Orientalism

This is the Ottoman History Podcast.

I'm Chris Grayton, and here's our guest in this new episode titled Hebrew Orientalism.

My name is Mustafa Hussain.

I am an assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim relations at the University of Michigan.

I work on Jewish-Muslim intersections, focusing on multidimensional relations between Jews and Muslims.

Hebrew Orientalism, Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine, is a new book published by Professor Mustafa Hussein.

He challenges the view that Jewish thinkers were dismissive of Arab culture in Palestine, as well as the view that their writing on the subject should be simply dismissed as ideological expressions of Zionist civilizational superiority.

Instead, Professor Hussain argues that a range of Arabic sources, from medieval chronicles, travel narratives, and poetry, to place names and botanical knowledge, played an important role in the remaking of Hebrew language and culture and the development of a settler project that straddled the history of two empires and the state of Israel.

This is the Ottoman History Podcast.

I'm Chris Grayton, and here's our guest in this new episode titled Hebrew Orientalism.

My name is Mustafa Hussain.

I am an assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim relations at the University of Michigan.

I work on Jewish-Muslim intersections, focusing on multidimensional relations between Jews and Muslims.

Hebrew Orientalism, Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine, is a new book published by Professor Mustafa Hussein.

He challenges the view that Jewish thinkers were dismissive of Arab culture in Palestine, as well as the view that their writing on the subject should be simply dismissed as ideological expressions of Zionist civilizational superiority.

Instead, Professor Hussain argues that a range of Arabic sources, from medieval chronicles, travel narratives, and poetry, to place names and botanical knowledge, played an important role in the remaking of Hebrew language and culture and the development of a settler project that straddled the history of two empires and the state of Israel.

the right reverend silveria gomez pimentar who died a few years ago in south america was the first catholic negro bishop in the new world his parents were slaves but he became an auxiliary bishop of palua at an early age and in nineteen o two was made bishop of mariana by pope leo the thirteenth There were two million people in his diocese.

He succeeded in restoring and elevating the religious and social life of his district, and was a man of vast learning, with high reputation as an Orientalist.

Pope Pius X is manifesting great interest in mission work among colored people in the United States.

Rev.

He is...

A kind of Zoroastrian, although Melville kind of invents his religion as just vaguely, menacingly Orientalist.

Whatever it is, he's some sort of Eastern guru.

He uses the term Parsi and other terms that are vaguely Persian-ish.

Um, and, uh, so I, I was then exposed to the middle East and having, uh, you know, gone live, I think having lived through the attacks and, um, the early stages of the war on terror, and then having had the experience of living in, in the middle East, uh, pushed me toward um graduate study in in middle east studies so i went to the university of chicago and and did that and that was another uh sort of radicalizing thing for me to study um not just the history of the Middle East and sort of, you know, better understanding that region in a way that increasingly, you know, to watch news coverage or read newspapers, I understood to be at odds with reality, like the way we were covering that region versus what I was learning in school were increasingly at odds with one another.

But also to study the history of the way that Westerners have viewed the Middle East and Orientalist thinking and approaches, and to see some of that reflected in the contemporary news coverage was another thing that really kind of was a wake-up to me as somebody who, again, had been, you know, pretty...

Bill Clinton ish.

I mean, I wasn't a big Bill Clinton fan, but that's sort of middle of the road kind of democratic, liberal person politically was was another grad school was another place where I really kind of move toward a more leftist kind of anti imperial position.

And there's very few household names.

And that complicates your ability to get a project off the ground because, I mean, even, I mean, look at Aladdin, which obviously is.

a very kind of Orientalist view.

Which is

So he is sending, he is dispatched, dispatching an agent to oversee everything.

And this is Orientalist as fuck.

Yeah.

Um, Otomo's like chamber.

They had their own freedom that, you know, they fought for.

And also at the same time, I felt like, you know, zooming, uh, putting the focus on them was also debunking, like, sort of the Orientalist, uh, vision, like, of the West of, like, you know, women in the Arab world, blah, blah, blah.

Um, so, so that was, like, one thread, and then the other thread was, uh, you know, understand how French colonialism had impacted our communities and our families and our history over time, like, over long, long-term, uh, periods, not, like, you know, in the aftermath of, like, independence, which is, like, always the stories that I heard.

And from there, I realized that there was this, like, sort of, um, m- grand movement of, like, for many, um, Maghrebi Jews of, like, uh, m- uh, moving from a position of, like, being colonized to becoming the colonizer in Palestine.

The things that you would see within those paintings also were kind of They weren't plundered necessarily, but they were sticky in terms of their commercial trade implications.

And when you start to look into, you know, Orientalism, all of the different ways, because now I think there's also some aspects of beauty in that.

I'm not, you know, I'm not... it's not a critique.

It's more like eyes wide open that this, that this is a part of what the culture is.