Jabotinsky rejected Orientalism’s moral East-West binary as merely a technological gap

Evidence

According to Jabotinsky, this tendency to romanticize the Orient rested on the false assumption that the East and the West were fundamentally different. The only difference between the two, he claimed, was that while Europe was technologically advanced, the East by and large was not. The East, Jabotinsky claimed, was a primitive expression of Western culture—the historical equivalent of Europe of the Middle Ages. The calmness, restraint, and peacefulness of the East were a reflection of the Orient’s primitive nature, not the outcome of a profound approach to life. Jabotinsky maintained that there did not exist a moral difference between the predominantly Christian West and the Muslim world. He wrote, “Islam, like any other religion, possesses the greatest moral attributes and serves as a very positive educational factor.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 527

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that for Jabotinsky ‘Orientalist’ tendencies meant romanticizing the East as morally superior, an inversion of Said’s sense of the term.
• XREF: Echoes modern critiques that East-West difference is developmental not civilizational, but from a right-wing nationalist perspective — connects to the general ‘invented East/West binary’ literature.