Jabotinsky rejected romanticizing the Orient as a primitive stage of Western development

Evidence

Jabotinsky challenged in this article what he called the “orientalist” tendencies that had gained popularity among Zionists who saw the East and its inhabitants as morally superior to the West, because the East had not been contaminated by Western civilization and had maintained its original, virtuous characteristics. 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. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 537

Categorization

• XREF: Jabotinsky’s ‘Europe’s moral boundaries to the Euphrates’ evokes the civilization-vs-backwardness framing in Orientalism literature, and the Islamic-modernity tension (ironically ‘Not Islam but Islamists’ in the reader’s area of interest).
• SHARE: The specific Jaboitinsky quote about advancing Europe’s moral boundaries to the Euphrates might be worth sending to anyone into Revisionist Zionism history.