Non-specialist Graetz mediated orientalism to generations of European Jews

Evidence

Heinrich Graetz (1817–91) was the greatest Jewish historian of the nineteenth century. Although not an Islamicist, per se, he shaped the way generations of students thought about the Orient with his comprehensive history of the Jews, in which he addressed at considerable length the rise of Islam, Jewish influences on Islamic belief and practice, and the subsequent history of the Jews in the Islamic orbit. Indeed, he was the principal, or at least initial, source of knowledge about this subject for many European Jews, and among them, many future Jewish orientalists. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 388