Zweig prized the Orient’s alien forms as Judaism’s most authentic essence

Evidence

For Zweig, precisely that which is most oriental and non-Western—in short, that which is most distasteful to western Jews—represents the most authentic form of Judaism. Thus, the loud, passionate chanting (the “foreign articulated, wailing, groaning melodies”), the sheer dynamism of the act, embodies the fundamental mode of worship; this in spite of, or rather because of, the fact that it appears altogether alien to religious observance in the West. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 432

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how authenticity claims invert the distasteful—the idea that what shames a group’s assimilated members becomes the marker of its deepest truth.
• CANDY: A pithy paradox worth casually sharing: Jews seeking authenticity deliberately embraced the very Orientalist tropes used against them.
• XREF: Parallels the self-orientalizing dynamic described in Gil Anidjar’s The Jew, the Arab and in Said’s account of how discourse shapes identity.