American evangelical orientalism recasts Jews as latter-day Hebrews in a sacred epic

Evidence

Although orientalist perceptions of Jews have all but disappeared in Europe, they continue to flourish in some parts of the United States. In part because America itself has appeared to its European settlers as a Promised Land, there is at the cultural and symbolic level a potential, much exploited today, for pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli sympathy in the United States. Melani McAlister has provided a richly original reading of this sentiment, including its orientalist allusions, in its effects on American policy in the Middle East, but also on ethnic and racial relations within the United States. Evangelical Christians, who display a powerful biblicist orientalism, are the most visible and perhaps extreme example. Before the evangelical gaze contemporary Jews, particularly Israelis, become latter-day Hebrews, the center of a sacred-historical epic that began in the Orient with the dawn of man and will end there with humanity’s salvation. But most North American Christians often view Jewish rituals as pleasantly exotic, and many a bemused gentile, attending a traditional Jewish Sabbath dinner or synagogue service, has felt himself or herself to have been transported to an extraterritorial Orient, an embassy of Semitic space. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader orientalism literature argued in the chapter’s framing, and to McAlister’s work on American biblical orientalism shaping Middle East policy. — connects to: Jewish nationalism adopted the Christian West’s secularized image of the ancient Hebrews — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 335