Jewish orientalist scholars from non-colonial nations produced scholarship free of colonial ambition

Evidence

Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher were three Jewish historians who helped shape orientalist scholarship. They are linked in a number of ways. All shared similar intellectual inspirations: Hegel’s philosophy of history, the so-called higher biblical criticism, and Wissenschaft des Judentums, the critical, historical approach to the Jewish past. While Geiger and Graetz were German, Goldziher was Hungarian. Nevertheless, his most important scholarship was written in German, as was his crucial personal diary, and so his work bore the intellectual stamp and methodological assumptions of normative German historical scholarship. Moreover, whether from Breslau or Budapest, all three men came from countries that did not possess colonial holdings in the Near East and so their assessment of the Orient did not bare traces of colonialist ambition—sometimes, in fact, the exact opposite. While they clearly saw themselves as Europeans and were proud of that, theirs was not an orientalist project built on the foundations of a European, colonialist, triumphalism. Nor can the discourse that they produced really be seen as an act of cultural hegemony in the Gramscian sense. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 378

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates Said’s Orientalism thesis: knowledge production about the East from a non-imperial, subaltern position. Connects to the reader’s interest in who gets to represent whom.