Genealogies of Orientalism and Occidentalism: Sephardi Jews, Muslims, and the

Americas. Author(s): Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. Source: Studies in American Jewish
Literature (1981-), Vol. 35, No. 1, Studies in AmericanJewish Literature (2016), pp. 13-32

This essay takes as its starting point the idea that Orientalism was constitutive of the
Americas long before the physical arrival of Jewish and Muslim immigrants to the Americas.

The 1492 discourses about Muslims and Jews, which culminated with the fall of Granada
and the Inquisition, were already themselves part of a historically triangulated set of
relationalities between Europe and North Africa/Middle East, and the entity that was soon to
come into consciousnessthe Americas. Preexisting Iberian images and phobias about Jews and
Muslims boarded the ships to the Americas in a trajectory across the Sephardi-Moorish
Atlantic

While contemporary critiques see Orientalism as the reductive and stereotypical fixing
of the Orient (Edward Said), and similarly of the early (indigenous) Americas, Walter Mignolo,
twentieth-century Brazilian anthropologist, Gilberto Freyre, for example, spoke of
modernization as synonymous with Europeanization

BETWEEN THE TWO 1492s To understand the Americas Orient in its historical depth,
we need to go at least as far back as Christopher Columbus, and even to the earlier Christian
crusades

Columbus intended to go east to convert the diverse heathens and infidels, including
Muslims and Jews. Orientalism, in this sense, begins with the very arrival of the bearers of
Iberian theological vision in the Americas

Even before arriving in the Orient, then, the Orientalist imaginary had already arrived in
the Americas, arguably becoming a constitutive element in a broad cultural matrix. Forged in
centuries of reconquista, fifteenth-century Spain provided a template for the creation of racial
states and for ethno-religious cleansing.

Examining the circulation of tropes and metaphors, as well as the discursive

connectivities between the various 1492s, affords us a historically grounded way to begin the
story of Orientalism in the Americas.4 In Brazil, more specifically, discourses about Muslims and
Jews armed the conquistadores with a ready-made demonizing vision, transferable from the
old to the new world, this time targeting Africans and indigenous peoples rather than Jews
and Muslims. Discourses, along with languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, traveled together to
the new world. Columbus took the converso Luis de Torres as his interpreter, because his
knowledge of Semitic languages would supposedly facilitate interlocution in the East.

As a country formed by indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, European colonizers, and

immigrants of every possible provenance, Brazil partially formulates issues of identity through
cross-national comparisons. Comparisons with the United States, for example, have been
unending, forming even, at times, an integral part of a specular and reciprocal process of self-
definition.
 GILBERTO FREYRE: A STUDY IN AMBIVALENCE

The work of Gilberto Freyre, who was to become one of the most influential theorists of
Brazilian national identity in the Americas, instantiated an intense dialogue with various currents
of thought. Turning scientific racism on its head, Freyre transformed what antecedent theory
had seen as negativethe epidermically obvious presence of blacks and Indians, mestizos and
caboclos, and the less obvious, more submerged presence of Moors and Sephardisinto a point
of national pride.

Freyres highly idealized and eroticized account of Brazils origins highlights the sexual
exaltation of the basic formative couplethe tolerant Portuguese man and the pliant Indian
womanwhose very possibility was facilitated, in Freyres view, by a Moorish-Portuguese
flexibility with regard to race. Freyres account of European-indigene romance relays what Doris
Sommer calls a key foundational fiction, the romantic fable, developed in nineteenth-century
Indianist novels like Iracema, of the origins of Brazil as a nation in the fecund heterosexual
encounter of European male and indigenous woman, presented as the primal matrix of Brazils
identity.13 In a kind of genre/gender mistake, Freyre envisions the sexual politics of
enslavement, first of Indians and then of Africans, through the steamy prism of

At other times, however, Freyre emphasizes the violence and even sadism inherent in
such relations, claiming that there is no slavery without sexual depravation. 14 In The
Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil, Freyre emphasizes a sadistic
dimension of the child rearing of colonial patriarchs, a sadism subsequently transmitted to other
institutions like religious and state schools.15 For Freyre, the hierarchical structures of slavery
filter down and spread outward into a general all-pervasive plantation patriarchalism that comes
to characterize

Brazil as a whole. But Freyre traces both characteristicspatriarchal authoritarianism

and sexual-racial flexibilityto a Moorish lineage. Freyres positive association of Moorish
Portugal with a suave flexibility is seemingly contradicted by the fact that Moorishness is also
associated with its negative opposite, authoritarianism. While Freyre recuperates the Moorish
cultural contribution in cuisine and architecture, he also associates the Moor with Brazilian
underdevelopment.

Rather than praise or demonize Freyre as the apostle of racial democracy, it is perhaps
more helpful to see him as a figure fascinating precisely in his contradictions.

While the latter may have been more submerged in the historical period in which Freyre
was writing, one can nonetheless analyze the discourses about both the African-indigenous and
the Sephardi-Moorish elements within a broader relationality dating back to the twin 1492s of
the reconquista and the conquista. The Iberian wariness about both an Orient associated with
Africa and the South and an Occident associated with Europe and the North thus persisted in
the Americas.

The negative influence of the Jewish and the Muslim was seen as Orientalizing, that
is, as tainting Christian and European Latin identity and sense of self, whether in Europe itself or
in the neo-Europes of the Americas. The Iberian clash generated decrees (in 1501 and 1530)
against Moors and Jews entering the Americas.

Sephardi Jews have a long history in Brazil, going back to the very beginnings of
Portuguese arrival. In 1502, a consortium of Jewish merchants, headed by the converso Ferno
de Noronhaafter whom an island in the middle of the Atlantic is namedbrought sugar cane
from Madeira and So Tom to the newly discovered land then called Vera Cruz after
obtaining a three-year lease from the Portuguese

Crown for exploration and settlement. For Noronha and his group, Brazil offered both a
business opportunity and a refuge from persecution. Some Jews maintained their Jewish
customs in hiding, while others assimilated into the Catholic mainstream. Jewish convert
investors scouted the coast and shared with the Crown their monopoly contracts to harvest
Brazil-wood. While non- Jews called them (euphemistically) cristos novos (New Christians) or
conversos (converts), or pejoratively marranos (pigs), the Jews called themselves people of the
nation, or anusim or bnei ausim (literally, the raped ones or children of the raped ones).
The Inquisition visited Brazil at the tail end of the sixteenth century, sending many Jews into
hiding. Many Jewish customs, such as respect for the Sabbath, were maintained in the
backlands, including in the Amazon.

Although often relegated to the margins of Latin American history, the Sephardi, in
Freyres remaking of Brazil, is recuperated for the narrative of Brazils national formation. In The
Mansions and the Shanties, Freyre discusses Brazils transition over centuries from a rural,
agricultural sugar-based patriarchal society to an urban industrial society.

Here the notion of powerful Jewish networks links the Sephardi not merely to European
but also to Muslim spaces. In this double-edged discourse, the anti- Semitic image of the Jew is
simultaneously transvalued into a positive element in the formation of Brazil;

The Sephardi for Freyre is thus foundational to Brazils economy, science, and culture,
and even to its sanguine hybridity. Ironically, if the limpieza de sangre aimed to purify Iberian
culture of the bio-religious traces of the Jew, Freyre symbolically injects some of that very same
cleaned-up Jewish blood into the very veins and arteries of Brazilian nationality. Freyre thus
deploys the discourse of blood to reclaim a Sephardi genealogy for Brazil.

FROM MOORISH LONGING TO DE-ORIENTALIZATION

Moorish longing within this transatlantic Andalus came at the same time under the
shadow of the new Brazilian republics desire for scientific modernity associated with the France,
and the United States, of Enlightened republicanism. The peak of Freyres work comes in the
wake of a century of the institutionalization of French models in Brazilian civic life, especially in
the capital of Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, his search for Moorish traces can be seen as an
indirect lament for a past that vanished in the wake of modernization.

Despite the neo-reconquista and de-Orientalizing modernization project in Brazil, and

despite the suppression of an Islam blamed for slave rebellions, Muslim culture never
completely disappeared. In his Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in
the Americas (2005), Michael Gomez, while nodding to Reiss work as foundational, focuses on
the ways in which Muslims continued to practice their religion even after the suppression of
rebellions, often having to go into hiding, not only in Bahia but also in other regions, such as Rio
de Janeiro.

33 As occurred with the conversos and the Moriscos of Iberia, non-Christian religions
came under severe pressure in Brazil. But the association between Islam and slave rebellions
made Muslims highly vulnerable to the policing of cultural practices, leading to reducing the
numbers of its followers. The cultural impact remained, however, even if in diluted or
submerged form. Islam thus persisted within the cultural syncretism with Christianity and the
Afro-Brazilian religions of candombl, even when not recognized as such.

These revisionist projects thus must be understood against the backdrop of the process
by which Brazils Muslims have been written out of the official history of Brazil. While the arrival
in Brazil of Arabs largely from the Ottoman empire (hence the misnomer turcos) and especially
from Greater Syria at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century has been
acknowledged and even celebrated as part of the national mix, the West African Muslims have
been relegated to the margins of the national story.

This forgotten dimension of Brazilian syncretism underlies a specific anxiety about black
Islam, which could simultaneously coexist, in another turn of the cultural screw, with a penchant
for Sephardi-Moorish Iberian longing. Here we have tried to show that the contemporary
Brazilian imaginary of the Orient can be productively viewed against the backdrop of what we
have called a Moorish-Sephardi unconscious. We have tried to highlight not only the positive
transatlantic historical, discursive, and cultural links between the Orient and the Occident,
but also the anxieties that such links provoked. This transatlantic Muslim space must be viewed
as always already Jewish as well, within shared cultural geographies that are part and parcel of
the Americas. The transatlantic Sephardi-Moorish space inaugurated with the two 1492s carried
over the ocean hegemonic Iberian discourses about Muslim and Jews. The anxious affections
that the Moor and the Sephardi, as Janus-faced figures, have provoked in the Americas, we have
tried to argue, disturb any facile dichotomies between East and West and North and South.
 Chapter 1: Of the Selection of Images For Conscious Presentation; What Our Body
Means and Does

WE will assume for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter and theories
of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world. Here I am
in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses
are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. All these images act and react upon one
another in all their elementary parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature, and,
as a perfect knowledge of these laws would probably allow us to calculate and to foresee what
will happen in each of these images, the future of the images must be contained in their present
and will add to them nothing new.

Yet there is one of them which is distinct from all the others, in that I do not know it
only from without by

perceptions, but from within by affections: it is my body. I examine the conditions in

which these affections are

produced:

I pass now to the study, in bodies similar to my own, of the structure of that particular
image which I call my body.

I perceive afferent nerves which transmit a disturbance to the nerve centres, then
efferent nerves which start from

the centre, conduct the disturbance to the periphery, and set in motion parts of the
body or the body as a whole.

Let us consider this last point. Here are external images, then my body, and, lastly, the
changes brought about by

my body in the surrounding images. I see plainly how external images influence the
image that I call my body:

they transmit movement to it. And I also see how this body influences external images:
it gives back movement to

them.
 4. Perception and memory

Since its publication in 1896, Matter and Memory has attracted considerable attention
(see, for example, Deleuze 1956). In the Preface that he wrote in 1910, Bergson says that Matter
and Memory is frankly dualistic, since it affirms both the reality of matter and the reality of
spirit (Matter and Memory, p. 9). However, he is quick to warn us that the aim of the book is
really to overcome the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism (ibid.). In the
history of philosophy, these theoretical difficulties have generally arisen from a view of external
perception, which always seems to result in an opposition between representation and matter.
Thus, Bergson's theory of pure perception, laid out in the first chapter of Matter and Memory
aims to show that beyond both realism and idealism our knowledge of things, in its pure
state, takes place within the things it represents.

But, in order to show this, Bergson starts with a hypothesis that all we sense are images.
Now we can see the basis of Bergson's use of images in his method of intuition. He is re-stating
the problem of perception in terms of images because it seems to be an intermediate position
between realism and idealism (Matter and Memory, p. 26). Bergson is employing the concept
of image to dispel the false belief central to realism and materialism that matter is a thing
that possesses a hidden power able to produce representations in us. There is no hidden power
in matter; matter is only images. Bergson, however, not only criticizes materialism (its theory of
hidden powers), but also idealism insofar as idealism attempts to reduce matter to the
representation we have of it. For Bergson, image differs from representation, but it does not
differ in nature from representation since Bergson's criticism of materialism consists in showing
that matter does not differ in nature from representation. For Bergson, the image is less than a
thing but more than a representation. The more and the less indicates that representation
differs from the image by degree. It also indicates that perception is continuous with images of
matter. Through the hypothesis of the image, Bergson is re-attaching perception to the real.

In perception Bergson demonstrates this point through his theory of pure perception
the image of a material thing becomes a representation. A representation is always in the
image virtually. We shall return to this concept of virtuality below. In any case, in perception,
there is a transition from the image as being in itself to its being for me. But, perception adds
nothing new to the image; in fact, it subtracts from it. Representation is a diminution of the
image; the transition from image to pure perception is discernment in the etymological sense
of the word, a slicing up or a selection (Matter and Memory, p. 38). According to Bergson,
selection occurs because of necessities or utility based in our bodies. In other words, conscious
representation results from the suppression of what has no interest for bodily functions and the
conservation only of what does interest bodily functions. The conscious perception of a living
being therefore exhibits a necessary poverty ( Matter and Memory, p. 38).
 If we can circle back for a moment, although Bergson shows that we perceive things in
the things, the necessary poverty of perception means that it cannot define intuition. Turning
back from the habitual use of intelligence for needs, intuition, as we can see now, places us
above or below representations. Intuition is fundamentally un-representative. In this regard, the
following passage from the third chapter of Matter and Memory becomes very important:

If you abolish my consciousness matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all
linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every
direction like shivers. In short, try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily
experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these qualities into vibrations, which are
moving in place; finally, attach yourself to these movements, by freeing yourself from the
divisible space that underlies them in order to consider only their mobility this undivided act
that your consciousness grasps in the movement that you yourself execute. You will obtain a
vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what
the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception. Reestablish now my
consciousness, and with it, the requirements of life: farther and farther, and by crossing over
each time enormous periods of the internal history of things, quasi-instantaneous views are
going to be taken, views this time pictorial, of which the most vivid colors condense an infinity
of repetitions and elementary changes. In just the same way the thousands of successive
positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives,
which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs (Matter
and Memory, pp.208209).

Like the descriptions of intuition, this passage describes how we can resolve the images
of matter into mobile vibrations. In this way, we overcome the inadequacy of all images of
duration. We would have to call the experience described here not a perception of matter, but
a memory of matter because of its richness. As we have already suggested, Bergsonian intuition
is memory. So, we turn now to memory.

As we saw in the discussion of method above, Bergson always makes a differentiation

within a mixture. Therefore, he sees that our word memory mixes together two different kinds
of memories. On the one hand, there is habit-memory, which consists in obtaining certain
automatic behavior by means of repetition; in other words, it coincides with the acquisition of
sensori-motor mechanisms. On the other hand, there is true or pure memory; it is the survival
of personal memories, a survival that, for Bergson, is unconscious. In other words, we have
habit-memory actually aligned with bodily perception. Pure memory is something else, and here
we encounter Bergson's famous (or infamous) image of the memory cone.

The image of the inverted cone occurs twice in the third chapter of Matter and Memory
(pp. 152 and 162). The image of the cone is constructed with a plane and an inverted cone whose
summit is inserted into the plane. The plane, plane P, as Bergson calls it, is the plane of my
actual representation of the universe. The cone SAB, of course, is supposed to symbolize
memory, specifically, the true memory or regressive memory. At the cone's base, AB, we have
unconscious memories, the oldest surviving memories, which come forward spontaneously, for
example, in dreams. As we descend, we have an indefinite number of different regions of the
past ordered by their distance or nearness to the present. The second cone image represents
these different regions with horizontal lines trisecting the cone. At the summit of the cone, S,
we have the image of my body which is concentrated into a point, into the present perception.
The summit is inserted into the plane and thus the image of my body participates in the plane
of my actual representation of the universe.

The inverted cone image is no exception to Bergson's belief that all images are
inadequate to duration. The inverted cone is really supposed to symbolize a dynamic process,
mobility. Memories are descending down the cone from the past to the present perception and
action. The idea that memories are descending means that true memory in Bergson is
progressive. This progressive movement of memory as a whole takes place, according to
Bergson, between the extremes of the base of pure memory, which is immobile and which
Bergson calls contemplation (Matter and Memory, p. 163), and the plane where action takes
place. Whenever Bergson in any of his works mentions contemplation, he is thinking of Plotinus,
on whom he lectured many times. But, in contrast to Plotinus, for Bergson, thinking is not mere
contemplation; it is the entire or integral movement of memory between contemplation and
action. Thinking, for Bergson, occurs when pure memory moves forward into singular images.
This forward movement occurs by means of two movements which the inverted cone
symbolizes. On the one hand, the cone is supposed to rotate. Bergson compares the experience
of true memory to a telescope, which allows us to understand the rotating movement. What we
are supposed to visualize with the cone is a telescope that we are pointing up at the night sky.
Thus, when I am trying to remember something, I at first see nothing all. What will help us
understand this image is the idea of my character. When I try to remember how my character
came about, at first, I might not remember anything; no image might at first come to mind. Pure
memory for Bergson precedes images; it is unconscious. But, I try to focus, as if I were rotating
the rings that control the lenses in the telescope; then some singular images come into view.
Rotation is really the key to Bergson's concept of virtuality. Always, we start with something like
the Milky Way, a cloud of interpenetration; but then the cloud starts to condense into singular
drops, into singular stars. This movement from interpenetration to fragmentation, from unity to
multiplicity, (and even from multiplicity to juxtaposition) is always potential or virtual. But the
reverse process is also virtual. Therefore the cone has a second movement, contraction
(Matter and Memory, p. 168). If we remain with the telescope image, we can see that the images
of the constellation must be narrowed, brought down the tube so that they will fit into my eye.
Here we have a movement from singular images to generalities, on which action can be based.
The movement of memory always results in action. But also, for Bergson, this twofold
movement of rotation and contraction can be repeated in language. Even though Bergson never
devotes much reflection to language we shall return to this point below he is well aware that
literary creation resembles natural creation. Here we should consult his early essay on laughter.
But, with this creative movement, which is memory, we can turn to creative evolution.