The Cult of the Orient pervaded assimilated German-Jewish bourgeois culture as self-fashioning.

Evidence

Needless to say, Zweig was not the only assimilated German-Jewish writer to make such observations of eastern Jews at prayer. Alfred Döblin, in his Reise in Poland [Journey to Poland] (1926), commented on the “primal element” reached in eastern Jewish religious observance (in this instance, in the deep, undulating chant of Kol Nidre), while Joseph Roth, in his Juden auf Wanderschaft [Wandering Jews] (1927), notes the odd exoticism attributed to Hasidim when viewed by western Europeans, almost as if they were “inhabitants of the Himalayan region, who are now so much in fashion.” As the work of Paul Mendes-Flohr, Steven Aschheim, and others has shown, the “Cult of the Orient” in general, and the “Cult of eastern Jewry” in particular, was a widespread phenomenon during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In urban centers across central and western Europe, assimilated Jews (and a number of gentiles as well) turned to the Orient as a source of cultural revitalization. That this turn largely took root in an urban milieu is of no minor significance, for “the shaping of an identity of the Orient,” argues Scott Spector, “is a practice that cannot be separated from the construction of metropolitan identities.” From Karl Emil Franzos and Else Lasker-Schüler through Buber and his far-reaching reception, the discovery and cultivation of an orientalized Jewishness left a significant mark among otherwise fully assimilated, urbane, and thoroughly bourgeois German Jews. As Buber himself once summarily quipped, “the Jew has remained an oriental.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 435

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Spector’s argument that oriental identity construction is inseparable from metropolitan identity — resonates with the Complaints About Immodesty article’s framing of dress/identity as class signaling in urban contexts.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the specific mechanism by which urban ‘metropolitan’ identity required an orientalized other — why did city dwellers of all bourgeois types need this foil?