Sentimental Semitism

The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West, Tom Reiss, London: Chatto and Windus, 2005. pp 433

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Lev as a young writer

At the turn of the century and on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan at the confine of the Russian Empire, was a confused city. It was situated on the limit between East and West, but seemed unable to decide to which civilisation it really belonged. Many Azeris wished Baku to be in Europe, while others desperately hung to their oriental legacy. Most Christians -- Armenians, Georgians and Russians -- looked towards the West, while Muslims stuck to their glorious past and therefore hung on to eastern ways. For the Jews of Baku the choice was even more complex because anti Semitism was once again closing in on them, and although they could not have fathomed what would come to pass fifty years on, they tried to reach to left and right at the same time in order to hedge their bets.

For a time, unable to anticipate the future, the population of Baku seems to have formed two distinct factions like many oriental, ethnically mixed societies at the time (Alexandria in the first half of the twentieth century is a comparable example). Over the course of its history, Azerbaijan had been conquered by Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the Ottomans and the Persians, to name a few of its masters. It belonged sometimes to the East and sometimes to the West. Its geographical situation was finally resolved when it was captured by the Russians in 1825. By this time, Baku was coveted by all for a single reason: it was blessed with massive reserves of oil. This was not oil that had to be drilled for, but oil that gushed in backyards, oil that was so plentiful that it spilled over in black ponds and sometimes in enormous lakes.

It was not long before the mediaeval walled city became the centre of a burgeoning oil industry, supplying more than half the world's crude. On the profits of this glut a new Baku encircled the original walled one, a city "of extravagant mansions, mosques, casinos and theatres," home to the Rothschilds, the Nobels and the local Jewish and Muslim oil barons. Briefly, Baku, still immersed in the Middle Ages with its desert tribes of warriors and its caravans, became at the same time a sort of Riviera on the Caspian Sea.

In the end, the inhabitants were not called upon to decide between modernity and tradition. The Russian Revolution smashed the city, and, after 1917, little if anything remained of it. However, instead of being rewarded for having fuelled the Russian victory, Baku saw its most important citizens deported to Siberia and its oil industry allowed to languish.

In the last decade of the twentieth century Baku experienced a new oil boom, and became once more a centre of attention. In 1998, Tom Reiss, author and journalist, was sent there to investigate. Reiss may or may not have reported on the levels of oil production in Baku. Instead, he found something else, something that would take his undivided attention for the next five years. Before he left for Azerbaijan, an Iranian friend recommended that he read a short novel, Ali and Nino, by a certain Kurban Said as an introduction to the city he was about to visit and to the Caucasus in general. The book was difficult to find but Reiss eventually secured an old paperback copy published in the 1970s and on reading it felt that he had "dug up buried treasure." But who was its author? Who was Kurban Said? Did he write other novels, had he once been a well-known novelist, was he dead or alive?

Through an arduous examination of documents, memoirs and archives interspersed with strokes of luck and chance meetings, Reiss managed to follow the trace of the man who has become his obsession and now hopes to resurrect him to his rightful place in the society of world-famous writers. Reiss's book The Orientalist is the product of a five-year search for an elusive and mysterious character, a sort of literary genius and a master of disguise, who believed he could cross the ordinary barriers between race, nationality and religion and was caught up in the end not by the powers that had resolved to ensnare him and put him in his rightful place, but by his own tragic fate.

Kurban Said, aka Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey, was a Jew born in 1905 in Baku to an oil baron Jewish father from Tiflis and a revolutionary (Bolshevik) mother. Lev's mother used her husband's fortune to promote the ideas of the Russian revolution. Indifferent to his family's varied ideologies, to the presence of Stalin and of rich bankers alternatively dining at the family table, young Lev was fascinated instead by the Islamic heritage of the Caucasus and apparently converted to Islam when he was still a very young man. He then donned the costume and manners of a Muslim prince, and turned himself into the prototype of the Jewish Orientalist, a character once recognisable in Victorian England when highly assimilated young men from prominent Jewish families set off to find their Oriental roots in the desert. In this sense, Lev was the real thing, since unlike the English product he was drawing on his own heritage.

Lev would probably have remained happily in Baku for his whole life had Baku not found itself in the thick of world events. After his mother's suicide, he fled with his father as the Bolsheviks and the forces of the Czar fought over their city. They traveled through Persia and Turkey, stayed for a time in Paris and settled finally in Berlin as Nazism was beginning to emerge in Germany.

During these years, Berlin was home to all sorts of exiles, including Russians, first the Communists and then the Czarist refugees. Through his mother Lev was known to the former and through his father to the latter. Yet he continued to pretend that he was a Muslim prince and reinvented his autobiography from which he carefully censored any reference to his Jewish origins. His father became a patrician Muslim who owned oil wells, while his mother was never made any mention of. For some mysterious reason his friends and acquaintances went along with the charade.

By the time he was thirty, he had made a name for himself as an important writer known to publish sometimes under his real name and sometimes under aliases. He frequented the brilliant intellectuals who then filled Paris and Berlin's fashionable cafés. He married an American heiress who enticed him to travel to America before anti-Semitism turned murderous in Germany. That his wife never knew she was marrying a Jew ("plain Lev Nussimbaum," as she later put it ) and not a Muslim Altesse Royale seems unbelievable, yet this is what transpired at the time of the scandalous divorce proceedings that ruined Lev's reputation and exposed him once and for all as a camouflaged penniless Jewish adventurer.

By this time he had returned to Germany, where he flirted with Nazism from the lofty vantage point of Muslim Persian royalty. Again, it seems rather bizarre that since hundreds of people in Berlin knew of his past, he could keep the pretense going and befriend members of Hitler's entourage.

As anti-Semitic laws became harsher in Berlin, however, Lev decided that Fascist Italy offered a safer climate and reinvented himself as a disciple of Mussolini, a role he played successfully for a few of years. But no matter how hard Lev tried to make his life into a fairy tale in order to escape the sad reality in the end he did not beat the odds. He contracted a rare and lethal blood disease and died in agony in 1942, just days before the Gestapo came to arrest him.

Reiss's search for the elusive Kurban Said has yielded a rich and informative historical novel rather than a detective story. While the personality of his hero remains mostly unexplained and fluid, Reiss's work develops around the events of the period, offering a glimpse of the atmosphere in Russia before and after the revolution, of Berlin under the Weimar constitution, of the fall of the Deutsch Mark and its consequences and of the rise of Hitler. The internecine political quarrels of the time come alive in the turbulent atmosphere that preceded the final catastrophe of the Second World War.

Reiss also devotes a lengthy exposé to the tradition of the Jewish Orientalist, to which he painstakingly insists that Lev Nussimbaum belonged, a tradition that stretched back to the nineteenth century, to Benjamin Disraeli, Arminius Vambery and William Gifford Palgrave (Father Cohen). "In Weimar Berlin [Lev] encountered a surprising number of other Jewish writers who sought refuge from the new political realities [a revival of anti- Semitism] in esoteric vistas of sympathetic Orientalism, like Eugen Hoeflich who wrote books calling for a merger of the Asiatic people of the world -- Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Confucians -- into a united front against the forces of European mechanization and mass warfare."

Reiss adds: "Over the course of the nineteenth century, as ideas of race and class struggle began to eclipse the faith in universal reason and progress, Europe's Jews had undergone both devastating rejections from without and identity crises from within." Fearing this new form of exclusion, an increasing number of prominent Jews seemed to look to the Islamic world for a solution to their problem. "They came to see themselves as being of the Orient -- specifically, the Islamic Orient -- in some very special and attractive way."

Many North European Jews saw a new attachment to the East as a way of escaping their demeaning image as ghetto-dwellers in the West. Maybe they were persecuted, they reasoned, because they did not belong in Europe after all. This is how Reiss at least attempts to rationalise the "desire" of these particular Jews to "go Eastern," hence the return to Palestine. This is not very convincing, but nor are the reasons he gives for his hero's multiple identities. In the end, The Orientalist is a great chronicle of Europe before and between the events that led to the two world wars, but it somehow fails to shed light on the personality of the central character and his motivations.

By Faiza Hassan