Book Review of Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe (original) (raw)
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Anticolonial Orientalism: Perets Hirshbeyn's Indian Travelogue
In Geveb. A Journal of Yiddish Studies, 2019
This article inscribes Eastern European Jews into the study of (anti)colonialism and Orientalism by analyzing the 1929 India travelogue by Yiddish writer Perets Hirshbeyn. I show how the context of Jewish modernization movements affected the portrayal of "oriental" Asia in Hirshbeyn's travel writing. I approach Hirshbeyn's narrative from the perspective of Cultural Studies and critically explore his self-placement between belonging to the West and identifying with the Orient. Hirshbeyn's narrative includes a strong anti-colonialist tone, which is often juxtaposed with his Orientalist argumentation. At the same time, Hirshbeyn traffics in paternalistic, orientalizing language and mobilizes it to draw analogies between oppressed Jews and oppressed Indians. Hirshbeyn's perception of the social situation in colonized India was, I argue, conditioned by the Jewish context in Eastern Europe. I suggest that Hirshbeyn, a progressive Eastern European Jew who spent several years in the United States, was an ambivalent actor who transgresses the binary power relations between British colonizers and subordinated native Indians. As a whole, this article deepens our understanding of the relations between colonialism, Orientalism, and Jewishness in Yiddish literary culture.
Zionism, Pan-Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament in the Interwar Writings of Eugen Hoeflich
AJS Review, 2021
In the early 1920s, the Viennese writer and journalist Eugen Hoeflich promoted a unique vision of Zionism that aligned Jewish nationalism with a set of anticolonial ideologies collectively known as Pan-Asianism. This article explores the poetic and political strategies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular. I read Hoeflich's turn to Pan-Asianism as an attempt to work through a conceptual problem that theorist Partha Chatterjee calls the “postcolonial predicament.” That is, how might the Jews assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presuppose their inferiority? Hoeflich's vision of Indian-Jewish solidarity constitutes an imaginative effort to de-Europeanize Jewish nationalism and disentangle Zionism from British imperial designs. On a broader level, this study sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed central European Zionists in the interwar era, and points to the discursive continuities that linked Jewish nationalists in Europe to anticolonial thinkers in Asia.
On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices, 2023
The question of how to read and possibly even think-with—as Donna Haraway would say—Orientalist scholars appears in Arnika Ahldag and Rebecca Hanna John’s text on the journeys made by Hermann Goetz and Robert Lachmann from Germany to, respectively, India and Palestine in the 1930s. Their biographies serve as a starting point for thinking about the figure of the Orientalist as an outsider whose projects more often fail than succeed. Instead of essentializing and boycotting the figure of the Orientalist as the source of all evil–with a direct link to either French and British colonialism, as argued by Edward Said, or German nationalism, as argued by Sheldon Pollock–the authors explore the conditions under which German Orientalists like Goetz and Lachmann worked, in what was then defined as “the Orient.” Foregrounding their failures helps in undoing the fixed opposition between silenced object of study and dominant researcher, to potentially find allies in a field that is often thought of as the enemy.
The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism Reversing the Gaze, eds., Susannah Heschel, Umar Ryad, Routledge, 2018
This chapter examines the reception of German-Jewish scholarship in the Mashriq and India and the connections between Orientalist scholarship and modern Arab and Islamic thought. It focuses on the German-Jewish Orientalist Josef Horovitz (1875-1931), who taught at M.A.O. College in Aligarh, India, from 1907 to 1914, served as the director of the Seminar for Oriental Studies at the University of Frankfurt from 1915 to 1931, and was the founding director of Islamic Studies at Hebrew University. This chapter argues that Horovitz’s aspirations for Islamic Studies at Hebrew University, as well as his critical assessment of both British activitiesy in the Middle East and political Zionism can be linked to the time he spent in India.
Minor Cosmopolitanisms: Institutions, Intellectuals, and Ideas between India and Germany
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020
he tem po ral fo cus of this spe cial sec tion is on the twen ti eth cen tury and the in ter war years (1918-39) in par tic u lar, as a height ened pe riod of global en gage ment and in ter ac tion. The pe riod was marked by po lit i cal and cul tural tur bu lence but also new con nec tions and ideo log i cal for ma tions that reached be yond the Brit ish Em pire. The cru cial role of South Asian Is lam and Mus lims from the sub con ti nent in shap ing the in tel lec tual and po lit i cal un der stand ing of Is lam in Germany is the connecting thread of the es says in cluded in this themed sec tion. As we have long known, In dia oc cu pied a cru cial space in the in tel lec tual pro jects of the Ger man Enlighten ment, the Romantic move ment, and its Orientalist vi sions, not to men tion in the work of so cialthe o ret i cal think ers, most no ta bly Karl Marx. 1 IndoGer man his to ries have so far lim ited their fo cus to the Hindu bhadralok's (the "cul tured" class) in tel lec tual en gage ment with elite Ger mans in the me trop o lis. 2 Instead, the au thors of the es says here ar gue that the "mi nor ity his to ries" of Mus lims and Jews may al low us to re think broader nar ra tives of South Asian and Ger man in tel lec tual his to ry, and to make a place for com par a tive Mus limJew ish his to ries. These take on ur gent sig nif cance as the "Mus lim ques tion" has be come deeply con ten tious in In dia, even as it be comes in creas ingly cen tral in the his tory and pol i tics of Germany. 3 Two schol arly in ter ven tions are in struc tive for our con cerns about com par a tive mi nor ity his to ries here: Aamir Mufti's Enlightenment in the Colony and Faisal Devji's Mus lim Zi on. Both works bring to gether the is sue of mi nor ity his to ries, of Jews, on the one hand, and Mus lims, on the oth er. 4 Mufti does so through a com par a tive lit er ary ap proach, and Devji through in tel lec tual his to ry. Putting them in di a logue with each oth er, Mufti and Devji in vite us to re think the "Jew ish ques tion" in Germany and the "Mus lim ques tion" in South Asia in com par a tive ways in re la tion to the global emer gence of the prob lem atic of mi nor ity be gin ning in the in ter war years. We fol low this com par a tive ap proach about mi nor ity his to ries to un der stand Jew ish and Mus lim connected his to ries in Germany and In dia. Indeed, South Asian Mus lims en gaged with the mod ern Jew ish thought and in tel lec tu als in Germany in early twen ti eth cen tu ry. 5 Similarly, Jew ish schol ars in South Asia were among the pi o neers of knowl edge pro duc tion about Is lam and worked closely with South Asian Mus lims and In dian Mus lim in sti tu tions. Josef Horovitz at Mu ham madan An gloOriental College, Aligarh, and Leopold Weiss/Muhammad Asad at Islamia College, Lahore, are ex em pla ry. 6 Both were also as so ci ated with the jour nal Is lamic Culture, published in princely Hyderabad. Mus limJew ish con nec tions were height ened in the pe riod of the rise of fas cism and the tran sit of Eu ro pean Jew ish ref u gees to In dia. 7 Gerda Philipsborn, a Ger manJew ish kin der gar ten teacher at Jamia, was a cru cial fg ure in the feld of ed u ca tion and close col lab o ra tor of sec u lar na tion al ist In dian Mus lims at Jamia Milia Islamia. These in tel lec tual
Journal of Global History, 2006
German political Orientalists in the era of the First World War thought that new ethnographic methods and insights would allow them to coax Muslim populations throughout the Middle East and South Asia into violent revolt against the British. The European imperial mindset insisted that non-Western peoples could be mastered and masterminded at whim. In fact, German pursuit of absolute control of Asian populations led to their loss of control, as their misrecognitions of the facts on the ground placed them in relationships of mutually-affecting lived encounter with Indian revolutionaries. While these interactions remained largely limited to the realm of military operations during the war, they opened up into ideological encounters on the radical fringes of Weimar society in the war’s aftermath. Yet far from a study of humanistic exchange or understanding, this essay seeks to historicize the meetings of Germans and Indian émigrés and show how misrepresentations and power asymmetries wer...