ABSTRACT
Between the Renaissance and the middle of the twentieth century, the Israelites of the Bible came to be imagined in the West as a people similar to the modern inhabitants of Muslim West Asia and North Africa. A near-equation of ancient Jew and contemporary Muslim followed from the typical orientalist assumption that the “Orient” 1 was ahistorical and monolithic. The current peoples of the Orient, it was thought, lived in the same kind of civilization as their “ancestors.” And, as one oriental was like another, it mattered little if these ancestors had been Jews, Turks, or Arabs. The record of this orientalization of the Bible is pervasive and extensive. I will have space to illustrate it with only a few almost randomly chosen examples. My focus is on the long nineteenth century. My examples are from two areas that have still not quite received all the attention they deserve in the literature on orientalism: Christian art, and biblical scholarship.
