Assimilated German-Jewish writers orientalized eastern Jews as closer to Islam than to Western Jewry.

Evidence

Indeed, most significant is that, for Zweig, the praying eastern Jew shares far more with the Islamic-based oriental than with his western European Jewish brethren. “This Ostjude [at prayer] is,” in the words of Leslie Morris, “Zweig’s orientalized, essentialized, and ahistorical other, the dervish who exhibits ‘utmost rapture.’” He is, like the old man, a type in the mythical landscape of eastern Jewry; he represents not a single person, but the collective spirit of an entire people. And, as Zweig remarks further on the dancing Hasidim, reaching new heights in their spiritually charged act, they serve as a stark reminder of the division between the life of natural, oriental purity and that of utter alienation of the Occident: “These old men, more the men than the boys, who really romp and rejoice in the prayer halls, these jumping Jews with blowing ‘Tallejssim’ and quivering beards, dancing naturally without women, dancing as the orientals they are in honor of the festive celebration and according to the book that contains the path to God, the path to life. These dancers evoke the quivering in and of itself, and with this every real insight is received: how far away one is alienated from life itself” (62). From Zweig’s—admittedly, somewhat skewed—vantage point, when the eastern Jews dance, they dance not merely as Jews, but as orientals; and even when they mourn, it is, so Zweig asserts, the “mourning of the oriental” (63). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 434

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Cult of the Orient discussion in this same chapter and echoes how European thinkers elsewhere orientalized internal ‘others’ (like Slavs or southern Italians) similarly.
• SEED: An essay angle: internal orientalism — how a minority group orientalizes its own poorer/religious co-members to claim modernity for itself.