Re: Jewish interest in Islamic affairs
The End of Mystique
Most Jews drew very different conclusions from the Holocaust and the creation of Israel than those drawn by Rodinson. For many Jewish scholars of Islam, the experiences of the war put in question the spirit that had underpinned favorable European Jewish approaches to Islam. “The [Arab] masses preponderantly favored a German victory,” acknowledges the Tunisian historian Hichem Djaït, "through which they hoped to be freed from colonialist rule. Beyond that, Nazism fueled the anti-Semitism that undeniably smoldered among the common people — who had no idea of the scope of Nazi persecution or of the dreadful atrocities being committed in Europe."78 Muslim anti-Semitism cast into doubt the very premises of a Jewish scholarly tradition that had presented Islam to Europe as a model of tolerance, especially toward Jews. Outbreaks of violence against the ancient Jewish communities of Muslim lands eventually led to their emigration and sometimes their outright expulsion. Arab opposition to Israel in the early years often employed anti-Semitic motifs, as did the Soviet effort to delegitimize Israel as racist. All of these revolutions in the Jewish condition fundamentally altered the vantage point from which many Jewish scholars viewed the Arab and Muslim worlds. Bernard Lewis (b. 1916) came to personify the post-war shift from a sympathetic to a critical posture.
Lewis was born to middle-class Jewish parents in London, and he began to study law. But he became captivated by history, which he studied at the University of London. As a youth, Lewis received a solid training in Hebrew, in which he composed both prose and poetry. Hebrew thus became his gateway to Arabic, and he later allowed that his own Jewish education made it easier for him to understand Islam, and even sympathize with its premises.79 There were those who attributed his aptitude to his origins, as did Sir Cyril Philips (b. 1912), a pillar of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London:
Capitalizing on the initial advantage of a Jewish background and knowledge of Hebrew, [Lewis] had gone on to achieve a first-class and higher degree in the history of the Near East and also an enviable command of Arabic and Turkish; and his abilities and qualifications were so obviously outstanding that I sought the earliest opportunity to get him established beside me with the rank of professor.80
This was 1945, by which time Lewis had been through Syria on research, done a year in Paris under Massignon, received his doctorate, and spent the war years in intelligence work. He remained at the School of Oriental and African Studies until 1974, during which time he became the most influential post-war historian of Islam and the Middle East.
While Lewis possessed all the tools of orientalist scholarship, he was a historian by training and discipline, intimately familiar with new trends in historical writing. Along with Cahen, he was one of the first historians to apply new approaches in economic and social history to the Islamic world. While a student in Paris, Lewis had a brief encounter with the Annales school, which inspired an early and influential article on guilds in Islamic history. He subsequently refused the straightjacket of any overarching theory, and especially Marxism, which he regarded as particularly unsuited to an understanding of the Middle East. But his studies of dissident Muslim sects, slaves, and Jews in Muslim societies broke new ground by expanding the scope of history beyond the palace and the mosque.
Lewis’s early work centered upon medieval Arab-Islamic history, especially in what is now Syria. However, after the creation of Israel, it became difficult for Jewish scholars to conduct archival and field research in many of the eastern Arab countries. Lewis turned his efforts to the study of these Arab lands through Ottoman archives available in Istanbul, and to the study of the Ottoman empire itself. His great classic, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), examined the history of modernizing reform not through European diplomacy of the “Eastern Question,” but through the eyes of the Ottoman reformers themselves. Lewis relied almost entirely on Turkish sources, and his history from within became a model for many other studies of nineteenth-century reform in the Middle East. It also signaled his own deepening interest in the history of ideas and attitudes in Islam’s relationship to the West.
While Lewis’s work demonstrated a remarkable capacity for empathy across time and place, he stood firm against the growing ideological third worldism of Western intellectuals and scholars. Lewis had an unshakable liberal commitment to democracy and its dissemination. With the onset of the cold war, he became alarmed by the expansion of Soviet influence in the Middle East, and the erosion in the Arab lands of the last vestiges of liberalism by strident anti-Western nationalism. In these years, he wrote, "the choices before us still retained something of the clarity, even the starkness, which they had kept through the war years and which they have subsequently lost."81 Certainly the choices made by Israel and Turkey — in favor of democracy and Western alliances — were his own moral preferences, and led to his growing identification with both countries, where he came to enjoy a broad influence.
In 1974, Lewis relocated to Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, precisely at a time when orientalism as a branch of scholarship came under a combined attack by Arab-Muslim nationalists and Western post-modernists. These argued that the modern study of Islam in the West had evolved as a tool of imperialist domination, and that the West’s pursuit of knowledge had conspired with its pursuit of power. Orientalism, effectively a form of racism, had misrepresented Islam as static, irrational, and in permanent opposition to the West. Lewis, whose own work was maligned in the campaign, offered a vigorous refutation. The development of orientalism, he argued, should be understood as a facet of Europe’s humanism, which arose independently of, and sometimes in opposition to, imperial interests. It was precisely the orientalists who broke the grip of medieval prejudice against Islam, and who diversified the representation of Islam in the West. Lewis also rejected the view that only Muslims, Arabs, or their political sympathizers could write the region’s history: he called this “intellectual protectionism.” A combination of curiosity, empathy, competence, and self-awareness was the only prerequisite for the writing of “other people’s history.”
The orientalism debate developed, in part, as a consequence of the large-scale entry of Arabs and Muslims into institutions of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in the West. These now staked a claim to that “initial advantage” of intimacy with Islamic culture and the languages of its expression formerly claimed by Jews in the West. Yet no one could displace Lewis as preeminent interpreter of Islam, for his stature rested upon his elegant syntheses for general audiences, which were translated into over twenty languages, and which made his name synonymous with Islamic history for educated publics in the West. Neither could any scholar match what Humphreys calls "the extraordinary range of [Lewis’s] scholarship, his capacity to command the totality of Islamic and Middle Eastern history from Muhammad down to the present day. This is not merely a matter of erudition; rather, it reflects an almost unparalleled ability to fit things together into a detailed and comprehensive synthesis. In this regard, it is hard to imagine that Lewis will have any true successors."82
A Jewish Contribution?
With Lewis, a chapter closed not only in the development of the Western understanding of Islam, but also in the role of Jews as interpreters of Islam in the West. Europe began that chapter as the prime center for the processing of Western (and Jewish) knowledge of Islam. Jews were the first to disappear from the field in Europe, but others followed, driven out by totalitarian rule. After mid-century, many more of Europe’s leading scholars moved to America. From Cambridge to California, America’s institutions imported Europeans, and the center of gravity of the Western understanding of Islam crossed the Atlantic.
The past was now forgotten. Nikki Keddie has pointed to the absence of a sense for the ways knowledge accumulates over time, as a succession of contributions:
[T]he giants of the recent past tend to be largely forgotten as soon as they are dead if not before, especially if what they have written isn’t what is now considered fashionable or central. There is also an optical illusion, in the sense that much of what these people have contributed is not recognized because it has entered so much into the field that people do not realize how novel a contribution it was. They are criticized when they are in error, but their achievements are forgotten. So Middle Eastern history has become a field without its own history.83
It has been easiest to forget many of the Jewish “discoverers” of Islam, especially those who wrote in German or lost crucial parts of their careers to war and wandering. Many of their names are no longer recognized, many of their writings are no longer read.
Yet these Jewish “discoverers” left behind an identifiable legacy. They contributed to Europe’s initial willingness to reevaluate Islam in an objective and even positive light. The Enlightenment in Europe had not banished ignorance of Islam or the tendency to denigrate it, both a legacy of medieval Christian prejudice. One historian of Western scholarship has written that "if we take a closer look at the many studies of Islam written between 1650 and, say, 1830, we see that prejudice, rather than disappearing, was usually only being modified or shifting from one object to another."84 It was Geiger’s essay of 1833 that broke with this prejudice, and Goldziher’s subsequent work that consolidated the new approach. Time after time, for over a century, Jews were among the first to arrive at insights that would serve as the basis for a modern and objective appreciation of Islam. This would have happened without the Jews; it happened earlier because of them.
They were motivated, for the most part, not by the kind of Islamophilia that found adherents on Europe’s cultural margins, and which was always suspect for its association with radicals and dilettantes. The Jews, on the contrary, hoped to assume their place in Europe’s cultural centers, in its great universities, newspapers, and theatres. They began their discovery of Islam at a time and place in the nineteenth century when some form of assimilation still represented their preferred option. Under these conditions, the favorable portrayal of the Jews under Islam, and the sympathetic study of Islam itself, served a purpose. They demonstrated the leavening role of Jews in the civilization of Islam in a past age when Islam had changed the world, and suggested that Jews could play that role for modern Europe.
The work of Jewish orientalists — liberals and Marxists, Zionists and assimilationists, believers and atheists — subverted the idea that East and West were polar opposites. Much of Europe debated whether the Jews belonged to one or the other; Jews replied that the question itself lacked validity. The work of Jewish orientalists at every turn challenged the tendency to interpret Islam or Judaism sui generis, and their message was remarkably uniform: Islamic history (like Jewish history) can be subjected to the same analytical tools as Europe’s; Europe’s civilization rests also on Islamic (and Jewish) foundations; Islam (like Judaism) is no anachronism, but undergoes constant adaptation, and would accommodate even European modernity. Jews urged European respect for peoples bearing cultures of extra-European origin, precisely because the Jews were the most vulnerable of these peoples, residing as they did in the very center of Europe.
Paradoxically, while Europe gradually assimilated this approach to Islam, it often declined to assimilate its Jewish bearers. Anti-Semitism in central Europe, and its manifestations in eastern and western Europe, undermined the project of Jewish assimilation. Jews were chased from the universities, then from the continent, as a prelude to the “final solution.” Yet their contribution to the understanding of Islam could not be erased from consciousness of Europe, even where their very names were excised from bibliographies. Goldziher’s influence on Islamic studies remained as profound as Durkheim’s on sociology and Freud’s on psychology. And the respect for Islam that Jews had done so much to disseminate not only survived in Europe but served as the basis for Europe’s tolerance of Muslim minorities after the war. The mosque-like synagogues erected by Jewish communities in the nineteenth century prepared Europe to accept the real mosques which Muslim communities erected across the continent in the twentieth. Indeed, in the absence of Jews, Muslim migrants became primary beneficiaries of the regret felt by new European elites for Europe’s failing of the Jews.
The history of Europe’s discovery of Islam is being written piecemeal — a chapter here, an article there. Eventually this work will be synthesized, and the relative significance of the Jewish contribution — and indeed, the very idea of such a contribution — will have to be weighed carefully. The question has been posed. It may prove difficult to answer. To judge from the articles that follow, it will be impossible to ignore.
© Martin Kramer