Jewish nineteenth-century Orientalists created the myth of a tolerant medieval Muslim golden age.

Evidence

If all that Said was arguing was that Orientalists have not always been objective, then the argument would be merely banal. Orientalists themselves would be the first to assent to such a proposition. Bernard Lewis is only one of many scholars who were ahead of Said in drawing attention to the ways in which those who wrote about Islam and Arabs in past centuries tended to write according to the prejudices of their age and culture. In particular, Lewis drew attention to the way in which Jewish Orientalists of the nineteenth century played a large part in creating a myth of a golden age of Muslim culture and tolerance in medieval times. Said’s vision of Orientalism owed more to Lewis’s writings than Said would have been happy to acknowledge. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 518

Categorization

• XREF: Directly related to the ADDENDUM sacrifice theme of myth-making about golden ages; also concerns the ‘golden age of Muslim tolerance’ trope used polemically today.
• SEED: An essay angle: how a scholarly myth created by well-meaning Jewish orientalists became a weapon in contemporary Islamist and Islamophobic polemics alike.

Related

• Jewish orientalists studied Islam free of Europe’s civilizing-imperial mindset. (similarity 0.80)
• Learned Orientalist scholarship pressed ideological myths into service (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christian anti-Muslim discourse preceded Said’s orientalism by centuries (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s Orientalism changed the meaning of ‘Orientalism’ from benevolent human interest in the East to an apparatus of knowledge and writing aligned with western imperial power. (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s survey concentrated on British and French varieties of Orientalism that supported the British and French Empires as commercial enterprises constructed from colonialism. (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism treated Jews and Muslims as joint subjects from its medieval beginnings. (similarity 0.79)
• The Spanish Golden Age under Islam served as a political model for German Jews (similarity 0.78)
• Said’s liberalism foreclosed any possibility that the Orient could instruct the West (similarity 0.78)