Bulgaria's Zionism, The Colonization of Palestine and The Question of Balkan Postcoloniality

Abstract

The foreclosure of the Balkans’ postcoloniality is a fragment of a much larger strategic manoeuvring inside a European historiography ruled by the national paradigm aimed at disowning colonial history. Because the European Union is a new political entity without a previous history, and because it has formally denounced colonialism and anti-Semitism, there is a creeping assumption that it somehow deserves a clean slate and the right to shift the ownership of its colonial histories to its former colonial subjects. As an effort to ‘de-provincialize’ Europe from the position of the Balkans’ marginal history, Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, the leading scholar in the critical studies of Balkanism, insists on the incommensurability between Orientalism and Balkanism on the grounds that the Balkans, unlike the Orient, ‘lacks colonial predicament’. The history of Bulgarian Zionist settlers in Palestine challenges Todorova's claim. Bulgarian Zionists were agents of a double colonization, in Bulgaria as subjects of internal colonization, and in Palestine as colonizers.