In 1978, Edward Said, the late professor of English literature at Columbia University, and a figure so controversial that there are even questions as to his place of birth, wrote in his landmark book Orientalism that “colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.” His theory, which has today become intellectual gospel, is that the university backwater of Oriental studies somehow gave the West the “capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, [and] making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing mission.” Said’s outsize claims essentially suggest that Europe came to dominate the world because Europeans came to love translations of The Thousand and One Nights.
Yaron Peleg, an assistant professor of Hebrew at George Washington University, doesn’t come to bury Said, but neither does he come to praise him. He presents a close reading of several works from the period of the Hebrew Revival (1880 – 1930) in which he stresses that Hebrew Orientalism was an important, if short-lived, literary movement which differed from classic colonialism in that Jewish history and thought had broad, organic ties to the Middle East. Whether he will succeed in making the academy reconsider its automatic branding of this literary body as colonialist is doubtful; the fact that he is willing to paddle up so powerful a stream is praiseworthy.
Peleg presents reviews of numerous writers of this now lesser-known period of Hebrew literature, with a special focus on David Frishman’s Bamidbar, Moshe Smilansky’s Sons of Arabia, and A.I. Arielli’s play, Allah Karim! His trenchant analyses seek to rescue these works from the dustbin of academic disdain, and to a great degree, he succeeds. At the very least, he presents a fully dimensional intellectual world in which these works reside, and this is no mean accomplishment. Index, selective biblio.
