“Every history is contemporary history.” - Benedetto Croce
From Leonard V. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome:
Studies such as Edward Said’s Orientalism or Martin Bernal’s Black Athena have recently illustrated the truism of Croce’s adage referred to above. While Said has argued that nineteenth-century imperialist concerns have affected negatively (and continue to influence negatively) much scholarly work on the cultures of the Near East, Bernal has maintained that classicists have categorically refused to explore the Afro-Asiatic roots of Classical Civilization. Said and Bernal have shown that to study the ideas that underlie the work of previous generations of scholars leads to a recognition of the mechanisms that influence scholarly discourse today. Yet, what is much less clear in the work of both Said and Bernal is this: if history is contemporary history, then this also holds for the interpretations Said and Bernal have given to the works of previous scholars. Thus, one may argue that by criticizing the work of such scholars, Said and Bernal have documented in the very first place what they themselves as products of and participants to the late twentieth century regard as problematic. In the case of Said’s work one could argue that his “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Arab/Palestinian” perspective explains not only why he has selected certain orientalists as typical representatives of the European orientalist establishment of the nineteenth century, but also why he has failed to include others. One might in fact wonder whether Said has succeeded in identifying how past European orientalists distorted our view of the Near East. There are good arguments to maintain that Said himself has painted a distorted picture of which issues were central to much of nineteenth-century European orientalist scholarship. In the case of Bernal, one need not read more than a few pages to reach the conclusion that his tome lacks much of the methodological rigor that characterizes the work of those he criticizes. More often than not, Bernal simply fails to back up his claims.