinger Orientalism, Occidentalism and Colonialism in Freytag’s Images of Jews and Poles........................................................................ 99 Axel Stähler The Author’s derrière and the Ludic Impulse: Oskar Panizza’s “The Operated Jew” (1893) and Amy Levy’s “Cohen of Trinity” (1889) ............................................................... 111 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Jewish Masculinity, Gender and Orientalism Ofri Ilany Homo-Semitism: Jewish Men, Greek Love and the Rise of Homosexual Identity ........................ 131 Gabriele Dietze Affective Masculinity: Queering Jewish Orientalism in Young Vienna.................................................. 143 Karin Stögner Nature and Anti-Nature: Constellations of Antisemitism and Sexism........................................................157 Jews as Orientals and De-Orientalization Christina Späti Between Exoticism and Antisemitism: Orientalization of Jews in Switzerland in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries .................................................173 Dekel Peretz Franz Oppenheimer: A Pioneer of Diasporic Zionism...........................................................................187 Jihan Jasmin S. Dean De-Orientalization of Jews after 1989 in Germany: The Relationship between Discourse and Subjects ............................................ 201 List of Contributors............................................................................................. 213 Plates..................................................................................................................... 217 Preliminary Remarks Ulrike Brunotte / Jürgen Mohn / Christina Späti This collection of essays will explore the possibility of applying perspectives de- veloped in the context of Gender and Postcolonial Studies to Jewish Cultural Studies and Studies in Antisemitism. The volume is the third multidisciplinary re- search output of the international research network “Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism, and Occidentalism” (ReNGOO). The network’s collaborative re- search addresses imaginative and aesthetic rather than sociological questions, with particular focus on the function of gender and sexuality in literary, scholarly and artistic transformations as well as in constructions of orientalist images both from without and from within. The focus is on research concerning the orientalization and self-orientalization of Jews. Both processes are strongly intertwined and inter- act in various ways. Self-orientalization as a way of response to quests of self- identification in an age of antisemitisms based on nationalist exclusion was made possible because orientalism in itself is a very ambiguous concept. While oriental- ist discourse often relied on heavy stereotyping and negatively connoted represen- tations of the oriental “Other,” it also sometimes took on positive connotations which referred to notions of exoticism, rendering the imagined East a mysterious and interesting place. Orientalism can thus be seen as a rather fluid concept which underwent many changes in the course of the nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries. The present collection of essays explores the ways in which stereotypes of the external and internal other intertwine in modern national discourse since the nineteenth century and examines the ways in which these borders are demarcated and transgressed by means of Orientalist self-fashioning in Jewish cultural produc- tion. In so doing, orientalizing discourse was used in order to Judaize the East, a process that became more important with the rise of Zionism and the question of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Moreover, the very idea of self- orientalization poses a challenge to the Saidian paradigm of orientalism, in which orientalism is conceived of as a “strange secret sharer of Western Antisemitism.” The general theme is approached in a truly interdisciplinary manner, and the book is thus divided into several chapters that cover, amongst others topics, the interaction of colonialism, Zionism and orientalism, the Jew as a literary oriental trope, and the entanglement of orientalizing identities with gender and queer identities. Although it takes its cue from highly topical debates and current re- search projects, the collection is nevertheless primarily concerned with the intri- cate genealogies of contemporary discourses. Reflections on the (Hobsbawmian) long nineteenth century and the fin de siècle are therefore at the center of the book. The two longer opening chapters of Aschheim and Brunotte, which are both re- 8 PRELIMINARY REMARKS publications, offer a kind of introduction to the broad field of study, first the longue durée of the intertwinement of the figure of the Jews and indigenous or “foreign people” in Western colonial discourse and colonial enterprises, and sec- ondly an introduction to the many varieties of orientalizations and the “Oriental web” (Aschheim) within European thinking. Colonialism, Orientalism and the Jews The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism* Steven E. Aschheim “My heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West.” Yehuda HaLevi (1085–1141) Politics and the writing of history have always been interconnected realms. It is clear that the great political question of the present day — the so-called “clash of civilizations” — has highlighted, and rendered us more sensitive to, themes and problems of historiography that previously were not regarded as particularly cen- tral or urgent. This may explain why so much of contemporary post-9/11 scholar- ship is so intent on studying the origins, conflicts, connections, and constructed nature of categories such as Islam, Europe, the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, the “secular” and the “religious.” In related fashion, the study of Jewish history is in- creasingly focusing on the critical interplay of “East” and “West” as both a forma- tive and problematic force in the multivalent Jewish engagement with the modern world. Much of this work has been characterized by shrill polemics and dogmatic ideology, but new, often provocative, perspectives have also been opened up by viewing these matters through postcolonial paradigms. Rather than engage this debate in partisan manner or seeking to smooth out the ambiguities, I want to ex- amine the ways in which these frameworks help us to illuminate the continuing, complex ironies and tensions of the “Oriental”–“Occidental” dichotomy and the seminal role that notions of the “East” and the “West” have played in modern Jewish politics, culture and identity. The “Oriental”–“Occidental” divide is, of course, a general ontological and epistemological cut that runs through millennia of Western history. The power- driven stereotype of the distinction between Asia and Arabia, the decayed, voice- less Orient, and the progressive, articulate Occident — a paradigm inextricably as- sociated with the work of Edward Said and which, despite many critical necessary qualifications and modifications, retains some essential