New Books in Critical Theory Mostafa Hussein, "Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine" (Princeton UP, 2025)
May 1, 2026
Mostafa Hussein, assistant professor of Jewish-Muslim studies at the University of Michigan and author of Hebrew Orientalism. He explains how Hebrew thinkers adopted and adapted Arabo-Islamic culture to shape Zionist aims. Short scenes cover language revival, landscape and place-naming, mixed identities of native and immigrant Jews, and the tangled politics of admiration, hierarchy, and coexistence in late Ottoman and British Palestine.
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Hebrew Orientalism Is An Ambivalent Local Project
- Hebrew Orientalism reframes Orientalism inside Palestine where Jewish thinkers both admired and instrumentalized Arabo-Islamic culture for nationalist ends.
- Mostafa Hussein shows settlers used Arabic language, customs, and ethnography to indigenize Jewish claims while still asserting hierarchical dominance.
Study Practices Not Just Ideology
- A 'third way' methodology focuses on practices of Jewish writers living in Palestine rather than grand ideological summaries or pure scientific claims.
- Hussein analyzes routines, fieldwork, and naming practices by semi-academic figures to reveal contradictions between knowledge and settler aims.
Mixed Background Palestinian Jews Shaped The Project
- Many protagonists were mixed-background Palestinian Jews like David Yallem and Abraham Shalom Yehuda with deep local ties predating mass Zionist immigration.
- Hussein recounts their bilingual, bicultural lives and how they saw Arabic sources as part of Jewish Eastern heritage.
