Jewish orientalists embraced the oriental label to reinvigorate Judaism against Europeanization

Evidence

One further feature distinguished Jewish orientalists from their gentile colleagues. Their own deep Jewish literacy made Islam and Arabic more intuitively intelligible to them than it had been for Christian scholars. Islam’s tradition of commentary and jurisprudence was in general outline entirely familiar to scholars steeped in traditional Jewish culture. Moreover, perturbed by the Europeanization (or indeed, Polonization) of Judaism in the form of Orthodoxy, the Jewish orientalists examined here accepted as a badge of honor the Enlightenment’s pejorative description of Judaism as “oriental.” In an attempt to reify this claim, they turned respectfully to the study of Islam and/or the Jewish culture that flourished under its aegis, hoping that the grandeur and beauty of both could reinvigorate Judaism and weaken the “dominance and authority” they themselves experienced at the hands of Europeans. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 414

Categorization

• SEED: An article angle: the strategy of reclaiming a pejorative identity label as a badge of honor — how marginalized scholars parlayed stigma into scholarly authority, with Jewish orientalists as a case study.
• XREF: Connects to the theme of reclaiming pejorative labels — parallels with other identity-reclamation movements and with Edward Said’s critique of orientalism serving non-Western interests.