Before Europe orientalized its eastern colonies, the Jew orientalized himself. Living in exile — amid the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the four Islamic caliphates — he yearned for Zion: the homeland forever lost, the cradle of an identity forever idealized. “My heart is in the East — / And I am at the edge of the West” is how the predicament was put by Yehudah Ha-Levi, who wrote in Hebrew in twelfth-century Muslim Spain about Jerusalem under the yoke of the Crusaders. The poem, among the most famous in the Jewish canon, proceeds by questions —

How can…