German Orientalism in the Age of Empire

“Suzanne Marchand engages a major issue of modern German history with her rich, ambitious, and beautifully composed book. She offers powerful and sophisticated arguments that rest on a dazzling command of evidence. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire not only fills a huge gap; it is a bravura performance and a landmark work.” – David Blackbourn, Harvard University

“German Orientalism in the Age of Empire is intellectual history on an epic scale. Suzanne Marchand’s rich revisionist account re-creates the practices of an extraordinary branch of scholarship in vibrant detail. She traces the complex roots of modern Orientalism in Renaissance philology and early modern biblical exegesis, follows the transformation of the field in the modern university and the age of European empire, and brings the reader into direct, instructive contact with dozens of fascinating thinkers and scholars. Again and again, she challenges received truths about European thought and how it should be studied.” – Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

“Suzanne Marchand has written a dazzling work of scholarship, a tour de force as an intellectual history of modern Germany. The erudition and breadth of material presented demonstrates that Suzanne Marchand is one of the great scholars of her generation. Essential reading for students in numerous fields, including religion, biblical studies, history, Asian studies, ancient Near East studies, and philology, her book is also an extremely important contribution to the field of Jewish studies, brilliantly illuminating its rise, development, influence, and significance.” – Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany

“German Orientalism in the Age of Empire is that rare combination of deep research, vast erudition, and big, important ideas. By rooting Orientalism in the rich cultural soil of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, Marchand gives us a complex, nuanced, and balanced view of European attitudes toward the ‘Orient.’ This is a major contribution to our understanding of European intellectual history.” – James Sheehan, Stanford University

“Suzanne Marchand’s enormously learned, contextually rich, and conceptually complex study of the scholarly traditions and cultural practices that defined the ‘peculiarities’ of German Orientalism in the modern Imperial age finally provides a comprehensive, convincing response to questions that historians of modern Germany have been asking since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism more than thirty years ago. But her book does more than simply fill a gap in historical scholarship or supplement existing paradigms of analysis. Marchand’s work reframes the issue by setting the processes whereby representatives of the ‘West’ constructed their own cultural identities by appropriating and ‘othering’ the ‘Orient’ within the longue duree of Europe’s own cultural civil wars. By emphasizing the immense diversity and motivational ambivalence of German Orientalism, she has produced a story that opens the tradition to critical, reciprocal, post-Imperial appropriations.” – John Toews, University of Washington

"Marchand's book, encyclopedic in size, scope and ambititon, examines works by an overwhelming number of scholars writing between the eighteenth century and twentieth centuries..." -Susanne Kord, TLS

"Marchand's impressively well-researched and -written book offers the first comprehensive and historical study of German Orientalist scholarship. Essential." -Choice

"...an essential and engaging work that deserves to be read by all students of European intellectual history." -Erik Sidenvall, Church History