The Orient in Europe: Zionism and revolution in European-Jewish literature

This dissertation, "The Orient in Europe: Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature," responds to Edward Said's concept of a monolithic Christian Orientalism that justified European economic and political control of the Middle East. The project considers the role of European Jews in this discourse, since they have been participants in European culture, but have also been associated with negative images of the Oriental, and furthermore, have had their own political affiliation with the Middle East in the twentieth century through the Zionist movement. While previous criticism has suggested that Jewish authors were only complicit with Orientalism, my work recognizes a simultaneous subversive tendency in German- and French-Jewish literature of the twentieth century that resists stereotyping and promotes solidarity with other oppressed groups. Drawing on Lisa Lowe and Nina Berman's conceptions, I refer to this trend in European-Jewish writing as "Jewish orientalisms," revising Said's "Orientalism," in order to acknowledge not only the internally complex and contradictory nature of this writing, but also its diversity due to national, ethnic, gender, and sexual difference.;The present study examines the development of this discourse across the twentieth century. The first half of the dissertation addresses the German-Jewish discourse on Palestine and Zionism prior to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Beginning with the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau and Martin Buber, I then explore the critique of Zionism apparent in the work of Arnold Zweig and Else Lasker-Schuler prior to 1933, which challenged imperialism in favor of cultural and political coalition between Jews and Arabs. The second half of the dissertation provides a comparative analysis of French- and German-Jewish orientalisms after World War II. Anna Seghers (Germany) and Andre Schwarz-Bart (France) connect the European-Jewish experience with that of the African slaves of the Caribbean, while Chochana Boukhobza (France) and Jeannette Lander (Germany) question Israel as the solution to the Jewish diaspora and embrace a transnational Jewish identity.