Nineteenth-century Europeans and Jews idealized Bedouins as pure carriers of ancient oriental glory.

Evidence

But if the desert was effete, at the same time it was the home of the one Arab people that most faithfully conserved the old ways of oriental living and thinking. These were, of course, the Bedouin, whom nineteenth-century writers frequently contrasted with the Arab of the city, who represented decadence and degeneration. There was an element in this aspect of orientalism of the European’s longing for the premodern world: the Arab city stood perhaps for all cities when it was imagined to represent not progress but decline from a more glorious past. The Bedouin, who represented the noblest Arab and the pure Semite, still lived in a simpler but more religious and more virile age. Indeed, many nineteenth-century Jews turned to the Bedouin as proof of the qualities of the Semitic race. (None did so more enthusiastically than Benjamin Disraeli, a proud Jew in spite of his baptism, and as the author of the novels Tancred and David Alroy an ideologist of Jewish self-identification as an oriental desert race.) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 189

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the exoticization of ‘noble savage’ figures and to how marginalized groups adopt romanticized self-images; also relates to colonial semiotics of identity.
• DEFINE: The Bedouin-civilized Arab binary becomes a recurring trope worth noting as a conceptual frame.