When does the pre-modern stop and the modern begin in the Middle West (aka the Middle ‘East’)? For many biblical archaeologists and historians, the turning point is 1949. Before that date, people used ‘primitive’ farming methods, without the ‘benefit’ of modern techniques. The modes of land tenure, usage, and economic structure remained largely unchanged for millennia. After 1949, with the establishment of the state of Israel, modernity finally arrived – freedom, democracy and the US military. Needless to say, these pre-modern Arabs provide an absolute boon for archaeologists, for here may be found first-hand evidence of how people have lived since ancient times. So an increasing number of ethnographic comparisons are under way, using data from, say, the pre-Ottoman, Ottoman or British Mandate periods, in order to highlight economic life in biblical times. Yet, it is a curious argument, for it both distances the biblical materials from the interpreter and it turns the ‘dirty Arabs’ into biblical characters – on par with Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Moses et al.
11 July, 2012
The role of the ‘pre-modern Arab’ in biblical archaeology and history
Posted by stalinsmoustache under Bible, economics | Tags: Arabs, archaeology, British mandate, history, Middle West, modern, orientalism, Ottomans, pre-modern |[4] Comments
11 July, 2012 at 7:23 pm
Now this is my kind of biblical studies.
These contradictory attitudes toward Arabs and others seem to multiply, too, a sure indicator that some other desire has been repressed and displaced. Take JD Michaelis, for example, who is a key example in the construction of The Arab = The Primitive Israelite. For Michaelis, Arab ethnology, especially studies of the Bedouins, offered not only a golden path from Pure Origins (TM) to Christianity, but a convenient way of bypassing that unfortunate wrong turn into Judaism (now “Late Judaism”, even before it really began). And so a Lutheran finds a way to bypass Jewish exegesis and place Christianity at the origin.
Frank Manuel has a good bit on Michaelis in The Broken Staff.
11 July, 2012 at 8:03 pm
I get it (apart an increasingly interesting number of ‘likes’): the dirty Arab is simply an ancestor of the dirty Christian.
11 July, 2012 at 9:18 pm
Yeah.
12 July, 2012 at 8:43 am
Zionism saw itself at first as a very European romantic utopian ethnic nationalism.Taking aboard the antisemitic slur that Jews were unproductive (untrue in that while for good historic reasons most Jews lived in cities, they did all the jobs city dwellers would be expected to do, not many being rich bankers) the idea was a nation working collectively on the land, but with modern indeed modernist European values, including genocidal disdain for natives and their culture. Old Palestinian and African Jews have told how, acting in early propoganda films, they had to pretend that they were being shown for the first time how to use a knife and fork. I had thought that sometime between Suez and the sixday war the U.S.having replaced the U,K. as the padrone, the ideology was being replaced by one of being pioneers in the war on terror. But know, spokesmen for the entity, though their skin is darker than mine and their grandfathers being from Africa, still today speak of immigrants need to realise that Israel is the land of the white man.