British caricature of Jews shifted from oriental to assimilated in a century

Evidence

The “secularization” of Jewish discourse, that is the attempt to distinguish it from Christian-Jewish polemics, was its reformulation in Orientalist terms. From the Enlightenment onward, the discussion of the civil status of the Jews has been formulated in clearly orientalist terms, while orientalist images have played an important role in the reshaping of Jewish identity. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 628 (#complicates, via linked claim)

One further feature distinguished Jewish orientalists from their gentile colleagues. Their own deep Jewish literacy made Islam and Arabic more intuitively intelligible to them than it had been for Christian scholars. Islam’s tradition of commentary and jurisprudence was in general outline entirely familiar to scholars steeped in traditional Jewish culture. Moreover, perturbed by the Europeanization (or indeed, Polonization) of Judaism in the form of Orthodoxy, the Jewish orientalists examined here accepted as a badge of honor the Enlightenment’s pejorative description of Judaism as “oriental.” In an attempt to reify this claim, they turned respectfully to the study of Islam and/or the Jewish culture that flourished under its aegis, hoping that the grandeur and beauty of both could reinvigorate Judaism and weaken the “dominance and authority” they themselves experienced at the hands of Europeans. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 414 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Yiddish was reclassified as a European language partly due to urban Jewish lobbying; Medieval ‘Jews have horns’ imagery still circulates in twenty-first-century Britain; Jews were long classified as an oriental people by the West — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 68 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern secular Jewish discourse was actually a reformulation in Orientalist terms #complicates (0.76) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 628
• Jewish orientalists embraced the oriental label to reinvigorate Judaism against Europeanization #complicates (0.74) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 414