A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry)

A history of knowledge transfer of Oriental Studies stretching along an axis from Germany to Palestine/Israel. This study examines the history of Zionist academic Orientalism-referred to throughout as Oriental studies, the term contemporary English speakers would have used-in light of its German-Jewish background, as a history of knowledge transfer stretching along an axis from Germany to Palestine.The transfer, which took place primarily during the 1920s and 1930s, involved questions about the re-establishment, far from Germany, of a field of knowledge with deep German roots.Like other German-Jewish scholars arriving in Palestine at the time, some of the Orientalist agents of transfer did so out of Zionist conviction as olim (immigrants making aliyah, or literally “ascending” to the homeland), while others joined them later as refugees from Nazi Germany; both groups were integrated into the institutional apparatus of the Hebrew University.Unlike other fields of knowledge or profession