Investigating Orientalist Claims of Antisemitism in the Arab World and Morocco in the late 19th Century: Bernard Lewis’s Accounts of Jewish Experience as Study Case

Abstract

Western attitudes to Jews changed drastically after World War Two. Historians of the experience of Jewish life everywhere in the world started rewriting this history from a more sympathetic angle. Perhaps more than any other religious group, the experience of Jews has had a remarkable presence in print, film, media and all forms of narratives transmission. One of the most prominent historians of Jews’ experience in the Arab world and in Morocco is the British Orientalist Bernard Lewis. He belongs to, a by now, dubious discipline that became notorious for its ideological biases and discursive slippages that demonize its subjects of study and predispose public opinion in the West to tolerate aggression against the Arabs. Whence our interest in examining Lewis’s narratives of Jewish experience at a turning point in the history of both Arabs and Jews: the late 19^th century. Given modern Westerners sympathy with Israel and their rewriting of the history of the Jews, and given Orientalist discourse’ ideological biases, it is incumbent on us to examine to what extent were Lewis’s accounts fair in their narrative.