German nationalist Jews rejected eastern Jewry as culturally alien and threatening

Evidence

However, the fascination with eastern Jewry and its putative “oriental” affinities was not shared by all. According to Max Naumann, in a tract published in the same year as Zweig’s work, Vom nationaldeutschen Juden [On the Nationalist German Jew] (1920), the Jews of the East maintained “moral views of sub-Asia [Halb-Asiens] foreign to the German spirit” and therefore posed a threat to the well-being of those views held dearest to Germans. Naumann had little sympathy for Jews such as Zweig, who—in what he no doubt saw as a severely misguided effort—looked to the eastern Jews, the very inhabitants of Halb-Asien, for cultural sustenance and a vital source of regeneration, an act that a cultural anthropologist might be apt to term “going native.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 436

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme in this collection of orientalist discourse being contested within Jewish populations themselves — parallels debates covered elsewhere in the book about internalized orientalist hierarchies.
• DEFINE: Introduces the term Halb-Asien / ‘sub-Asia’ as a German-Jewish orientalist label for eastern European Jewry, and the analytic concept of ‘going native’ applied retroactively.