From pan-Asianism to safari-Zionism: gendered Orientalism in Jewish-Austrian literature

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay reviews representations of Palestine and its Arab inhabitants through studying a set of Jewish-Austrian texts. It aims to investigate how the question of Palestine and the issue of the Palestinian “presence” were imagined by Jewish-Austrian authors beyond the reductive binary of Zionism and anti-Zionism. I will discuss Theodor Herzl’s texts, Der Judenstaat (1896), Altneuland (1902), and Herzl Relo@ded: Kein Märchen (Herzl Relo@ded: It’s no fairy tale, 2016) by Doron Rabinovici and Natan Sznaider. I will compare Zionist imaginaries among these texts and contrast them to the writings of Moshe Yàakov Ben-Gavriêl (1891–1965) who advocated for a pan-Asianist union between orientals: a category that included both Jews and Arabs for him.My essay seeks to answer three main questions: first, can the tradition of thinking described by Edward Said as “Orientalism” be found in my corpus of analysis? Second, what forms of resistance and deconstruction of orientalist tropes can be found? Last, how would an analysis of Jewish-Austrian literatures and their gendered representations on Palestine and Palestinians complicate the current historiography of Zionism? I will answer these questions by offering both a literary analysis of the texts above alongside an appraisal of recent historiography on Zionism.