Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews

Achim Rohde

Asians in Europe

Reading German-Jewish History through a Postcolonial Lens

German Orientalism

German history has long been neglected by historians of Western colonialism and practitioners of postcolonial studies. This lack of attention to the German context is evident already in what could be termed the founding thesis of postcolonial studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978): As Germany played only a marginal role among the colonial powers, the German view of the orient both in the academy and the wider social context, according to Said, was hardly affected by this discourse.⁶¹ Some of Said’s critics point to the prestigious German orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an example for a value-neutral, ...