Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew

Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of understanding modern Orientalism. Tracing a path of modern Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the late eighteenth to the mid–twentieth centuries Librett argues that Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled.Librett suggests further that the Western assertion of “material” power in terms of which Orientalism is often read is overdetermined by a “spiritual” weakness: an anxiety about the absence of absolute foundations and values that coincides with Western modernity itself. The modern West he shows posits an Oriental origin as a fetish to fill the absent place of lacking foundations. This fetish is appropriated as Western through a quasi-secularized application of Christian typology. Further the Western appropriation of the “good” Orient always leaves behind the remainder of the “bad” inassimilable Orient.The book traces variations on this theme through historicist and idealist texts of the nineteenth century and then shows how high modernists like Buber Kafka Mann and Freud place this historicist narrative in question. The book concludes with the outlines of a cultural historiography that would distance itself from the metaphysics of historicism confronting instead its underlying anxieties.