Jews have practiced orientalism against each other, and even against themselves.

Evidence

The “internal orientalism” of Jew versus Jew, practiced by modernizing, Western or Westernized, Ashkenazic Jews vis-à-vis their more traditional brethren was not unrelated to the romantic self-orientalization just mentioned. Ismar Schorsch and others have shown that the identification of nineteenth-century liberal Jewry with Judaism in medieval Muslim Spain was to a significant degree a way to avoid the stigma of identifying with the Ostjuden of eastern Europe. For the most part the “half-Asiatic” Ostjuden were abhorred in, paradoxically, typically orientalist terms; nonetheless, they too could be the target of romantic orientalism. Of more relevance to recent history is another version of Jew-toward-Jew orientalism: that of the Ashkenazic Jews (originating in the West) toward the “oriental” Jews in Israel. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 86

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the orientalism framework from the earlier chapters on Christian orientalist views of Jews to intra-Jewish dynamics. Also connects to the volume’s own theme of Jews as both oriental and occidental subjects.
• STORYSTEM: The nineteenth-century liberal Jewish embrace of medieval Muslim Spain as a self-fashioning move to dissociate from eastern European co-religionists is a rich narrative seed — a character choosing a romantic heritage precisely to escape a stigmatized kinship.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘internal orientalism’ as orientalism practiced within a group against its own members.