Orientalism

Abstract

This chapter attempts to explain why orientalism once included both Jews and Muslims as targets, and then ceased to do so. From the beginning of Islam, Muslims were often viewed in the Christian West as akin religiously and culturally to Jews. During the colonial period, the prototypical Muslim was racialized as an “Arab,” a branch of the Semitic race to which Jews also belonged. Understandably, the idea of Jewish-Arab kinship lost its power as Arabs and Jews came increasingly to face each other as enemies in Palestine. The imagery of orientalism itself began to wane as a result. In the twenty-first century, the “Arab” was reimagined as a “Muslim,” but the new trope of the Muslim was largely emptied of orientalist imagery. The American invention of the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” too, separated the Jew from the earlier orientalist figure of the Semite. In this century, orientalism is no longer productive in the discourses about either Muslims or Jews and of limited use in explaining contemporary antisemitism.