Edward Said’s Jews

That Jews are missing from that fullness is significant, for the Jewish echoes in Said’s life were numerous and pronounced: He was rooted in the experience of exile, inspired by Jewish intellectualism, and driven by a central obsession with the Jewish state.

Jews were important at every stage of Edward Said’s life. He was delivered in Jerusalem by the midwife Madame Baer. Growing up in Cairo, one of his closest friends was psychoanalyst Andre Green; he took lessons and shared meals with the exacting Polish pianist Ignaz Tiegerman.

Most of Said’s close friends at Princeton were Jews; there he was inspired by the experimental approach of Milton Babbitt and would study under the composer Erich Itor Kahn, who had fled the Nazis. Monroe Engel and Harry Levin, his dissertation supervisors at Harvard, were essential in shaping his academic perspective. At Columbia, many of those who concerned themselves with his burgeoning Palestinian identity were Jews, including David Lehman, who dedicated a series of poems to him, and theologian Alan Mintz.

His work first appeared in publications led by Jewish writers. Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, offered him a refuge for his perspective. Jean Stein named a room in her apartment, filled with Oriental décor, after him.

But Said’s long engagement with Jews and Jewishness largely amounted to a set of crass positions: incuriosity, relativism, blankness, replacement. Brennan charts many of Said’s seemingly innumerable relationships with individual Jews. But he largely echoes Said’s perspective on the Middle East (the book is dedicated “for the Palestinian people”) and the infecund nature of Said’s encounter with Jewishness.

“I have never known what language I spoke first, Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt,” Said wrote in his childhood memoir Out of Place. His two names remained a mystery even after he inquired into their origins, the discordance of their pairing. He had known his father as Wadie Ibrahim Said; but “Said” was absent when he saw his dad’s name listed on the honor tablets at St. George’s School in Jerusalem. He would later learn that Wadie had adopted the generic Arab name after some years in America. Said never managed to find any of the relatives his mother told him bore the name, and he never learned its source.

As for his conspicuously Occidental first name, his mother told Said he was named after the Prince of Wales—who apparently cut a particularly fine figure in 1935, the year of his birth. Hearing his mother cry “Edwaad” at closing time in the Zamalek Fish Garden in Cairo, Said recalled, he was “undecided whether to answer her back or to remain in hiding for just a while longer, enjoying the pleasure of being called, being wanted, the non-Edward part of myself taking luxurious respite by not answering until the silence of my being became unendurable.”

The Saids were part of a small Anglican minority within the Palestinian Christian minority. Brennan writes that their sect “began during the mandate to face accusations of collusion and collaboration with the British occupying powers and, by extension, with the Zionist movement.” Said’s father’s Standard Stationery Company was the primary supplier office equipment to the British army in Egypt: Christian and well-off with a seemingly direct link to Western power, “the family worked overtime to demonstrate their authenticity as Palestinian Arabs.”

At the prestigious Victoria College in Alexandria, Said registered the twilight of British global power, receiving an elite education that prepared him for membership in a nonexistent elite. He joined a rising tide of adolescent mockery at the pretention, impersonality, and rigid authority of the Englishmen, rumored by the Arab kids to be “depraved pederasts.” Speaking his ancestral tongue—which he had earlier repressed at the Cairo School for American Students—became a “proud insurrectionary gesture,” a “way of answering an academic question and attacking the teacher at the same time.”

Said experienced the pivotal tragedy of his people at a distance. In Cairo, where he later confessed his immediate family was “completely insulated” by wealth and security, he felt the Nakba as a lowering of mood, a souring of faces, a sporadic, incoherent anger expressed by incoming relatives. He would later find ways to shade his own limited encounter with the Nakba into that of his extended family and therefore his people: “I grew up in Palestine. I remember what it was like to leave. One’s whole family left.” Yet what started as an indirect foundation in his consciousness would later become the foundational event of his intellectual credibility.

Said’s recollections of his father focused on his own sense of smallness in comparison to him: Wadie Ibrahim comes across as distant but dominant. Even through depressive moods and nervous breakdown, his physical prowess and decisiveness are underscored. (This portrait “appalled” his sisters, who found him instead a “tender, quiet man who spoiled them with love and kindness.”)

Interwoven into this picture was an early connection to the emerging American empire and to Said’s own place in it: Wadie Ibrahim enlisted in the American Expeditionary Force and fought in France during World War I, after which he set up a paint company in Cleveland. He eventually acquired U.S. citizenship, and was officially called “William.” Said and his sisters were given American passports at birth. If there was an eerie absence of personal texture to the decade Said’s father spent in America, certain generic features of American culture were part of Said’s childhood world: Thanksgiving turkey, apple pie, stock phrases (“big boy”). (His father would later repeat the phrase “my country, right or wrong” when arguing about the Vietnam war with his son.) Retrospectively reexamining his father’s relationship with America, Said eventually focused on the “practice of self-making with a purpose, which he exploited in what he did and what he made others around him, chiefly me, do.”

As for his own relation with America, Said was “a New Yorker before ever moving to America,” spending time in the city in the late ’40s and early ’50s “sitting in its movie houses or wandering through its department stores and restaurants.” Out of direct touch with hinterland Americana, he wrote that his experience was “barren of soda fountains and soda jerks, the two items that intrigued me the most.” He was mesmerized by American cinema.

He moved to America aged 16, attending Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts. The sterility and homogeneity he encountered there would extend to Princeton. He would later deem it miraculous he survived what he called its “poisonous social atmosphere” of “casual, pipe-smoking, tweedy anti-intellectualism.”

But Brennan depicts a more purposeful figure during this period than Said’s memoirs would suggest. In response to the hushed bigotry of some of his WASP superiors, he sought to “outmanoeuvre” them with “a cosmopolitan flair that many found disarming,” cultivating a worldly image enabled by wealth. Aside from French, at this early point, Said used “two forms of English: one American, the other Oxonian, shifting abruptly between the two at a moment’s notice either to make a point or to match the accent of his interlocutor.” He “negotiated Princeton’s customs perfectly, enjoying the rituals of the dining clubs in particular but could be very ironical about them, mocking their excessive shows of ceremony.” He would range (mostly fruitlessly) across nearby schools looking for girls in his Alfa Romeo; his activities included “visits to prominent family members in Washington, D.C., or overnight stays at the Lebanese mission in New York.”

“It is anyone’s guess whether he fled the life of sales contracts and import ledgers because of a higher calling” is not the most seductive reflection by a biographer about the genesis of one of the most famous intellectuals of the 20th century. Rather, it reflects a certain blankness at a key stage in Said’s life.

At Harvard, Said’s vision for his academic path began to take shape, a process Brennan illuminates adeptly. Said’s doctorate was supervised by Monroe Engel, a novelist and editor (including to Saul Bellow), and critic Harry Levin, who observed a generation of “adaptable émigrés,” “trained in their homelands and by earlier travels to be experts on cultures other than their own.” Levin’s vision for literary studies “anticipated many of Said’s critical preferences,” founded on “cautioning against the ‘tyranny’ of grand ‘systems’ of thought that lose touch with contradictions and chance discoveries,” and “a sense of universal interrelatedness.” Levin was in conversation with Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, two Jewish philologists who had fled the Nazis. Spitzer understood his vocation as a “chameleonic” one, in which “free-floating erudition” unlocked disciplinary experimentation. Levin “impressed on Said the importance” of Auerbach and Spitzer. But Said later “downplayed his relationship with both of his mentors” Engel and Levin, even though both relationships were actually “deep” and “sustained.”

Philology and literary studies provided Said with a broad orientation, channelling a background rooted in special capacities derived from access to different languages, traditions, and using close reading to generate new connections and discoveries. But it was theory—rooted in the work of European thinkers which Said helped transform into a distinctly American concoction—which ultimately unlocked the crucial possibilities of Said’s academic strategy.

Even at the dissertation stage, Said was “clever enough to realize he would be more likely to succeed professionally by writing a conventional study of a canonical English author.” But in order to escape the “somewhat predictable project he had chosen, of exploring Conrad as an invented authorial persona,” he ended up “injecting ideas” from French and German theorists into an “otherwise safe dissertation.”

While he was reading widely in “phenomenology, existentialism, and psychoanalysis,” however, his allegiances were, ultimately, “skin-deep.” He noted that these “theoretical movements” were “acquiring prestige” and was open about “shamelessly” utilizing the vocabulary of their leading lights. Insertions from their work allowed him to “throw off the straitjacket of a criticism based on a mere reading of novels and poems.” Said realized that through intellectuals like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, it was possible “to understand the study of forms, as taking place in a context, in a whole environment.” It was exactly this malleable premise that unlocked the possibilities of building a new approach to academic authority.

One intriguing counterpoint was provided by Yehoshafat Harkabi, chief of Israeli military intelligence in the mid-to-late 1950s, who was by coincidence also stationed there as a fellow. The pair already had a history: At an Arab American student convention, Harkabi led some Israeli students who confronted a group representing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by Said. Following their series of exchanges at Stanford, depicted by observers variously as polite and strained, Harkabi would show up in the book as an epitome of racist condescension toward Arabs; an exemplar of Israeli orientalism.

Orientalism’s title is a metonym for the way Said reversed and reclaimed the act of naming. “Since they do not call themselves Orientalists, my use of the word is anomalous,” Said notes of the “modern American social scientists” he targets in the book. Imperialists had turned native terms into markers of shame and inferiority; now Said was inverting the neutral terms by which they defined themselves. He extracted from the tradition of Orientalism the negative vitality needed to overhaul it from within, starting with the term itself. The project was not only one of historical revision, but of lasting opposition: “My argument takes it that the Orientalist reality is both antihuman and persistent. Its scope, as much as its institutions and all-pervasive influence, lasts up to the present.”

“It would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality,” Said wrote. “There were and are cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than … anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly.” His focus was instead on “the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient.” But despite his tactically necessary disclaimer, the two tracks—of brute reality, and the reality of ideas—did not ultimately coexist: “We must be very clear: Orientalism overrode The Orient.”

“Orientalism” was not really an idea; the premise of the book—i.e., the existence of “Orientalism”—was essentially presented as utterly singular, dominant, and monolithic, and yet also as functionally malleable intellectually. Orientalism possessed the dimensions and force of action: It was an act that enabled other acts.

There was of course an overtly political dimension to this: “I find the work on Orientalism to be a contribution to the struggle against imperialism,” Said put it bluntly. He was overt about the justifications for his revolutionary suspension of norms: “Even Said’s admirers found Orientalism at times unalert to contradiction, too willing to corral unlike thinkers into the same camp … Close friends observed that Said knew he ought to qualify his statements more, but he felt he had to be strong and definite for political reasons.” “Subtlety, generally, was his beat,” but “he didn’t want to get lost in it,” was how his colleague Michael Wood put it.

But Said’s assault on subtlety would become his most lasting and profound influence. The book established itself by claiming to unmask reductive Western systems of power and thought. But its own set of intellectual tools were as reductive as any system. In the words of Alan Mintz, in a letter to the Forward explaining why he chose not to attend his former friend’s funeral in 2003, Said “was enacting his own description of how culture works by using ideas to do the work of politics.”