John M. Efron

From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East: Orientalism through a Jewish Lens

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY saw the emergence of historians among the Jewish people who were dedicated to casting a reflective and introspective eye on the Jewish past, one that sought to apply critical methods of scholarly analysis to texts, where once such texts had principally been the focus of religious devotion and exegesis. Inspired by the birth of historicism, the inner intellectual and institutional impetus for the critical and secular study of Jewish history came with the rise of the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums), an undertaking that began in Germany in the second decade of the nineteenth century.1 In the turn to history among Jewish intellectuals, many of them directed their scholarly gazes to the pasts of other peoples and religious traditions. Such a development saw the birth of Jewish Orientalist scholarship, whose principal focus was the world of Islam. Jewish historians concentrated on Islamic history and theology, the connection between Judaism and Islam, and Jewish life in the Muslim world. In the latter case, it was the cultural and intellectual achievements of Jews in Muslim Spain that especially attracted the attention and indeed admiration of nineteenth-century Jewish historians. Jewish historians were seduced by the rich philosophical and poetical traditions of Spanish Jews. They sensed the social implications of such lives led at the intellectual vanguard. Nineteenth-century scholars were deeply impressed by the degree to which Jews in the Islamic orbit had long since fulfilled the demand of nineteenth-century Russian Jewish poet Judah Leib Gordon, that one be ‘‘a man abroad and a Jew in [one’s] tent.’’ For the earliest generations of Jewish historians, the lives of medieval Jewish poets and philosophers under Islam bespoke the promise that