De Haan’s oriental utopia required erasing Jewish nationalism and secularism.

Evidence

De Haan’s real-life Orient witnessed greater contradictions, brutality, and contempt than that of the novelist. It was a raging dystopia, with Zionists attempting to subdue nature, the Arabs, and the Haredim. De Haan’s utopian oriental fantasy conceived that harmony could be attained if all of Jewry submitted to the demands of the ultra-Orthodox, the British colonial rulers, and the Arabs—with all trace of Jewish national sentiment and the very impulse toward secularism erased, a demon exorcised. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 444

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: There is a genuinely disturbing and philosophically rich inversion here: a Jewish Utopia defined by total self-emptying of Jewish national sovereignty — the ‘harmony’ purchased at the price of erasing the very category of the secular Jew. It reads like an anti-Zionist mirror of messianic return.