Post-Colonial Studies / Jewish Studies

IVAN DAVIDSON KALMAR is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the

University of Toronto. His publications include The Trotskys, Freuds, and Woody
Allens: Portrait of a Culture (994). DEREK J. PENSLAR is Zacks Professor of
History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Toronto. His
most recent publication is Shylocks Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern
Europe (200).
Tauber Series for the Study of European Jewry

Brandeis University Press

Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, Editors

Jewish history complicates the stark dichotomy between East and West and nowhere
more than with the Zionist movement, the return of the Jews to the East. The essays
in this highly original work take the relationship of the Jews to Orientalism in unexpected directions, thus demanding a thoroughgoing revision of Orientalism itself.
David Biale, Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History, University of
California, Davis, editor, Cultures of the Jews: A New History

Orientalism and the Jews

In spite of growing globalization there remains in the world a split between the West
and the rest. The manner in which this split has been represented in Western civilization was the subject of Edward Saids Orientialism (978). In this groundbreaking
work, Said identied the Orient as the Islamic world and to a lesser extent Hindu
India. Orientalism signies the way the West imagined this terrain.
Going beyond Saids framework, Kalmar and Penslar argue that orientalism is based
on the Christian Wests attempts to understand and manage its relations with both of its
monotheistic OthersMuslims and Jews. According to the editors, Jews have almost
always been present whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East; and the
Western image of the Muslim Orient has been formed and continues to be formed in
inextricable conjunction with Western perceptions of the Jewish people.

Waltham, Massachusetts
Published by

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND

Hanover and London

www.upne.com
ISBN 1584654112

,!7IB5I4-gfebbh!:t;K;k;K;k
Cover illustration: Detail, anonymous Venetian artist, Transporting the Arc of the Covenant, after 475,
illumination. Folios 4 verso and 5 recto, Psalterium, Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana. Used with permission.

BRANDEIS

Orientalism and the Jews

edited by

Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar