Paper short abstract:

Leaving to Palestine after the rise of the Nazi party, the textual encounter of the German-Jewish orientalist Martin Plessner with the Orient became a physical one. This paper deals with this scholar's efforts to separate the scientific and political spheres in the new context of the local conflict.

Paper long abstract:

The case of German-Jewish orientalist Martin Meir Plessner (1900-1973) is an opportunity to examine the narrative of the transfer of Oriental Studies from Germany to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem through the eyes of an antihero: a scholar who never became a prominent figure, was generally left out of the decision-making circles and had to adapt to the reality rather than shape it.

Studying in Breslau and Berlin, for young Plessner the encounter with the Orient, Arabs and Arabic was a textual one. Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Plessner lost his recently-acquired position in Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and immigrated with his family to Palestine. By migrating from Germany to Palestine, Plessner had transformed the detached oriental encounter into a physical encounter at the heart of the emerging Arab-Jewish conflict. Drawing from rich archival material, this paper is an attempt to examine how this spatial shift has influenced Plessner's personal political views, on the one hand; his scholarly and professional work on the other hand; and above all, the link between the two.

The spatial shift, this paper claims, had not caused any significant change neither in Plessner's political views nor in his disciplinary approach. Science and politics continued to exist as two separate spheres, and Plessner did his best to keep it that way. Nevertheless, life in the Orient made collisions between the two worlds unavoidable. By transferring academic Orientalism to Palestine, Plessner was no longer able of truly and wholly keeping it 'neutral'.