New Books in Middle Eastern Studies 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, explores Hebrew Orientalism and Jewish engagement with Arabo-Islamic culture in late Ottoman and British Palestine. He discusses bilingual intellectuals, Arabic’s role in reviving Hebrew, contested place-names and landscape claims, shifting politics under British rule, and the ambivalent blend of admiration and hierarchy in cultural exchange.
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Hebrew Orientalism As Ambivalent Local Project
- Hebrew Orientalism is an ambivalent, locally directed form of Orientalism distinct from Said's Western model.
- Jewish thinkers in Palestine both admired and sought to 'indigenize' via Arab-Islamic culture while pursuing nationalist aims, producing contradictory practices.
Third Way Methodology Focuses On Practices
- A third-way methodology focuses on practices not only ideology, examining what Hebrew Orientalists did on the ground in Palestine.
- Hussein studies routines, fieldwork, naming, translation and language committees to reveal nuanced, often contradictory motives behind knowledge production.
Mixed Backgrounds Of Key Hebrew Orientalists
- Many Hebrew Orientalists were of mixed backgrounds and often native to Palestine, like David Yellen and Abraham Shalom Yehuda.
- These figures combined local familiarity (Iraqi, Palestinian roots) with European education to argue Arabs were as ancient as Hebrews.
