Re: Jewish interest in Islamic affairs
Wolf wrote these words in the midst of Europe’s self-immolation, which he saw as the wage of greed. The play sought to turn Europe’s prejudice against Islam on its head, holding up the Prophet Muhammad as an exemplar of non-violence to a Europe seemingly bent upon its own destruction. (To do so, the play had to end at the hijra, before Muhammad’s confrontation with the Jews of Medina, and before his emergence as a conqueror in battle.) The play was published in 1924, and excited interest among some Muslims, who wrote to Wolf expressing hope that it might be performed. But it never reached the stage, and by then Wolf had made a different commitment, not to Islam but to communism. Still, he continued to revise the play almost up to his death.
Another Jew drew a different conclusion, based upon a similar reading of the Qur’an. Leopold Weiss (1900-92) was born in Austrian-ruled Lemberg (now Lvov, in Ukraine) and raised in Vienna. Although he received a traditional education, Weiss turned away from Judaism, and at the age of twenty went to Berlin to pursue a career as a writer and journalist. On a visit to Palestine in 1922, he became persuaded of the injustice of Zionism, and joined the prestigious *Frankfurter Zeitung *as a stringer. The newspaper later commissioned him to travel across the Middle East and produce a book.
But in 1926, after his return to Germany, Weiss converted to Islam. On a Berlin subway, he noticed “an expression of hidden suffering” upon the faces of the “well-dressed and well-fed” passengers. They suffered because they were “without any goal beyond the desire to raise their own ‘standard of living’, without any hopes other than having more material amenities, more gadgets, and perhaps more power.” At home, his eye fell upon an open Qur’an he had been reading, to this verse: "You are obsessed by greed for more and more / Until you go down to your graves."59 All doubt in the Qur’an as a revealed book vanished, and he converted to Islam. Weiss, like Wolf, thought Islam averse to materialism, and it is telling that Weiss in 1926 should have fixed on precisely the same verse in the Qur’an (102) that Wolf puts in the mouth of Muhammad in his play published in 1924: “you already have too much and yet you reach for more… and the race for more finally ends in the grave of nothingness.” This idea of Islam as a spiritual antidote to Western materialism seems to have had a particular appeal to Jewish seekers who felt that their own faith failed to strike a balance in its encounter with capitalism.
Weiss took the name Muhammad Asad and departed for Saudi Arabia, where he lived as a Muslim and married an Arab woman (a union that produced Talal Asad, the noted anthropologist). He became an adviser to Ibn Saud, and wrote Arabia-bylined stories for German-language newspapers. In 1932, he broke with the Saudi monarch and left for India, where he emerged as an Islamic thinker. In 1952, Pakistan appointed Asad to its mission at the United Nations in New York, and in 1954 he published an immensely popular account of his travels and life, entitled The Road to Mecca. In his later years, he lived mostly in the West, and published a modernist translation of the Qur’an.
Asad believed that, in embracing Islam, he was actually continuing the tradition of Abraham, that the Arabian sky was “my sky,” the same sky that “vaulted over the long trek of my ancestors, those wandering herdsmen-warriors” — "that small beduin tribe of Hebrews."60 While this was hardly a new idea, Asad’s conclusion — conversion to Islam — did go far beyond the literary and scholarly expressions of “Semitic” solidarity made by other Jews. Still, in his idealization of Islam, Asad did not depart from the path followed by earlier Jewish romantics and orientalists. As I suggest in my article for this collection, his attempt to make the Qur’an speak to modern minds incorporated those very ideals that drove the reform of Judaism. Indeed, it was precisely this resemblance that made his project so suspect in the eyes of many Muslims.
The Palestine Option
In the first half of this century, several hundred thousands of European Jews settled and remained in Palestine, where they came into sustained contact with the religion, languages, and peoples of Islam. This process of discovery constituted an important chapter in the history of modern Zionism, but it came too late to have much of an impact upon Europe. For example, the Zionist encounter with the scenery and Arab inhabitants of Palestine produced a brief flowering of orientalist painting in the 1920s. But by the time European-born Jewish artists painted orientalist canvases, orientalism as a genre had waned in Europe. Their works never reached European galleries and never entered the Western canon.61
But Jewish scholarship on Islam, transplanted to Palestine, did have a continuing impact, drawing as it did upon a century-long tradition. The founding in 1925 of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in large part a project of German-speaking Jews, exercised a strong attraction upon a younger generation of scholars, influenced already in their teens by organized political Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, and anti-Semitism. The late Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, in her essay for this volume, sketches some of the figures who established the study of Islam in Jewish Palestine. Mention has been made of Josef Horovitz and Gotthold Weil, the first two directors of the School of Oriental Studies at the Hebrew University. These were men of an older generation, educated, tenured, and rooted in the universities of Frankfurt and Berlin. It is doubtful they would have ever relocated to Jerusalem of their own free wills. (Horovitz never did, Weil came only after the Nazis dismissed him from his post.)
But their immense influence was sufficient to set the Hebrew University on a trajectory determined by the priorities of German Jewish scholarship on Islam, with its emphasis on philology and the history of classical periods. In their own way, they regarded this as a practical choice. Horovitz, who had taught for years in a Muslim institution in India, wanted the new School of Oriental Studies to be respected in Muslim lands. The large projects he launched, such as the concordance of early Arabic poetry, were meant to stand up to exacting orientalist standards, but also to win Arab admiration.
In the conditions that prevailed in the 1930s, these emphases seemed like luxuries to some outside observers. A 1934 report by an external committee of inquiry, submitted to the board of governors of the university, related that the School of Oriental Studies “has been and still is criticized by many,” because it had “no other object in view than to give the students a picture of Moslem civilization of the past.” This would not do: Jewish Palestine
is surrounded on all sides by the Moslem world, a thorough knowledge of which is of the greatest importance for the economic and political development of the country. For this purpose it is not the study of pre-Islamic poetry nor the study of old Arab historians that matters, but the study of the living Islamic world. Its geography, dialectology, and commerce are far more important to the Palestinian Jew than Islamic art and archeology. In short, the School of Oriental Studies should be modeled on similar schools in Paris, Berlin, and London, in which the student is made to know the living and not only the dead Orient.62
The committee dismissed the notion that the emphasis on classical Arabic and Islam would win Muslim admiration: “It is now quite evident that no Arab will change his political views on the Jewish question because of the preparation by the Hebrew University of a Concordance of Ancient Arabic Poetry.” The School, concluded the committee, should "begin the kind of practical work that is expected from a school of this kind."63
Yet this view never prevailed. In the midst of the dispersal from Europe, immigrant Jews sought to duplicate in Palestine the conditions under which they had thrived — whether they were ultra-Orthodox Ostjuden departed from their Talmudic academies, or worldly academics departed from the universities of Mitteleuropa*. *Chains of scholarly transmission continued to transmit. Scholarly agendas fixed in fin-de-siècle Berlin and Frankfurt could not simply be abandoned, and they survived intact in the new centers of scholarship in Palestine, later Israel. Even the exacerbation of conflict with the Arabs did not alter these priorities.
Leo Ary Mayer (1895-1959) was the decisive figure in perpetuating this tradition — and deflecting criticisms of it. Mayer, born in Stanislav (in Austrian Poland), came from a strongly Zionist background, and he settled in Palestine in 1921, after completing his studies at the University of Vienna. His field was Islamic art and archeology, and he worked for the department of antiquities before joining the fledgling Hebrew University in 1925, the very year of its establishment. At the new university, the personable Mayer became a mandarin. He was the first local director of the School of Oriental Studies, which he guided from 1935 to 1949, while at the same time serving terms as dean and rector. In Palestine, Mayer had endless opportunities to explore the many facets of Islamic art, and embarked on a project to recover the identities of the great anonymous artisans of Islam, producing studies on architects, astrolabists, woodcarvers, metalworkers, and sword-cutlers. He was best known for two works, Saracenic Heraldry (1933) and Mamluk Costume (1952). A museum of Islamic art in Jerusalem — itself an unabashed statement of admiration for the high civilization of Islam — today bears Mayer’s name.
Under the impetus of Horovitz’s plan and the protection of Mayer, the Hebrew University perpetuated central European traditions in philology and Islamwissenschaft. In her essay, Lazarus-Yafeh emphasizes the role of David Hartwig (Zvi) Baneth (1893-1973), the son of a noted Talmudist, in establishing exacting standards in both fields. Baneth, who was raised in Berlin and educated there and in Frankfurt, came to Palestine in 1924. He began teaching in the School of Oriental Studies two years later, and continued to do so for forty years, essentially following the Frankfurt curriculum. Baneth, who was famously self-effacing and equally demanding, published little in his field (Jewish thought expressed in Arabic), but played a decisive role in transplanting the rigorous standards of central European scholarship to Jerusalem. Thanks to Baneth and others, the study of early and classical Islam, with an emphasis upon philology, philosophy, religion, and art, became a hallmark of the Jerusalem school. The scholars in this field, listed by Hava-Lazarus, enjoyed formidable reputations for their exacting scholarship, and put the Hebrew University in the first rank of Islamic studies.
Among the many scholars produced in Jerusalem, one carried its reputation far afield: Hungarian-born Samuel Stern (1920-69). Educated in a Benedictine school and a rabbinical seminary, Stern began to teach himself Arabic at the age of sixteen. In 1939, when war broke out, his mother sent him to Jerusalem, sparing him the grim fate that befell her and Budapest Jewry. At the Hebrew University, his star shined. (“Stern had no need to be taught anything anymore,” recalled Baneth.) But the war of 1948 disrupted the university, and Stern, an asthmatic, could not be mobilized. He left for Oxford, where he prepared his doctorate under Sir Hamilton Gibb (1895-1971), and there he remained for the rest of his career.
Stern’s interests ranged widely, from medieval poetry (in Arabic, Spanish, and Hebrew) to the dissident sects of Islam, via diplomatics and numismatics. Shulamit Sela, in her article for this collection, relates how Stern combined his Islamic and Jewish interests, and how he used Jewish sources, including the Geniza, to illuminate aspects of medieval Islamic history. Stern wished in the early 1950s to return to the Hebrew University, but no place could be found for him. Later, after he established himself in Oxford, he declined an offer from Jerusalem. Stern died young in 1969, his work uncompleted. His colleague Albert Hourani wrote in a eulogy that he came to Oxford as a stranger, and "he remained a stranger, not quite at home in the world."64 In fact, he had a strong attachment to Jerusalem, and he bequeathed his house and library to the Hebrew University.
New Emphases in Jerusalem
Another approach also flourished in Jerusalem, which was prompted by a deepening interest in the evolution of Muslim societies. This interest in Islamic history as something larger than language, religion, and art took its first strides forward in the work of Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900-85). Goitein was born in Burgkunstadt, Germany, and studied under Horovitz in Frankfurt. He emigrated to Palestine in 1923, and in 1928 joined the faculty of the Hebrew University, where he taught until 1957. His early work dealt with Islamic religious institutions and Muslim history. In recalling this phase of Goitein’s career, Lazarus-Yafeh points to his abiding interest in the religious manifestations of Islam, and their relationship to Judaism — the kind of concerns typical of his teachers in Germany and his colleagues in Jerusalem. Goitein himself remained a practicing Jew throughout his life.
But he broke completely new ground in his monumental work on the Geniza documents — research and writing largely undertaken after he left for the United States in 1957. R. Stephen Humphreys has suggested the importance of the Geniza (the documentary storehouse of the Jewish community of medieval Cairo): the study of Jewish history in medieval Islam “can yield social history of a depth which we cannot achieve for any other group, even the highly articulate and vastly larger Muslim majority.” But because of the Jewish milieu in which these documents were created, notes Humphreys, “it helps to have been brought up in an observant Jewish home and to have had some training in rabbinics.” Goitein was the perfect match for Geniza research, and in the five volumes of A Mediterranean Society (1967-88), he laid the foundations for a revolution in the social and economic history of Islam in the Middle Ages — an achievement Humphreys calls "one of the most impressive and moving in the history of our field."65 The Geniza documents continue to yield new insights, and are likely to remain at the epicenter of research on the social and economic history of the Muslim Middle Ages.
The Jerusalem school also led breakthroughs in the social and economic history of other periods. David Ayalon (Neustadt) (1914-98) personified the successful transplantation of the European tradition to Palestine. Born in Haifa, he was educated entirely at the Hebrew University (apart from one year spent at the American University of Beirut). He worked for a time for the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, and served in the British army during the Second World War. In 1947 he published (with Pessah Shinar) an Arabic-Hebrew dictionary that has maintained its preeminence to this day. In 1950, Ayalon joined the faculty of the Hebrew University, and began to center his research on the Mamluks of Egypt. His work was the first to elucidate the social underpinnings of the institution of military slavery, without which no understanding of late medieval Muslim history is possible.
Eliyahu Ashtor (Eduard Strauss) (1914-84) explored the economic history of this same period. Born in Vienna, Strauss came from a strongly Zionist background, and at the age of nineteen he published an ardent defense of Zionism against its Marxist critics. Strauss took his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1936, and would have been ordained a rabbi had the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 not cut short his studies. He came to Palestine that year and became keeper of oriental books at the National and University Library. In 1955, Ashtor joined the faculty, and later published what became the standard history of the Jews of Muslim Spain, before taking up the economic and social history of the Muslim Middle Ages. In this work, Ashtor made extensive use of Geniza materials, combined with Arabic chronicles and European trade records. In doing so, he was critical of “the Orientalists themselves [who], with few exceptions, have always been interested in the spiritual life of the Moslems, in Islam and in Arabic literature. So many texts which indeed refer to social and economic life have been overlooked or misunderstood.” It was his purpose to show that the Muslim East in the Middle Ages was “not at all a static, unchanging society,” and that "the bourgeois played a great role in political history and that there were strong revolutionary movements."66
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The new emphasis on social history also characterized the career of Gabriel Baer (1919-82). Born in Berlin, Baer escaped to Haifa in 1933. He studied at the American University of Beirut and the Hebrew University, where he prepared under Goitein. In 1954, he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University, specializing in nineteenth-century social history, with an emphasis on Egypt. Baer did pioneering work on the history of guilds, landownership, and urban-rural relations, challenging entrenched myths. He died in the midst of an ambitious project on Muslim endowments. A German scholar has described him as a rebel against scholarly convention:
His studies of specific social institutions within history contributed greatly to demolish the traditional orientalist view of an “Islamic” or “Arab” or “Middle Eastern” society as a uniform and static phenomenon. These facile generalizations of an “Islamic” mode of thought or behavior were unacceptable to him. In his opinion, the term “Islamic city,” for instance, could not account for the great differences and creative variations over space and time which could be observed for the city in the area.67
Yet Baer "refused to replace the simplistic traditional orientalist approach with the fashionable but often facile theories and models of more recent origin."68
The same could be said of the entire Jerusalem school of social and economic history. Its practitioners sought to expand the perimeters of history, to widen the lens to include the breadth of society. But they were reluctant to trade tested tools for untested theories. The solidity and density of their work established standards of evidence and explanation that have not been superseded.
As late as 1948, the entire Jewish community of the country numbered only half a million, a narrow base to sustain the importation of so much specialized scholarship. The war of 1948 and the years of austerity and isolation that followed it were difficult ones at the Hebrew University. The campus on Mt. Scopus became inaccessible, conditions were far from ideal, and academic positions were few compared to the number of immigrant scholars. Jewish scholars who once freely traversed the region became Israeli scholars, isolated from sustained contact with Arab-Muslim colleagues, important archives and libraries.
Given these circumstances, the successful transfer of the Jewish tradition of scholarship on Islam to Palestine and Israel must be regarded as a signal achievement. The Hebrew University built directly upon the hugely influential legacies of central European Islamwissenschaft. And despite the difficulties, contact with the living East made for a diversification, which carried scholarship beyond the study of Islam as religion, to include the study of the social and economic history of Muslim peoples, and even the realities of contemporary Islam. In many of these areas, the Jerusalem school and its offshoots in newer Israeli universities not only held their own but helped to define the evolving international research agenda as oriental studies gave way to the disciplines.
The Continental Remnant
The Jewish tradition of Islamic studies in central Europe, especially in Germany, generated immense energy at its height, and continued to do so after its displacement to Palestine, the United States, and Britain. The permanent departure of these scholars left a void in the heart of Europe. Yet Jews also occupied a significant place in the French and Italian traditions of Islamic studies. Jewish Islamicists from France and Italy knew less of the efforts to reconcile Judaism and modernity than did their German Jewish counterparts, many of who had rabbinical training. They tended to be more assimilated, less grounded in the Jewish tradition, less interested in the comparison of Islam and Judaism, and more influenced by Europe’s reigning ideologies. Like their German Jewish counterparts, they were displaced by the war, but unlike them, they returned afterwards to the same universities, where they continued to exercise a profound influence on Islamic studies.
Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was born in the Piedmont of Italy, to a highly assimilated family of mixed Italian and Spanish origin. “For two generations,” he testified,
my family had detached itself from the practice of the Jewish religion. Brought up without any religious indoctrination, supposedly substituted by the vague theism of my mother and by the religion of duty and humanism of my father, one day I found within and around myself a great void which needed to be filled. Two ways were open to me: the return to the ancestral faith, of which I perceived the august majesty and which my family had put aside without formally denying it; or the resolute entry into the fold of the Catholic Church, which attracted me by its harmonious and solid doctrinal structure and by the very strong emotional charge of its cult.69
But Levi Della Vida opened a third way: the comparative study of religion and Semitic languages, a labor that provided a measure of spiritual sustenance. He prepared himself by assisting Prince Leone Caetani (1869-1935) in the monumental translation project, the Annali dell’Islam. Such preparation enabled him in 1914 to secure the chair of Arabic at the University of Naples, and in 1920 he occupied the chair of Hebrew and comparative Semitic languages at the University of Rome. Yet Levi Della Vida’s horizons were much broader than philology. He synthesized many disciplines in his work, and he criticized orientalists who “do not see nor hear anything outside the closed and arid field of their erudite researches.” He also showed political courage. At the end of 1931, Levi Della Vida was one of twelve lecturers, out of 1,225 university faculty, who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Fascist regime — this, at a time when most Italian intellectuals, Jews among them, supported Fascism. His principled stand cost him his professorship. In 1939, he relocated to the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught until his reinstatement in Rome in 1948.
Evariste Lévi-Provençal (1894-1956) completely obscured his Jewish antecedents, although he earned his fame for his work on Islamic Spain, the very font of Jewish romanticism. Born in Algeria, Lévi-Provençal remained extremely reticent about his origins. He made a point of noting his military service to France in the First World War (he was wounded in the Dardanelles in 1917), his years of teaching and research in Rabat (he joined the Institut des hautes études marocaines in 1922), and his chair at the University of Algiers (occupied from 1935). But he was careful never to hint at his Jewish origins. Was this due to his thorough assimilation, or to the pervasiveness in France of the “banal” anti-Semitism personified by Massignon? Lévi-Provençal certainly fell victim to the latter: Vichy racial laws unseated him from his Algiers chair. It was during his “enforced leisure” that he began his three-volume Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane (1944-53), a synthesis that superseded its predecessors and has yet to be superseded.
As David Wasserstein notes in his essay for this volume, Lévi-Provençal seemed to avert his gaze deliberately from the crucial contribution of Jews to the life of Islamic Spain, and made no use of very rich Jewish sources. The reasons may have been technical. (Lévi-Provençal apparently knew no Hebrew, and had no background in Jewish studies.) Or they may have run deeper. The Jewish absence leaves Lévi-Provençal’s history of Muslim Spain an unreservedly French history, just as he gave himself an unreservedly French biography, culminating in service as an officer in the ranks of Free France. After the war, he relocated to Paris, where he became professor at the Sorbonne and the director of two institutes, for Islamic studies and the contemporary Middle East. But loyal as he was to France, he did not confuse France with French empire. In Paris, Lévi-Provençal became a critic of attempts to reestablish France’s damaged standing in North Africa by force, and was later an active member of the liberal Comité France-Maghreb.
Robert Brunschvig (1901-90) shared some of these scholarly commitments, but had much firmer Jewish moorings. Born in Bordeaux, he arrived in Tunis in 1922, where he taught French at a lycée for eight years. There he became interested in history, and he gained an appointment as professor in Muslim civilization at the University of Algiers in 1932. Brunschvig was also an avowed and charismatic Zionist, of the revisionist school of Jabotinsky, and a community activist who organized a parallel educational system for 20,000 Jewish children driven out of Algeria’s schools by the Vichy regime. (Brunschvig likewise was dismissed from the university.) After the war, he taught at the University of Bordeaux, and from 1955 to his retirement in 1968, at the Sorbonne, where he also headed the Institut d’études islamiques. Brunschvig specialized in North African Islam in the medieval period and the history of Islamic law, and became best known for his exemplary two-volume history of the Hafsid dynasty, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides (1940-47). His work on North Africa, in contrast to Lévi-Provençal’s on Muslim Spain, included very dense accounts of Jewish life, based in part upon a close reading of rabbinic responsa.
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Claude Cahen (1909-91) concentrated upon the Muslim East. Born in Paris, he received his diplôme in Arabic from the École des langues orientales in Paris in 1931, and undertook a research trip to Turkey in 1936 that set his scholarly agenda. After the war, Cahen taught at the University of Strasbourg, where he founded the first journal devoted to the social and economic history of the East. In 1959, he went to the Sorbonne, where he taught for twenty years. Cahen specialized in the economy of the medieval Muslim world, with an emphasis on Anatolia and the Levant. Hourani has described Cahen’s work as "perhaps the most systematic attempt to apply mature sociological concepts to the realities of Islamic society."70 In doing so, he created an alternative to the heavy emphasis on religion and theology in French Islamic studies, itself the legacy of Massignon.
Cahen was more than ambivalent about his origins. An avowed communist, he once told a colleague outright,“I am not a Jew.” In a document from the war years only recently published, he took a different tack: “I am [a Jew], it is a fact. I draw no pride or shame from it, I see it neither as a sign of a providential designation, nor as an outcome of my own will…Nothing in my education or associations has prepared me to declare myself a member any group other than humanity or France, or a professional community, an ideal, an action — the many forms of acceptable solidarity.” He disliked
encountering people who, due only to an accident of birth, treat you as someone who shares ideas and communal sentiments with them, who shares in their interests…in a word, members of a kind of conspiracy that positions you against the rest of humanity or the nation. It is still more disagreeable when circumstances make it impossible to disavow this solidarity without effectively breaking that other tie, so noble and consensual, which must bind us to any category of people who suffer.71
Maxime Rodinson (b. 1915) had similar ideological commitments, although he struck a different balance between history and politics. Rodinson was born to Russian-Polish immigrant parents in an impoverished working-class neighborhood of Paris. He grew up in a home and surroundings that were fervently communist and Stalinist, “de-Judaized,” and anti-Zionist. In 1932 he entered the École des langues orientales to prepare for a career as a diplomat-interpreter, and there took up the study of Arabic. Later he decided to prepare a thesis in comparative Semitics. Rodinson had none of the advantages brought to this field by other Jewish students. He was “initially quite ignorant of the Jewish religion,” and his parents "were dismayed when they saw me learning Hebrew. For them, Hebrew was the language of the rabbis, and when they saw I was copying Hebrew letters they said, ‘Look how he has tumbled into such foolishness.’"72 (His parents both perished in Auschwitz in 1943.) Rodinson spent the wars years in Lebanon (in Sidon and then in Beirut), before becoming a librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris in 1948. In 1955, he began to teach at the École pratique des hautes études. Rodinson joined the French communist party in 1937; he left it in 1958.
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Rodinson’s seven years in Lebanon drew him to the study of the Muslim world. His work combined sociological and Marxist theorizing in an accessible (and polemical) style. Rodinson became best known for his 1961 biography of Muhammad (“probably in an unconscious fashion, I compared him to Stalin”),73 a work of deep empathy setting the Prophet within a social context, but one resented by many Muslims because of its atheistic premises. In his Islam et le capitalisme (1966), Rodinson took issue with the view, widespread in Europe, that Islam hindered the development of capitalism and thus explained the underdevelopment of the Muslim world. At the same time, he did not accept the apologetic Muslim view of Islam as egalitarian. Islam was a completely neutral element, overridden by social factors — a position in accord with his theoretical premises. He credited his Marxism with "opening my eyes and making me understand and say that the world of Islam was subject to the same laws and tendencies as the rest of the human race."74
Like other Jewish Marxists (and, indeed, Marx himself), Rodinson judged the Jews by another standard: "I confess a repugnance for Jewish nationalism (common among very many Jews of my generation) even stronger than the repugnance I feel for other nationalisms, as strong as it is."75 Rodinson was an avowed anti-Zionist, whose views resembled Cahen’s. But unlike Cahen, he published his positions repeatedly, especially after 1967, in articles and books. Rodinson regarded Judaism as a personal choice (which he rejected: “I have always had a greater repugnance for Jewish ritual than for any other”),76 and he saw Israel as a colonial project, which could only be implemented through the wrongful displacement of Palestinian Arabs. But in later years he concluded that Israel’s Jewish inhabitants, under changed historical circumstances, had become “a new nationality with a culture of its own,” and that Israel rested on international legality, hence the necessity for mutual reconciliation. Rodinson’s political engagements were never far beneath the surface of his scholarship. He once compared himself to the controversial philosopher Levi ben Gershom (1288-1344), who saw his struggles over ideas as "wars for God."77 This was a far cry from the traditional scholarly detachment from politics, but the dislocations of twentieth-century Europe, from the Holocaust to decolonization, made such detachment difficult to maintain or justify.
These changes also eliminated continental Europe as a center of Jewish accomplishment in Islamic studies. The Italian and French Jewish scholars, who embarked on their careers before the war, finished them in Europe. But Jews then disappeared from the field. Not only were there far fewer Jewish academics in Europe, there were far more Muslims, and these would come to play the more significant role in the years following the war.