Amit Levy. A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel. Translated by Ron Mordechai Makleff. Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2024. 380 PP. Cloth $120.00. ISBN: 9781684582020.
North American scholars of Middle Eastern studies possess a more or less standard account of the rise of their field. Quintessentially a Cold War story, its genesis is tied to the expansion of American global power after 1945; the institutional ambitions of universities; the federal government and various foundations; and the gradual consolidation of “area studies” as both an intellectual and strategic enterprise. It is hard not to see it as a story of succession: the baton passing across the Atlantic from Britain to the United States, the inheritance and repurposing of the epistemic apparatus of an earlier imperial power. The residues are clear. After all, even the very name of the field “the Middle East” bears the imprint of that earlier British imperial geography and imagination, situating it somewhere between a “Near East” and a “Far East.”
When it comes to the study of “the Orient” in Israel, however, the picture is considerably more elusive, both because of the field’s current configuration and because of its distinct origin story. On the one hand, the study of the Middle East in Israeli universities post-1948 cannot be disentangled from state sponsorship and the violent history of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict. Sociologists of knowledge have long examined the connections between academic research and the Israeli security apparatus, often accusing Israeli Orientalists of blurring the line between knowing one’s neighbor and knowing one’s enemy. These ties lend themselves almost naturally to a compelling Foucauldian reading of the interdependence of knowledge and power or, alternatively, to a dialectical story of attraction to the “enchanted East” soon followed by revulsion and disenchantment. On the other hand, the past further complicates that story. The origins of such studies not only precede the rise of postwar “area studies” but are also rooted in a different epistemological template tied to the institutional history of the Hebrew University, which opened its doors to students and recruited new faculty in the mid-1920s, while Palestine was a British Mandate territory. Moreover, its early practitioners drew less on the romantic and literary imaginaries cultivated in French and British traditions—so central to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)—and less on the interdisciplinary social-scientific frameworks that would later define the American model. Instead, the field was shaped above all by the philological and historicist traditions of German and German-Jewish scholarship.
It is precisely this lacuna that Amit Levy’s A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel sets out to fill. In a meticulous study grounded in extensive archival research conducted in Jerusalem, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Budapest, Levy reconstructs how a modern academic field took shape at the intersection of migration, institutional formation, and political transformation. Levy chronicles the story of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem, formally inaugurated in April 1926, and interprets it as a clear case of knowledge transfer, shared professional values, and habitus. At the center of his account stands a small but remarkably cohesive circle of scholars headed by Josef Horovitz, the institute’s founding director, and Gotthold Weil, who succeeded him and carried forward its philological orientation. Both directors were German-born and trained in Berlin. Other scholars who worked under their supervision included David Hartwig (Zvi) Baneth, educated in Central Europe and steeped in the bibliographic and textual traditions of German Orientalism; Yosef Yoel Rivlin, who became a central figure in the study and translation of Arabic literature; Martin Plessner, trained in Berlin and representative of the rigorous linguistic and grammatical tradition; and Leo Aryeh Mayer, born in Eastern Europe and educated in Germany, who extended the field into Islamic art and material culture. The Jerusalem-born Rivlin (the father of Israel’s future president, Reuven Rivlin) was an outlier within the group in some respects, though academically shaped within the same Germanic scholarly orbit.
Levy shows how, together, these scholars built the discipline on the foundations of German Orientalist scholarship, with its emphasis on philology, textual mastery, and historical rigor. Their work was initially oriented toward classical Arabic, Islamic, and premodern texts, guided by a self-consciously “scientific” ethos that sought to preserve a distinction between scholarship and politics. Yet they operated within an environment that rendered such distinctions difficult to sustain: a Jewish Zionist university in an Arab-majority society under British rule, where intellectual ambitions intersected with broader cultural and political projects, and where the very proximity of the object of study subtly but steadily reshaped the field that they had set out to reproduce.
Levy reveals the Institute’s limits and lack of inclusivity by recounting failed attempts to recruit native-speaking Arab and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jewish scholars. The most famous case, arguably, is that of Abraham Shalom Yahuda, a Jerusalem-born scholar of Iraqi-Jewish background who had studied and taught in Berlin and later Madrid, and who was widely regarded as one of the leading Semiticists of his generation. Yahuda’s refusal to conform to the prevailing academic style of the German-trained faculty made his appointment contentious and ultimately unsuccessful. The failed candidacy exposed deep tensions that spilled beyond the institute, prompting many familiar with Yahuda’s impeccable scholarly credentials and native command of Arabic to raise an eyebrow. This marginalization, Levy shows, was not an isolated episode. Similar difficulties accompanied attempts to recruit Arab scholars—figures such as Taha Hussein or Muhammad Kurd Ali were discussed but never integrated into the institutional framework—thereby revealing the structural limits of a project that rhetorically aspired to intellectual exchange yet remained constrained by political, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
Resisting the temptation to stop the story in 1948, with Israel’s independence, Levy crosses this Rubicon and traces the Institute’s transformation through the early 1960s. A new generation of scholars —among them Shlomo Dov Goitein, Uriel Heyd, and their students—expanded the field beyond its philological core, offering new emphases on the modern Middle East, Jewish societies in Islamic lands, and other forms of knowledge that were more immediately relevant to the emerging Israeli state. What changed in this second generation was not only the cast of scholars but the very setting in which they operated, as the Hebrew University transformed into a state university, and the growing involvement of institutions beyond the academy, including the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, began to shape the horizons and expectations of the field itself. A revealing figure in this transition is Uriel Heyd: Born Hans Heydt in Cologne and emigrating to Palestine in 1934, Heyd combined academic and diplomatic careers, serving as First Secretary at the Israeli Embassy in Washington in 1950. Far from being purely philological, his work on the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish nationalism spoke directly to the concerns of Israeli foreign policymakers at the time. The book ends in 1963, after the passing of the founding generation and a few years after S.D. Goitein left Israel for the United States, as the Institute of Oriental Studies was renamed and transformed into the Institute of Asian and African Studies.
One of the book’s most important contributions is to challenge the notion that Israeli Middle Eastern studies can be neatly categorized either as a continuation of European Orientalism or as a product of local political imperatives. Levy demonstrates that it was both—and neither. A New Orient provides a portrait of a field shaped by inherited methods and categories, yet one that was reconfigured in response to new conditions. Scholars adapted their approaches to address the needs of a society that was at once deeply engaged with, and politically opposed to, many of the communities it studied. Levy’s study thus continues, in important respects, along the path opened by Suzanne L. Marchand in her work on German cultural engagement with “the Orient.” If German Orientalism was shaped less by direct colonial administration than by theological concerns and classicist education, it nonetheless remained embedded in broader European cultural hierarchies and imperial imaginaries, even in the absence of a formal empire. The distinctive case examined by Levy adds another layer of nuance and complexity to this picture. As he observes, the relocation of a German-shaped discipline to Jerusalem did not make it local, but it did endow it with new local contexts within which it could develop.
The field of Israeli Middle Eastern studies continued to draw sustenance from its multiple German roots long after the rupture with Germany itself. The institute thus became a site in which the transplanted ethos of German scholarship could assert itself with particular authority—but also one in which that authority circumscribed what counted as legitimate knowledge, leaving alternative intellectual traditions, whether Arab or non-European Jewish, at the margins.
Alexa Alice Joubin, English Department, CCAS, Classroom B-Roll
Arie M. Dubnov is an associate professor of history and International Affairs at the George Washington University, where he holds the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies and has served as the director of the Middle East Studies program. A former G. L. Mosse fellow, his publications include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), the Hebrew textbook Zionism: A New History (2026, co-authored with Guy Miron and others), and three edited volumes, Zionism – A View from the Outside (2010 [in Hebrew]), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory, and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-century Territorial Separatism (2019, co-edited with Laura Robson), tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context and Amos Oz’s Two Pens: Between Literature and Politics (Routledge, 2023), dedicated to the late Israeli novelist and public intellectual. His forthcoming book, Zionism before Israel, will be published with Harvard University Press in 2027.