“The Jews cannot anywhere completely adopt the language of the country they inhabit. One immediately recognises the German Jew by his bizarre pronunciation; the same applies to the Jews of North Africa. We can distinguish the Jew among a hundred Arabs in his accent, even though he is not so different in his appearance and clothing. Nothing is more ridiculous than hearing a Jew speak Arabic and the language of the Barbary States.”1

The quote above is taken from Edouard Drumont’s La France Juive (1886), himself referencing a work on Morocco written by an obscure Orientalist scholar known as “Mr. Rohep”. The notorious French polemicist’s two-volume, 1200-page study is a masterpiece of antisemitic vitriol. The Jew is depicted as ostensibly the most patriotic among the parasites, the most charismatic among the conspirators, and the most talented among the treacherous. Everywhere the Jew is an intruder, and everywhere he sows the seeds of chaos without a care in the world. In less than a year, La France Juive had sold 100,000 copies.2 It would soon become the most widely-read book in France, with its readership ranging from the aristocrats of the Rue Royale to the railroad workers of Montparnasse. 

The La France Juive episode, and the flurry of Dreyfus-era Jew-hatred which it enabled, illustrate a truism almost as old as truth itself. Antisemitism is, and has always been, characterised by a single overarching trait: obsession. What other people could be endlessly subjected to infinite magnitudes of pure malice, and their abuse eagerly propagated by those who should realistically have far more important errands to run? Did the aristocrat of the Rue Royale not have matters of political governance to resolve? Did the railroad worker in Montparnasse not have an engine failure to fix? Committing any amount of mental and physical resources to the consumption and internalisation of mythological conspiracy theories should contravene all reason. Yet, as defamation lawyer Anthony Julius has observed, “the anti-Semite will always insist that his enmity is rational.”3

Similarly, did Rohep not have more significant research to conduct than locating a single Jew within a crowd of non-Jewish Moroccans? Morocco has for long been a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious landscape. Rohep could have documented the rich culture of the indigenous Amazigh (Berber) people and their language, Tamazight; alternatively, he could have explored the historical impact of the Muslim conquests and Arab imperialism on North African society. 

Yet, he insists upon an exercise in mockery which targets the Jew for the perceived intransigence of his foreign-accented speech. Whether he lives atop the mountains of Bavaria or along the shores of Essaouira, the Jew’s Other-ness invariably remains an essential component of his existence. It did not matter to Drumont and his readers that Rohep, not being a native speaker of Arabic or Tamazight, would be completely unqualified to make any such observation. After all, the realms of objectivity and antisemitism rarely overlap. 

The phenomenon parallels Orientalist discourse as framed by prominent academic Edward Said (1935-2003). Said was born in British Mandatory Palestine, raised in Egypt, furthered his education in the United States, and became a foremost advocate for the Palestinian cause in academia. In 1978, Said published his seminal work, Orientalism. His study sought to demonstrate how Western scholars manufactured an imaginary “Orient” in order to justify their “conceptions and treatments of the [non-Western] Other”, leveraging this force of “knowledge” to rationalise colonial projects aimed at the mass subjugation of indigenous people.4 Xenophobia thereby constitutes the very foundation of Orientalist discourse, as the observer seeks to master the Orient and its Orientals through the fanatical exploration and denigration of other cultures. 

Said’s ideas have faced considerable criticism, not least because his analysis operates in the very limited scope of the Middle East, dismisses the overwhelming influence of German Orientalism, and totally ignores the visual component in favour of the textual. While he does not consider how this dynamic operates in contemporary antisemitism, Said acknowledges that Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have been Orientalised. He observes that for virtually all nineteenth-century Orientalists, an Oriental is marked by the following criteria: “[He] lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism.”5 

To the antisemite, the Jew is the ultimate Oriental. Despite enduring millennia of suffering in diasporic conditions, the Jew refuses to surrender his Oriental mindset and way of life; his predisposition to despotism expresses itself in his desire to control the global order, its finances, its perceptions, and even the weather; the Jew remains an ever-mysterious and perhaps demonic figure. In effect, the Jew is so dangerous precisely because he is the only Oriental who simultaneously possesses a near-infinite capacity for maintaining his Oriental identity, and an unmatched propensity for deception. 

Nowhere is this more obvious than in visual depictions of Jews, especially when we compare the embellished portrayals of MENA Jewry with the grotesque caricatures of their brethren in Europe. In February 1832, during his visit to Morocco alongside a swarm of French diplomats, the legendary Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix attended a Jewish wedding. The scene of Judeo-Moorish revelry, with its oud and riq players, its female dancer in a traditional Sephardic costume, and its deeply communal setting, is designed to evoke a strong sense of exoticism to a European audience. Jews appear most sympathetic in their natural Oriental setting, and it is only when they are exported elsewhere that their destructive qualities arise.

Figure 1: Eugène Delacroix, Noce Juive au Maroc, 1839, oil on canvas, 1.05m x 1.405m, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

At a more intimate level, the trope of La Belle Juive (Fr. “The Beautiful Jewess”) pedestals young Jewish women as the peak of Oriental eroticism. This is most famously communicated in Charles Landelle’s rendition of a Jewish girl from Tangier. Her ivory skin, her thick, dark flowing hair and eyebrows, the dark-greenish hue of her eyes, her pensive expression, the slight curve to her nose, her tantalisingly low-cut and colourful dress – Landelle exaggerates all of these features in order to entice the (specifically) male observer.

Figure 2: Charles Zacharie Landelle, Juive de Tanger, 1874, oil on canvas, 61.5cm x 50.5cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims.

This fetishisation of Jews in Orientalist artwork is sharply contrasted by their demonisation in antisemitic cartoons which steadily gained popularity in fin de siècle Europe and came to dominate the Nazi era. Consider an 1899 cartoon by Adolf Munzer entitled Gastfreundschaft (De. “Hospitality”), depicting a gathering of Jewish women. The luscious dark hair, desirable complexion, charismatic radiance and vibrancy of the belle Juive are noticeably absent. They are replaced by an assembly of hideous, overweight, vulgar, elderly, hook-nosed, dully-clothed, sedentary creatures whose sole motivation is gluttony.

Figure 3: Adolf Munzer, Gastfreundschaft, 1899, ink on paper, 8.75in x 7in, USHMM, Washington D.C.

The scene recalls an 1867 work on Jewish beauty by the famed Goncourt brothers, in which the erotic mystique of the Jewess is betrayed by her natural journey towards marriage, motherhood, and old age. In stubbornly refusing to remain an unchanging object of the male gaze, the Jewess returns to the “original rapacity of her race.”6 Thus, the most xenophilic Orientalist theme is characterised by the most antisemitic psychosocial undercurrents.

Besides the wholesale vilification of Jewish women, the trope would have far more sinister implications for Jews in Nazi-controlled lands. Popular imagination of Jews as the ultimate Oriental outsiders had provoked a form of mass stereotyping which would later inform Nazi policies of discrimination, ethnic cleansing, and extermination. Dark curly hair, deep-set eyes, and olive skin – features so accentuated in the belle Juive – came to be directly contrasted with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned paradigm of the Aryan race. 

A multitude of interviews and autobiographies from Holocaust survivors cite their light-haired, light-eyed physical appearance as a leading reason for their survival. Nazi officers were far more likely to identify and condemn Jews to the hellscape of the death camps if they “looked Jewish.”7 That is, if they appeared to match deeply-ingrained stereotypes fashioned by centuries of literary libel, brought to life by nineteenth-century artists, and disseminated through the meteoric rise of mass media. 

Orientalist tropes evidently lent considerable legitimacy to European racial science and were weaponised by the Nazis in their quest to annihilate the Jewish people. In Orientalising Jews from the MENA, Delacroix and his contemporaries had inadvertently signed a genocidal death warrant.  

The world of today remains obsessed with Jews. We find our identity and culture disparaged, defamed, and denied. Our history is weaponised for political ends, our suffering fetishised by those who insist on victimising themselves, and our deaths glorified by those who seek to victimise others. The legacy of discrimination endured by Mizrahi Jews under the fledgling State of Israel is exploited by those who yearn for the destruction of our homeland. Yet, the expulsion of nearly a million Jews from the MENA in the twentieth century is invariably dismissed as entirely of our own making. 

We are Orientalised by right-wing nationalists who implore us to “Go back to Israel”, and Occidentalised by social justice warriors who order us to “Go back to Europe.” We are Arabised by the pan-Arabists who cynically deem us “Arab Jews”, and westernised by Islamists who denounce us as European crusaders. 

Quite frankly, I’m tired of constantly being told what I am and ought to be. Aren’t you?

Aurele Tobelem is an undergraduate History student at King’s College London and the president of the KLC Israel Society. He is of Moroccan-Sephardi origin and has previously contributed to The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Roar News, and Global Arab Network.