Re: Jewish interest in Islamic affairs
Lay Orientalists
Scholarship was not the only medium of expression for the Jewish fascination with Islam. Jewish artists and writers also explored Islam for wider audiences, with an emphasis upon its superiority over a satiated, materialistic, or intolerant Europe.
Jews played no role at all in the nineteenth-century emergence of orientalism as a genre of art. Europe’s Jews hailed from those parts of the continent most remote from the Muslim world, and they came late to the traditions that informed orientalist art. By the turn of the century, however, a few Jewish artists began to draw upon orientalist themes, as they came into contact with the living East and orientalist art.
Perhaps the most internationally famous was Léon Bakst (1866-1924). Born Lev Samoilovich Rosenberg in Grodno, Belorussia, he was raised in St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in the Academy of Arts. Bakst did not conceal his Jewish origins; indeed, he announced his Jewishness to every acquaintance, sometimes as a provocation. (He was expelled from the academy for a canvas that portrayed a bereaved Mary as an old hag, “whilst the mourning band of Disciples gesticulated and shook like the congregation of a Lithuanian ghetto synagogue.”)55
Bakst left St. Petersburg for Paris, and there he studied under the most famous of the late-nineteenth-century orientalist painters, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904). But ultimately, Bakst became famous not for his painting, but for his inspired work in stage and costume design for the ballet, and above all the Ballets Russes, which took Paris and London by storm just before the First World War. The Ballets Russes pushed well beyond the outer limits of Victorian taste, by their excursions into sexuality and violence. Bakst had visited Istanbul, Algiers, Tunis, Crete, and the Caucasus, and oriental settings became his trademark: ancient Egypt in the case of the ballet Cleopatra, Near Eastern antiquity in the instance of Salomé, and then his greatest triumph, the 1910 ballet Schéhèrazade, based upon a story from A Thousand and One Nights. An admirer later described Bakst as “the Delacroix of the costume.” Bakst’s was a highly erotic orientalism, itself a precursor to the liberation of sexuality which would distinguish the twentieth century from its predecessor.
Some of Bakst’s critics, and some biographers, located the source of his orientalism in his Jewish background. As one put it, “stimulated by a sort of atavistic instinct, having its roots, undoubtedly, in his Semitic origins, Bakst inhaled with delight all the emanations of the Oriental spirit.” During Bakst’s travels, claimed another critic, "the call of the Asiatic was indistinctly awakened in this Occidental Jew."56 Bakst probably owed as much to his immersion in the traditions of Russian and French orientalism. But he certainly enjoyed presenting himself as a living embodiment of the East, and in a “Who’s Who” entry which he provided, he even concocted for himself a bogus Sephardic lineage, stretching back to King David.
While the Islamic East could be admired for its sensuality, it could just as readily be admired for its austerity. This approach characterized the work of the prolific dramatist Friedrich Wolf (1888-1953), specifically his play Mohammed.57 Wolf, born in Neuwied, Germany, rebelled against all convention as a young man, and in 1913 renounced Judaism without taking up another faith. During the First World War he served in Flanders as a physician, but declared himself a conscientious objector and was sent to a sanatorium. After the war, he became a communist, practiced homeopathic medicine, organized free medical service for the poor, and wrote many plays, the most famous of which, Professor Mamlock (1933), warned of impending disaster in Germany. He fought briefly in the Spanish Civil War, then took refuge in France, and spent the Second World War in Moscow. After the war, he settled in East Berlin, and he served for two years as East German ambassador to Poland. His son was the famous East German spymaster, Markus Wolf (b. 1923).
In 1917, Wolf wrote his first play, Mohammed, at the battlefront in Flanders, where he had a German translation of the Qur’an in his possession. “I find hope in Mohammed,” he wrote to his mother from the trenches, “bone from my bone, and flesh from my flesh.” The play follows Muhammad from his youth through the hijra, the departure from Mecca to Medina. Wolf presents the Prophet as a great champion of social justice and fervent advocate of non-violence, who distributes his wealth and frees his slaves. The Meccan oligarchy organizes against him, but he repels them by non-violent tactics, never raising a fist, until he finally chooses to migrate with his followers. Wolf’s Muhammad repudiates crass materialism in this exchange with the wealthy of Mecca:
MUHAMMAD (RESOLUTELY): …you already have too much and yet you reach for more; you hunt down the smallest advantage, cleverness becomes cunning, cunning becomes spite, power becomes violence, violence becomes rape, feuds start, blood flows, clans kill one another, and the race for more finally ends in the grave of nothingness.
ABU JAHL: The bleating of a lamb! A strong people needs land and power — just as the body needs nourishment — or else it suffers from need.
MUHAMMAD (FIERY): Need! How would you know what we are suffering from? The despair of the people is the despair of the heart! Do not imagine you can subdue the people with land and bread, with swords and gold! One measures a people not by how much power and how many possessions it needs, but by how little it needs to be great