Orientalism and the History of Western Anti-Semitism:
The Coming End of an American Taboo1
By Andrew N. Rubin
At the very end of the introduction to Orientalism, Edward W. Said makes the peculiar
observation that as he was writing the book he “found himself by some inescapable logic writing
the history of the strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism.”2 The historical and political
implications of this allusion to Joseph Conrad’s short story, “The Secret Sharer,” did not occur to
me until sometime around 2007, when, as I was writing the foreword to the reissue of his first
book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, I began receiving numerous requests
from journals to review what seemed at first a dizzying array of vitriolic, book-long polemics
whose sole aim was to discredit Orientalism.3 The distasteful idea of engaging these texts,
which described Orientalism as, among things, a work of “intellectual terrorism,”4 seemed
entirely counter-productive not simply because responding to them would actually lend to these
works a power that they did not even merit, but more important, it would recognize them as texts
written as if they had addressed the actual substance of Orientalism, and not some other social
1
For Phyllis Bennis.
2
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (2003), 27–28. All subsequent references will be cited as O and refer to this edition
unless otherwise specified.
3
These works, all of which were published in 2007 or shortly before, include Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A
Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007); Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its
Discontents (2006); Daniel M. Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (2007). As part of the same
political formation, one could also include texts that did not directly engage Orientalism in quite the same way or at
all, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (2008), Philip C.
Salzman and Diane Robinson Divine’s Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict (2008). The first phase of
this formation emphasized the “new anti-Semitism.” Texts included: Phyllis Chester’s The New Anti-Semitism: The
Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (2003), Pierre-André Taguieff’s Rising From the Muck: The New
Anti-Semitism in Europe (2004), and Abraham H. Foxman’s Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism
(2003).
4
Ibn Warraq, Defending the West (2003), 3.
antagonism of which a certain, popular anti-Orientalism was the remainder. What was
interesting about these belatedly and seemingly untimely reactions to Orientalism is that they
were the kind of polemics that appeared to embody a kind of cultural excess,5 symptoms of shifts
in the cultural fault-lines that suddenly make something visible that has actually been a
sedimented part of the social terrain all along, and now are disclosed as the grounds for a
different praxis.
In retrospect, the anti-Orientalist discourse had decisively changed its pitch by 2007,
although one can discern its historical antecedents as early as 2003. In testimony before a
House Subcommittee on Select Education that was investigating “questions of bias” in
Federally-funded Area Studies programs, Stanley Kurtz, a contributing editor to The National
Review, urged the Congress to pass House Resolution 3077 to establish an advisory board to
“study, monitor, apprise and evaluate” activities undertaken by academic departments or
programs that receive Federal Title VI funds for “Area Studies” on the grounds that Orientalism
no longer had to be read or taught for its “pernicious” influence to felt in Middle East Studies
programs. Kurtz warned the Subcommittee:
Edward Said has founded an intellectual paradigm. It’s called post-colonial
studies. It’s no longer necessary for people to directly quote him for them to be
under the influence of his general perspective. I have lived and seen this on a
day-by-day basis in academia, and I'm telling you that the influence of postcolonial theory and of approaches like Professor Edward Said’s is pervasive.6
5
It needs to be stressed that these texts are of a fundamentally different rhetorical character than the critique of
Orientalism by Bernard Lewis or Aijaz Ahmad, in that the former are written in an entirely different register, and in
many ways belong to a different genre.
6
“International Programs in Higher Education and Questions of Bias,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Select
Education of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, House of Representatives, 108th Congress, June 19,
2003, 27.
2
In retrospect, these statements seemed symptomatic of the fact that American political
discourse had, for the first time, permitted certain things to be said about the dispossession and
forced transfer of 750,000 Palestinians in 1947–1948 as well as Israel’s ongoing military
occupation of the Occupied Territories of Palestine, that, by any stretch of the imagination, could
not have possibly been uttered before.7 A younger generation of scholars had developed ideas of
own that it could not have inherited from the preceding one. Texts such as Defending the West
were, I realized, symptomatic of a new set of social and political antagonisms, whose emergence
marked an opening up of a discourse, that, dare I say it now, but why not, because, after all, it
can now be said, marked the coming end of American Zionism. What Edward Said had
described as “America’s last taboo” in 2000—the serious public discussion of the past or future
of Israel—had been broken.8 When The London Review of Books published John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt’s “The Israel Lobby,” in March 2006, they were by no means saying anything
that was not already widely known.9 Mearsheimer and Walt’s observation that organizations like
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee exercised a disproportionate amount of power
over the conduct of U.S. foreign relations with Israel was by no means a secret; yet the
suggestion that the alliance was neither based on some moral principle nor on a some national or
strategic interest prompted the New York Times Magazine to declare that Mearsheimer and
Walt’s work argument had “slammed into the opinion-making world with a Category 5 force.” 10
7
Edward W. Said, “America's Last Taboo,” New Left Review (2000): 46.
8
Ibid, 46.
9
John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2008).
10
The very magazine that had sustained the taboo had essentially announced to the world that it broken its own
taboo. The publication of the Israel Lobby, the paper of record declared, announced the end of “the beginning of the
end of the 9/11 taboo.” James Taub, “Does Abe Foxman Have an anti-anti-Semitic Problem,” New York Times
Magazine, January 14, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/magazine/14foxman.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
3
The climate, if you will, had radically changed. In Washington, D.C., which is where I
have lived since 2002, it became clear that it was now more or less possible to write and
politically do things that would have been impossible to do even before the tragic events of
September 11. American Zionism has not, by any means, lost its power and authority; it has,
however, lost its hegemony. If one interprets books such Defending the West: A Critique of
Edward Said's Orientalism by Ibn Warraq,11 Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism
and its Discontents,12 and even Daniel Martin Varisco's Reading Orientalism: the Said and the
Unsaid13 as a symptom of a shift in discourse, it becomes clear how these texts are the
expressions of a recrudescence of an American Zionism that had degraded and become more
malignant than it ever historically had been. Insofar as these texts were reactions to a shift in
feeling, they embody a late phase of ideology before it disintegrates and can no longer sustain
itself as set of shared beliefs that explain the world. Yet, it seemed as if these works dimly
apprehended the threat, yet by no means grasped how, in some vague way, Orientalism quietly
attested to its relevance to the present. One wondered, as Said had in “Orientalism Reconsidered,”
why so few critics had not more thoroughly engaged Orientalism’s claim “that hostility to Islam
in the modern Christian West has historically gone hand-in-hand with, has stemmed from the
same source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism, and that a critique of the
orthodoxies, dogmas, and disciplinary procedures of Orientalism contributes to an enlargement
of our understanding of the cultural mechanisms of anti-Semitism.” 14
11
Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007).
12
Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents (2006).
13
Daniel M. Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (2007).
14
Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), 208.
4
In many respects, the discipline of postcolonial studies, which claimed Orientalism as
part of its canon, did to some extent impede a full-throated, public discussion of the Palestinian
present, past, and past of future. What was, in retrospect, a debilitating critical debate over the
status of Michel Foucault in the text drained Orientalism of a great deal of its force. The
orthodoxies behind many of the impeachments against Said that he was not sufficiently loyal to
Foucault or his merthod were met with the equally unconvincing defenses that Orientalism was
unimaginable without Foucault.15 It was a scarcely observed, for example, that Orientalism is, in
quite a pronounced way, a scathing critique of Foucault’s account of philology in The Order of
Things, where Said observes, Foucault “does not mention Renan at all.” “Few of the standard
and contemporary works in linguistic theory or the history of Orientalism cite Renan with more
than cursory attention,” Said writes (O 149). In a footnote to that somewhat uncharacteristically
restrained observation, Said makes the point with characteristically less restraint. “Renan is
mentioned only in passing in Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale,” “only somewhat
disparagingly in Holger Pederson’s The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the
Nineteenth Century … Max Müller in his Lectures on the Science of Language (1861-64) and
Gustave Dugat in his Histoire des orientalistes de I'Europe du Xll’ au XIX’ siècle (1868-70) do
not mention Renan at all… [Nor for that matter does] James Darmesteters Essais Orientaux
(1883)—whose first item is a history, ‘L'Orientalisme en France,’ dedicated to Renan but does
not mention his contribution.” But to Said’s alarm, in Foucault’s Order of Things, Renan is
mentioned “not at all” (O 365). <<Les Mots et les choses>>. Pas une mots, pas une chose. Had
Renan’s absence been be taken up in debates about Said’s relationship to Foucault, it remains
unclear if the debate about Foucault and Orientalism would have endured as it did. In any event,
15
An excellent analysis of this debate is provided by Neil Lazarus, “Representations of the Intellectual in
Representations of the Intellectual,” Research in African Literatures 36, no. 3 (2005): 112-123.
5
Orientalism found itself in a field whose concerns were geographically elsewhere. The particular
formations that Orientalism enabled—such as the Subaltern Studies Collective and the Field Day
Group—drew the book away from the Mediterranean towards other partitions, in India or Ireland.
Instances of the text’s relevance to the political and historical demands of the present were
highly individual and isolated. As a result, Orientalism was “bracketed off from the
contemporary world.”16 Middle East Studies— where the book was to have an ongoing political
relevance—was unable to fully comprehend what Orientalism claimed was the “infirmity” in
Middle East Studies: its distance from philology. If in its emphasis on the social sciences and
expertise “Area Studies” had diminished human language to no more than an instrument of
imperial administration, the relevance of Orientalism’s critique of Western philology would be
hard, Said suggested, (though crucial) to discern.
Orientalism is a text that emerges out of a long, deep, and unsettling history of silences.
Recognizing the personal dimension to the book would mostly be a ceremonious way of
affording it the status of the “subaltern.” To say that Orientalism provides an account of, in
Gramsci’s words, the “inventory of traces” that the historical process had deposited on Said was
hardly a matter that should be simply left at that (O 25).
It is by no means enough to observe
that Orientalism was the work of Palestinian-American who had, like 750,000 and other
Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, been displaced and driven into exile or refugee camps when Israel
declared its creation in 1948.17 An elaboration of the contested and damaged experience out of
16
Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (2002), 230.
17
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern
Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Ilan Pappé, The Idea of Israel:
A History of Power and Knowledge (New York: Verso, 2014). Ilan Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of
the Palestinians in Israel (Yale University Press, 2011); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of
“Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Benny
Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
6
which the historical subject of the Palestinian and Orientalism would have been illuminating, but
these discussions were carried out in other forms, like Said’s memoir, Out of Place, which
stopped short of discussing the historically decisive experience of the 1967 June War.18 There
was little recognition that Orientalism evolved out of a set of experiences that were directly tied
to Western representations of the June 1967 War in which Israel shockingly defeated the armies
of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in six days, going on to militarily occupy the West Bank, Gaza, the
Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem to this day. The experience of this loss—a second loss—was
a jarring and historically decisive experience for Said.19 It prompted him to write at the behest of
his long-time friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, to whom Said dedicated Orientalism, an essay in
1967 entitled “The Arab Portrayed.” Largely in response to the June 1967 War, Said penned
what would become the kernel of Orientalism:
If the Arab occupies space enough for attention it is a negative value. He is
seen as a disrupter of Israel’s or the West’s existence, or … as a surmountable
obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert
waiting to burst into bloom, its inhabitants inconsequential nomads possessing
no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence. Thus the
Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew. In that shadow—
because Arabs and Jews are Oriental Semites—can be placed whatever
traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner feels towards the Oriental. For the Jew
of pre-Nazi Europe has bifurcated: what we have now is a Jewish hero,
constructed out of a reconstructed cult of the adventurer-pioneer- Orientalist
Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999);
Gabriel Piterberg, “Erasing the Palestinians,” New Left Review 10 (July-August 2001): 31-46; Illan Pappé (ed.), The
Israel/Palestine Question (London: Routledge, 1999); Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds.), The War for
Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (New York; Cambridge University Press, 2001); Edward W. Said, The
Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992); Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds), Blaming the
Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question (New York: Verso, 2001); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall:
Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2000); Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the
Zionists, and Palestine, 1921-1951 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
18
Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999).
19
Interview with author and Moustafa Bayoumi, Edward W. Said, The Edward Said Reader (2007), 422–423.
7
(Burton, Lane, Renan), and his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the
Arab Oriental.20
The underlying irony that Orientalism is history of Western anti-Semitism is, in other words,
already dimly present. “The shadow” of the Arab extends Orientalism’s allusion to “the strange,
secret sharer,” the trope through which the text articulates it resemblance to the history of
Western anti-Semitism.21
Said’s allusion to Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Secret Sharer” (1908) would be no
sleight of hand for an author who not only found Conrad to be “the cantus firmus of much that he
experienced,”22 but also maintained that the “The Secret Sharer” held a central place in his first
book Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. 23 While there would be reasons to resist
the reflexive tendency to interpret “The Secret Sharer” as an allegory for the operation by which
the “Semite” (a linguistic category and a phenomena) “bifurcates” into the figure of the “Jew”
and the figure of the “Arab” (O 304), Said, we should not forget, interprets Conrad’s story as a
study in “the actualized structure of doubleness.”24 He is far too aware of the limitations of the
structure, the perspective of the narrator, the reflective mirror of the sea, and Conrad’s renewed
confidence in his writing to suggest that the fugitive’s presence on the ship enlarges the
Captain’s awareness. While the presence of the “secret sharer” aboard does “institute an
economy of self-understanding,” the “economy of self-understanding” is precisely that: merely
20 Edward W. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, ed.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1970), 5. The identical passage appears in Orientalism, 286.
21
The idea of “Palestine is as a shadow is Said’s way of articulating Palestine as the radical alterity of Palestine.
Saree Makdisi, “Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 461.
22
Interview with author and Edward W. Said, The Edward Said Reader (2000), 421.
23
In a more complicated way as well, Said’s study of Conrad’s language allowed him to conceptualize and articulate
Orientalism. See my foreword to Edward W. Said’s Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (2008), xxiv.
24
Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (2008), 127.
8
an economy, a structure of circulation—one that does not avail the narrator of the kind of
consciousness that would lead to any meaningful form of liberation from all the impingements
the secret sharer’s presence aboard allows him to comprehend. In the end, the narrator is content
to further conceal and actually eradicate his double.
As a study in “actualized structure of doubleness,” “The Secret Sharer” widens our
understanding of how Orientalism was to institute the rupture that would bifurcate into the figure
of “Arab” and the figure of the “Jew.” How the various iterations of the figure of the “Arab” (the
product of the history of Orientalism) and figure of the “Jew” (the product of the history of
Western anti-Semitism) historically bifurcate is a subject on which Orientalism has very little to
say—a rather surprising aspect for a text that claims not only that the “cornerstone of modern
Orientalism” is the idea that both, Arab and Jew “as subject of Oriental study, are understandable
in view of their primitive origins” (O 234), but also his observation that, “the transference of
popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure
was essentially the same” (O, 286).
Orientalism’s silence on this matter would on the face of it present challenge: what does
it mean to understand Orientalism as a history of anti-Semitism? While it does not mean that we
return to some “Semitic” essence, it does involve understanding how exactly the rupture of the
“Semitic” was introduced into language by a conjuncture between discipline of nineteenth
philology and the discourse of Orientalism. While Orientalism does not address the history of
this bifurcation, it does, however, examine the very rupture in Western thought and language that
made these historical divisions possible. How the inter-disciplinary mechanisms by which the
study of human language and human history are incorporated by Orientalism into the philology
of the nineteenth century may seem a recondite subject, but it is by no means a form Eurocentric
9
nostalgia.25 The development of comparative grammar, the reclassification of languages into
families, and most importantly the rejection of the divine origins of language by the nineteenth
century philology, is what historically institutes the epistemological de-formation that, ultimately,
prevents us from thinking the Holocaust and the expulsion of 750,000 of Palestinian (al-Nakba)
both contrapuntally and as part of the same historical process. One does not have to return to
the biblical origins of Judaism to see how the interdisciplinary mechanisms of the comparative
study of language (philology) produced the very binary between the “Arab” and the “Jew” that
confines our thought today, and, in fundamental ways, as Said observed, is the very “touchstone”
for any serious engagement with the category of the human and human rights—whose putative
universality, it should be remembered, seemed to be almost epistemologically organized by both
the Holocaust and by al-Nakba, which, it is no coincidence, occurred the very same year that the
General Assembly of United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.26
As Said suggests, we must attend to the “troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular
wound,”27 by which I think he means a particular conjuncture between Orientalism and philology,
what Foucault had described in The Order of Things, the “discovery of language,” a putatively
“secular event” that not only discredited the search for the divine origins of languages that had
preoccupied Vico, Herder, Rousseau and others, but gave way to a different historical conception
of language that maintained that language could not be recaptured, only reconstituted by the
science of philology.28 Because early iterations of languages such as Hebrew or Sanskrit could
not be restored to the present, the discipline of philology developed the idea of a “proto-language”
25
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), 163.
26
Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), 435.
27
Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (2003), 54.
28
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1971), 282.
10
as a “heuristic notion” that could allow for languages to be examined as a “function of
philological discourse” (O, 137). The “Semitic” break occurs when, after the discovery of the
Indo-European by Franz Bopp, a generation later, Ernest Renan in his book, Histoire Générale et
Système Comparé Des Langues Sémitiques creates “a phenomena” that is neither a linguistic
category nor an object of nature: the “Semite” or the “Semitic,” a division that enabled its
subsequent bifurcation into various cultural iterations of the figure of the “Jew” and the
“Arab.”29
How this rupture is introduced and remains part of the vocabulary in present, how it
structures our thought, how it imposes certain limits on the way we conceive of the present, past,
and future, how it conceals itself as an object of Orientalism, is precisely how Orientalism
remains relevant to the demand we must, as Judith Butler observes, move beyond the “binary of
the Jew/Palestinian.”30 To understand the strange secret of the “Semite,” in other words, is to
grasp the multiple procedures that constitute its alterity as a “creature of sorts” (140)—a “quasimonstrous” creature that is literally created by Ernest Renan in the conjuncture between the
discipline of philology and the discourse of Orientalism. What makes this rupture so important
is that it was precisely the imaginary geography occupied by the Semitic languages that
effectively moved the discipline of philology away from India, distinguishing it from the IndoEuropean languages which Schlegel had claimed in “Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier”
were not simply organic, but a form of “artistic tissue.”
The ontologically indeterminate, median phenomena of the “Semite” is constantly
29
In the Histoire, Renan writes, “Je suis donc le premier à reconnaître que la race sémitique, comparée à la race
indo-européenne, représente réellement une combinaison inférieure de la nature humaine.” Ernest Renan, Histoire
Générale Et Système Comparé Des Langues Sémitiques (Paris: L'Imprimerie impériale, 1863), 4.
30
Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), 31.
11
condensed and referred back to its primitive origins, reconstituted by the philologist, who then
evaluates this unfixed figure on the basis of a comparison to other languages. Because the “Indo
European” (Aryan) “family of languages” is a different from the “Semitic” family to which both
the Hebrew and Arabic languages belong, Renan asserts that whereas one family develops at its
roots, the other “family of the same species” does not. As a result of this comparative judgment,
which speaks to the inherent ethnocentric pitfalls of the historical practice of comparative
literature, the “Semite” emerges as a phenomenon of “arrested development.” This is “the central
argument of Orientalism”:
Renan had called the Semites an instance of arrested development, and
functionally speaking this came to mean that for the Orientalist no modern
Semite, however much he may have believed himself to be modern, could ever
outdistance the organizing claims on him of his origins. This functional rule
worked on the temporal and spatial levels together. No Semite advanced in
time beyond the development of a “classical” period; no Semite could ever
shake loose the pastoral, desert environment of his tent and tribe. Every
manifestation of actual “Semitic” life could be, and ought to be, referred back
to the primitive explanatory category of “the Semitic.” (O 234)
The “Semites” are always being subjected to an order of knowledge that functions in two distinct
registers: one that depends on a variety and multiplicity in the present, and the other that depends
on returning their identity to “radical terminal of the generality.” As a contribution to the
development of the study of Indo-European linguistics, Renan’s “Semite” is an ontologically
indeterminate figure that refers to no existing type in the present and is, Said observes, a “fiction
invented … in the philological laboratory.” It is neither a “fully naturally object” nor an
“unnatural or divine object, as it had once been considered” (O 141); vacillating between what
cannot be adequately expressed in language, the “Semitic” occupies a liminal place “legitimated
in its oddities, by an inverse relation to normal languages, comprehended as an eccentric, quasimonstrous phenomenon” (141). Sustained by the inconsistency, by its opposition to the norm,
12
and understandable as an irregular, almost monstrous presence, the “Semitic” is a function of
Orientalism’s disciplinary mechanism which transforms human history, human language, human
language, and human culture “into something else,” “something peculiarly deviant” (emphasis
added, O 141). In precisely the sense that Said’s idea of the human cannot be thought or worked
through, let alone imagined or constituted on its own without some original or ontological break
break that precedes it, Renan’s achievement is to cover up the origins of precisely this caesura:
What [Renan] establishes is that Semitic is neither a live language, nor are
Semites live creatures. To be able to sustain a vision that incorporates and
holds together life and quasi-living creatures (Indo-European and European) as
well as quasi-monstrous, parallel inorganic phenomenon (Semitic, Oriental
culture) is precisely the achievement of the European scientist in his
laboratory… It is not too much too to say that Renan’s philological laboratory
is the actual locale of his European ethnocentrism; but what needs emphasis
here is that philological laboratory has no existence outside of discourse. Thus
even the culture he calls organic and alive—Europe’s—is a creature being
created in the laboratory and by philology. (emphasis mine, O 146)
These questions demand that we analyze the procedures through which this caesura is
concealed, how it is incorporated as Orientalist philology, how the disciplinary mechanisms of
Orientalist (i.e. “Western”) philology refers every iteration of the figure of the “Jew” or the
“Arab” to their primitive roots; and finally, how the bifurcation of the “Semite” into these two
identities is an ongoing function of the power so-called West that is, in analogous ways,
sustained by and itself sustains the very separation of the “Israeli” and the “Palestinian,” which,
after all, is why we must endure such distortions of language as the “Middle East Peace process.”
“Europe and the Jewish Question,” “Zionism and the Jews,” “Islam and the West”31 are
parataxical categories that have reinscribed the bifurcation while concealing the ways the “West”
31
Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford University Press, 2008), 34. Anidjar, it should be said,
addresses a similar subject, and indeed, he is the one to whose work on the subject I am most indebted to, but
13
produces what Said would later, his lecture on Freud and the Non-European, call the “secular
wounds” that were inflicted by Orientalism around the time human language was understood by
new philology to be made by humans.
Weltliteratur, Orientalism, and Western Anti-Semitism
What Orientalism continues to demand of us, as Said later suggested in Culture and
Imperialism, is that a full and enlarged understanding of the history of Orientalism in its Islamic
branch and the history of Western anti-Semitism, needs to be comprehended contrapuntally,
together, as an ensemble.32 It is not enough to grasp how the figure of the “Arab” and the figure
of the “Jew” are historically produced by “West,” but how the West reproduces itself through the
bifurcation. As Said observes, “the history of the 20th century demonstrates the expensive moral
and human consequences… [of this rupture]. But what has not been sufficiently stressed in
histories of modern anti-Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by
Orientalism” (O, 262). To that extent, to think through these three figures together is to realize
not only how the identity of Israel is deeply rooted in the Holocaust, but also how al-Nakba is
located in a prehistory that took place elsewhere, in Germany. Given the well-established
association between the Holocaust and the creation of Israel as a safe-haven for the survivors,33
why the dispossession of the Palestinian is never thought of as the effect of, as Said has observed,
a Western, Christian Genocide, is to begin to see how the split conceals the “West.”34 Why the
Anidjar places far too much stress on religion perhaps at the expense of what is really an interdiction that is
introduced by philology.
32
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1994), 32.
33
See, for example, Tom Segev, The Seventh Million.
34
Edward W. Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 183.
14
Palestinian past, present, and future never arises in all the debates about the Germany’s historical
past is to begin noticing how the fraught the history of Orientalism and the history of antiSemitism continues to epistemologically block efforts to think beyond the binary of the
Jew/Palestinian.35 Only by comprehending Israeli and Palestinian history together, Said was to
argue throughout his oeuvre, can the tragedy of the Holocaust and the subsequent displacement
of the Palestinians be given their full force.
35
See, for example, Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s “Roots, Race, and the Return to Philology,” Representations 106, no.
1 (May 1, 2009): 34–62. In an article that compares Said’s “return to philology” with Paul de Man’s commitment to
do same, Harpham essentially argues that by focusing on Orientalism and not the history of Western anti-Semitism,
Said was somehow reproducing the very anti-Semitism that emerges out of the bifurcation of Renan’s Semite. The
implications of Harpham’s rather insidious and unexplained comparison to de Man, whose anti-Semitic writings for
Le Soir go mostly unmentioned in Harpham’s essay so as it be quietly exploited at Said’s expense, is hardly
concealed:
Said and de Man, to take just two examples [of the call to return to philology], might have considered
[philology’s implication in the Holocaust] … before promoting a practice that had been intimately
entangled with racist and anti-Semitic theories and practices.” “Said, at least,” he concedes, “ is sensitive
to the potential for philology-sponsored racism, but he does not display a similar sensitivity to philological
anti-Semitism. While he mentions, for example, the racial stereotypes that inform Renan’s account of
Semitic (Jewish and Moslem [sic]) languages and cultures, he lays far greater stress on what he sees as
Renan’s single-minded antipathy to Muslims than he does on Renan’s prejudice against Jews. According to
Said, Renan did his work within the edifice we call Oriental studies’; and within that edifice, his ‘main
project is to shut down Islam.’” (emphasis mine, 61).
Said’s urge to “return to philology,” which, unlike de Man’s urge to return to Western philology, he sees as a
tradition shared by all three Abrahamic religions, is thus conflated with de Man’s war-time writing, to which
Harpham does even mention, cite, or quote, permitting the allegation against Said to operate quietly, as the secret
sharer, of de Man’s collaborationist writings for Le Soir.
The most troubling of these article was the one which de Man published on March 4, 1941, in which he wrote: “one
thus sees that a solution of the Jewish problem which would aim at the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from
Europe, would not entail entirely deplorable consequences for the literary life of the West.” It is not surprising that
Harpham (who would like to elide the distinction between de Man and Said, between Nazi anti-Semite and the
Palestinian, choses to ignore the particular form de Man’s Western anti-Semitic writings assumed. “Not one of the
commentators I have read [on de Man’s letters for Le Soir],” Said observes, “glosses one especially resonant phrase
‘the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe.’ In a brazenly collaborationist and pro-Nazi paper,” Said
observes, de Man “seemed to be in fact recommending the Zionist project already underway… already entailing the
onset of Palestinian Dispossession, but do be doing so casually, backhandedly, as if the real subject were the health
of Europe, not the disaster visited upon at least three generations of Palestinians.” [Musical Elaborations (1991), 38].
In this respect, one can understand Harpham’s critique of Said’s “return to philology” as a symptom of a late phase
of American Zionism before it can no longer sustain itself as set of shared beliefs that interpret the world.
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There are, however, many signs that this aspect of Orientalism is at last being addressed.
Until recently, for example, the lives and works of two of the twentieth century’s most prominent
intellectuals had never been examined concurrently. Hannah Arendt’s flight from Germany in
1933, her survival of the Holocaust in 1941 and her exilic writings seemed a world a way from
Edward Said’s expulsion from Palestine in 1947 and the body of exilic work he left behind. Yet
both had an incisive awareness of the discrepant, but interdependence of the other’s collective
histories and experiences. Hannah Arendt, after all, was among the first intellectuals in the West
to understand that the “the solution of the Jewish Question merely produced a new category of
refugees, the [Palestinian] Arabs,”36 just as Said was later to observe that the Palestinians were
the victims of the victims. The fact that the historical connection between Edward W. Said and
Hannah Arendt has been recently examined together, contrapuntally, in William Spanos’ Exile
in the City testifies,37 on the one hand, to just how persistent American Zionism has been in
keeping the two figures culturally, ideologically, and philosophically closed off from one another,
as it demonstrates the coming end of an American taboo.38
36
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950), 290.
37
William V. Spanos, Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint (2012).
38
See my forthcoming discussion of Spanos’ book in Comparative Literature Studies, Fall 2014.
16