Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice

Middle East and Islam Studies in Israeli Universities

Eyal Clyne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351263986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice explores the field of Israeli Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) sociologically and politically, as a window onto the relationship between Orientalism, Zionism and academia. The book draws special attention to neoliberal discourse and praxis in everyday higher education, the interests of scholars, and the political form that commercialisation takes in specific disciplinary and geopolitical conditions by deconstructing structural and historical presuppositions and effective ideologies that overdetermine this junction of academia, orientalism and Zionism.

The multi-layered study draws on various scholarly traditions and offers new evidence for, and insights in, historical and cultural-discursive discussions. It highlights paradigmatic gaps in reading Saidian orientalism, re-evaluates the origins and evolution of the local field, contributes to the study of everyday academic culture in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), and unveils the presupposed and the unsaid of the general and the specific field, exploring the intersection of an orientalist expertise, in a settler-colonial society, and everyday academic capitalism.

The expertise of this sociological and discursive study make it an invaluable resource for academics and students interested in Israel and Middle East studies, Higher Education and the Sociology of Academia.

Part I

Historicism

1 Genealogies

Introduction

This chapter traces the sociology of the first three generations of academic mizraḥanut, since its inception and until the late 1970s. The analysis is informed and motivated by three questions, each of which engages with existing perceptions about the field in this period. First, it responds to a narration of Israeli MEIS as rooted in a Germano-Jewish intellectual heritage. Several works, especially by Israeli MEIS scholars (e.g. Milson 1997, 576–77; Kramer 1999, 27–32; Lazarus-Yafeh 1999), emphasise the ‘origin’ of Israeli MEIS as German Orientwissenschaften, which some (Kramer 1999; Lewis 2000, 251; Marchand 2001; Teitelbaum and Litvak 2006, 31), including Said (2003, 19) himself, consider to be less (directly) relevant to postcolonial criticism, because it has supposedly developed independently of a colonial project (a view that, by the way, overlooks German imperialism and genocide in Africa). This narrative further portrays the fathers of Israeli ‘orient studies’ as continuing a tradition of luminary European Jews, who, partially due to their ‘oriental’ position as Jews within Europe, have arguably made foundational and sympathetic contributions to the Western scholarship on Islam (e.g. Lewis 1993; and Kramer 1999, which effectively accepts Said’s East-West structure theory).¹ This narrative resonates in views, reviews and interviews in the field, as the following comment by one interviewee exemplifies:

Israeli oriental studies is much more than the Occupation and … What it draws on is a central European, often Jewish German-language orientalism, which is … One of the problems of Said’s book is that he didn’t engage with that at all.

Therefore, the following assesses the relevance of Jewish-European and German intellectual tradition(s) to the practices and the configurations of succeeding academic mizraḥans.

Second, the chapter examines the investment of academic mizraḥanut in colonial relationships (e.g. intelligence bodies, military rule administration, hasbara² and diplomacy bodies), which are often stressed by critics. Interrupting the simplistic ‘everybody was/is in bed with everybody’, the chapter details this involvement, and considers the political realities under which these agents live(d), asking, what were the relevant trajectories of individuals and groups, in, through and out of the field?

Third, the chapter investigates what epistemic and material properties allowed the field to contain and endure the growth, conflicts and competition it saw during the bigger, more complex third generation (which consequently requires most of the chapter).

Note that the concept of ‘generation’ is used here sociologically (Mannheim 1952), not to indicate a shared time of birth, and surely not blood ties, but a cohort of joint historical experiences and time of operation. To ease the reading through details, names and chronology, and partially assisted by Menahem Milson’s (1997) survey of the development of MEIS in the Hebrew University,³ hereinafter I use ‘G+number’ to indicate generational belonging.

Juxtaposing the first two generations

The first generation of founders

The birth of academic mizraḥanut was also the birth of Israeli academia. Its foundations were laid at the School for Orient Studies (SOS), one of three schools – alongside Jewish Studies and Chemistry – that formed the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925–26 (Lazarus-Yafeh 1999; Eyal 2006, 35–36), and testify to its importance.⁴ Establishing the university was a political foreign act, mandated by the 1913 Zionist Congress, following many years of Zionist discussions of idea. Set to teach in Hebrew in a predominantly Arabic-speaking country, the formal inauguration ceremony of this Zionist flagship featured most of the Zionist spiritual and political leaders, alongside Lord Arthur Balfour and the British (Jewish) High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, and was met with a Palestinian general strike (Segev 1999, 179–80).

SOS was founded by a small circle of Jewish orientalist men. Out of its eight or nine individuals, seven were educated in Germany, five were born in Germany and seven also had advanced knowledge in Jewish studies. The School was conceived in 1924 by Leo Ary Mayer (an immigrant from Austrian Poland), David Hartwig, (Zvi) Baneth (a German immigrant), Shelomo Dov Goitein (a German immigrant)⁵ and Avinoam Yalin⁶ (a third-generation Ashkenazi Jerusalemite); and inaugurated on 15 March 1926 by Mayer, Baneth and Levy Billig (an English immigrant⁷). Josef Horowitz, a Professor at Frankfurt University, was appointed Visiting [i.e. absent] Director by his friend, the university chancellor, Judah Leon Magnes, a pacifist American immigrant Rabbi with a PhD from Heidelberg. Goitein joined in 1928, and Yossef Yoel Rivlin in 1929. Rivlin, the only non-Ashkenazi in the group, was part of a Jewish Jerusalemite dynasty. He completed his PhD the previous year under Horowitz in Germany, and is known for his ornate translations into Hebrew, including the Quran (in 1936) and One Thousand and One Nights (‘IOS News’ 1953a, 302; Baer 1979; Goitein 1979, 173; Milson 1997, 576–81; Kramer 1999, 27–30; Lazarus-Yafeh 1999, 254).⁸ So it is easy to establish already that this group has branched out of the said German scholarship on Islam. In a context where Jews in secular/Christian Europe were often seen as ‘Easterners in the West’, Jewish (often religious) scholars – some of whom were importantly not Zionist (e.g. Goldziher and Geiger; Raz-Krakotzkin 2006) – felt closeness and similarity to the ‘world’ they studied (Lewis 1993; Kramer 1999; Marchand 2001; Khazzoom 2003, 489–92).⁹

The founders had broad research interests, and their approach to studying the East was through assiduous philological scrutiny of text, which maintained that distance from the research objects is essential for guaranteeing objectivity. This remoteness convention quickly met with pressing demands from various quarters of the Yishuv,¹⁰ the pre-state Zionist community in Palestine (Toledano 2007), to which Shelomo Dov Goitein responded in the Yishuvist daily Davar, ten years after the establishment of the University:

From time to time it is demanded that the practical aspect of the School’s studies is strengthened … It seems to me that over time there will be need in our school to think about a separation into two courses [i.e. practical/applied studies, and other studies].

(Goitein 1935)

The said separation never took place, but, as Goitein wrote 44 years later, now as the head of both the School and Israel Orient Society (IOS, est. 1949), his coevals strictly avoided applied studies, and ‘left the practical aspect for other institutes, such as the Institute for Middle East Economy, International Relations and Political Science’ (Goitein 1979, 173).¹¹

Despite the advocated distance from the object and avoidance from studying contemporary affairs, the Hebrew University, as an institution, was both part of the Zionist project and a party in it. The university was established under the foreign power of the British Mandate for Palestine (est. 1922), the preamble of which made it responsible, inter alia, for ‘putting into effect … the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Jews at the time constituted about 11–16 per cent of the population, and their constant immigration and settlement efforts, including the setting up of a university, were part of an explicit political takeover ambition. On other hand, key academic mizraḥans advocated Zionism’s integration in the East, where Jews, or Erets Yisrael, were thought to ‘belong’. Their radical call within Zionism to ‘orientalise ourselves’ and revive and modernise ‘the backwards East’, was also the reason for naming their scholarly society Israel Oriental Society (IOS) and its journal The New East. This ambition was a common view among certain intellectual circles, including in the Hebrew University’s leadership, that wished to reconcile their anti-imperialism and anti-domination views and reputation with their settler-colonial practice, and have been marginalised by the hegemony of the Labour movement (Mapai) (Mendes-Flohr 1998; Kimmerling 2005, 100).¹²

This was one reason for the Hebrew University’s struggle for political and intellectual independence in the early years of the state, unlike its other two contemporary (Hebrew) academic institutions. While the Weizmann Institution of Science (est. 1934) served the military apparatus, and the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion, est. 1912) hoped for full nationalisation, the Hebrew University, which was the only university studying in the humanities and social sciences, fought for academic independence, and until 1948 managed, at political cost, to retain it, partially thanks to its reliance on donations from the US (Cohen 2006, 129).¹³ Michael Keren (1989, 33–34) argues that the establishment of the state in 1948 came as a shock to the intellectuals, who were both disappointed with the mundane and imperfect nature of the state they hitherto imagined, and because of the decrease in their political agency and leadership role. This marked the beginning of tensions between the state and the university, which lasted until 1953, during which time the state applied political and economic pressure in demand for academic and political adjustments, to which the university was opposed. The academic steadfastness ended with a series of personal, organisational and ideological changes in the university’s administration, that ‘manifested the adaptation of the academic institution to the idea that it must serve the political interest of the state’ (Cohen 2002, 363; Keren 1989, 51–57; Sand 2000, 154, 160–61; Cohen 2003; 2006, 115–93). Thus, retrospectively, their principles and concepts were less meaningful than the settler-colonial deed in which they took part.

The second generation of founders

The ‘sabra’ (Palestine-born) generations that followed were at least as significant to the shaping of academic mizraḥanut. Born in Palestine, or sometimes coming to it from Europe at an early age, G2 were socialised more as part of an established local mission-driven political community, and not as adult immigrants from secularised Christian Europe. They, too, were all Jewish men, and they studied during the 1930s and 1940s at a crucial time when liberal Europe and its Jewry came under existential risks, and the local resistance to the Jewish settlement in Palestine intensified into violence, which was clearly going to lead to an imminent civil war. In their local-epochal community of the Yishuv, Zionism was the determinant collective mission and a taken-for-granted fact of life.

All the nine individuals that Milson counts as G2 gained their PhDs locally from the Hebrew University (eight in SOS), and not in Germany. Although this is likely to have contributed to intergenerational and institutional continuity and dependency, the two generations operated under different and rapidly changing political and cultural circumstances. G1 were shaped by German orientalism and ‘Diasporic’ Jewish experiences, whereas G2’s positionality and possibilities were grounded in the political conditions of post-World War I’s Yishuv. Moreover, a key contextual atmosphere in which they lived rejected the (stereotypical) non-Western (and religious) Jewish identity that G1 symbolised, practised and also studied. Shlilat ha-galut (‘negation of Diasporic lifestyle’) was a fundamental Yishuvist concept, whereby Zionist settlers alienated themselves from the (anti-Semitic view of) ‘Eastern’, ‘backwards’ and ‘feminine’ character of the ‘old-Jew’, and actively aspired to a ‘modern’, secular, strong-bodied, aggressive and blunt identity. Thus, G2 and subsequent generations had different, and in some ways even opposite, habituses, cultural values and political contexts than those of G1 (Raz-Krakotzkin 1993, 2017 [1998], 2001, 2006).

G2 had formative influence on Israeli MEIS. They entered academic faculty when David Ayalon (born: Noishtadt¹⁴) and Uriel Heyd started teaching in 1949 and 1952 respectively, having been ‘invited to build a new department for the study of the history of the Middle East in modern times’ which would ‘elaborate the curriculum to answer for the needs of the impending state’ (Milson 1997, 585–86, n. 32, my emphases; interview 19). They both had experience in the Middle East Section of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency (the future Foreign Ministry), a body which both developed and exploited peace relationships with Palestinians for intelligence purposes (Eyal 2005, 51–52). In polar opposite to G1’s remoteness, G2’s background was considered to be favourably contributing to the academic task, and Milson (1997, 585) therefore describes it as ‘typical that both Ayalon and Heyd were engaged in practice in Middle Eastern policy[-making], before joining the academic teaching faculty’. Heyd later also served in senior roles in the Israeli missions to the US and Turkey (Davar 1968a, 1968b; Milson 1997).

A third important individual was 1976 Israel Prize laureate for Arabic Linguisti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Historicism
• PART II: Anti-crisis
• PART III: Discourse and ideology
• Conclusion
• Index