Abstract This article tracks the history of Israel Studies's emergence in the United States alongside developments in Palestine and Israel. Drawing on reviews of the literature, archival research, and interviews, it analyzes three key moments in the evolution of the field. First, it traces the origin of this project with the crisis in American Zionism precipitated by the 1967 war, and the rise of organizations for the production and distribution of knowledge about the Middle East. Second, it considers the period from the mid-1980s through the “Oslo years,” when the Association for Israel Studies was founded in the United States, and US and Israeli academies became increasingly intertwined. Third, it follows the rapid establishment of a series of centers and programs funded by private philanthropy in the wake of the second intifada, when the project consolidated around a pedagogical endeavor that came to be known as “Israel education.” The article conceptualizes the role of Israel Studies in these three periods as pacification, normalization, and centralization, each corresponding to the political context and the needs of the Israeli state.
Abstract This introduction to the special section on “Concepts of Difference: Historicizing Religion and Race in the Modern Middle East” argues for history as a practice of distinction. Ongoing critical historical work within Middle East studies and without has argued not merely that the category of religion is particular to a modern European genealogy but, further, that it is historically coextensive with race. Here, there is tension that needs resolving: Should religion and race be conceived as two sides of the same coin, as this critical work sometimes suggests—two iterations of the same invidious Western mode of dividing and categorizing the world that has tended to position Europe/Christianity/whiteness at the apex of a civilizational hierarchy of difference? Or is the concept of religion problematic insofar as it racializes? At stake here is not just the question of a minimal difference between religion and race as concepts and practices that divide human reality, but also the place of distinction, judgment, and history in scholarship.
Abstract The Ladino press provides a case study for thinking through race as archive and analytic in the Ottoman Empire. Doubly racialized both as Jews and as “Orientals,” reformist Sephardic reformers in the second half of the nineteenth century perceived themselves as trailing behind Europe, Ashkenazi Jews, and other Ottoman minorities. Journalists like David Fresco, who to sought to transform their communities to be fit for the modern world, provided racial depictions of Indigenous groups worldwide against whom readers could judge themselves to be further along the path of progress. While inscribing racial difference, through his commitment to monogenesis he defended racial progress and the ability of all races to progress as a single species. This tension reflects how reformers translated global racial ideas to fit their local circumstances as they sought to negotiate their own position in a violently uneven imperial world order. Rather than projecting presentist or Atlanticist concerns about race onto the Ottoman Empire, this reveals how historical actors translated racial ideas across the global, imperial, and communal levels. This was a process that neither antisemitism nor Orientalism—two dominant conceptual frames for thinking about difference-making in the region—can fully capture.
Abstract Since 2002, there has been intense interest in Ali Fuad Başgil among intellectuals and politicians connected to Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan's increasingly autocratic Justice and Development Party. A regime-loyal professor of constitutional law during the authoritarian one-party period (1923–45), Başgil reinvented himself as a liberal conservative after 1950. Contemporary admirers downplay Başgil's early work, paradoxically citing his postwar liberalism in support of Erdoğan's authoritarianism. This article reassesses Başgil's oeuvre, arguing that his current reception is facilitated by, yet requires ignoring, continuities in his thought. Drawing on Émile Durkheim and Léon Duguit, Başgil argued throughout his career that state law derives its legitimacy from preexisting societal norms, which it is the task of the legal scholar to understand, not to determine. This role understanding placed him at odds with legal scholars who grounded authority in legal-technical expertise, construing themselves as the final arbiters of justice. Başgil's philosophy allowed him to change his substantive ideas from fascist solidarism in the interwar years to liberal conservativism after the war without abandoning his antitechnocratic approach, making him the ideal role model for a regime that builds its identity on populist resentment against the same authoritarian state apparatus it now wields against opponents.
Abstract The Mahdist uprising in late Ottoman Sudan has generally been described in either economic or religious terms—as either an economic backlash against harsh taxation and Sudan's incorporation into the global capitalist system, or as an eruption of religious fanaticism directed against British colonizers. This article argues that both explanations err in uncritically adopting a modern concept of “religion” as distinct from the realm of “economy.” Reading several little-used archival documents from before and during the Mahdist uprising, the article shows how the uprising was a critique of precisely a modernist reordering of the world in terms of economy and religion, a cleavage closely related to the rise of new categories of difference like “Sudanese,” “Arab,” “African,” and so on. Yet the operative categories for the Mahdists were in fact mu'minūn versus kuffār—the former including West Africans and the latter primarily aimed at “the Turks,” the purported caliphs of the Muslim world—confounding the colonial concepts of religion, economy, and race that continue to structure scholarship on Sudan, the Middle East, and the non-West more broadly.
