There's nothing new about written work, including scholarly work, being put to uses its authors never dreamed of. But still it rankles when it's an esteemed family member who is being maligned.
We are the daughters of Raphael Patai, author of the book THE ARAB MIND, which was mentioned by Seymour Hersh in his May 24 New Yorker piece on American abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Hersh argued that the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not a mere aberration by a few low-level soldiers, but rather an orchestrated high-level military policy. As a source of information for this policy, Hersh wrote, "One book that was frequently cited was THE ARAB MIND, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression."
Although Hersh himself did not attribute responsibility for the misdeeds at Abu Ghraib to our father, the speed with which the Internet spreads all news--good, bad, and invented--has resulted in ever more simplistic assertions that reduce to the outrageous notion that Raphael Patai wrote a handbook for American torturers.
We find it repugnant to have our father implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) blamed for or associated with these atrocities. He was an academic and an intellectual, the author of many scholarly books relating to the Middle East and Jewish and Arab culture. He began studying Arabic at the University of Budapest when he was nineteen years old. In an autobiographical volume published in 1988, he wrote of the privilege he had had, in Breslau in 1930, of studying with Carl Brockelmann, "the foremost Arabist of the age," from whom he gained "a great love for that rich and beautiful language that was to remain with me all my life." Nor was this just rhetoric: one of his last books, published posthumously, was a collection of Arab folktales.
Raphael Patai approached the Middle East from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist whose goal was to deeply understand the cultures he studied. He was always sympathetic to the people among whom he did his research, and attempted to provide a balanced perspective on events--both historical and recent. In nothing that he wrote is there the slightest hint that exploitation of perceived weaknesses (especially a vulnerability as near- universal as sexual shame) for political ends is ever justified.
For THE ARAB MIND, he used both western and multiple Arab scholarly sources to support his conclusions. When first published, the book was uniformly praised by numerous newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post and, perhaps ironically, the New Yorker, which described the book as "A sympathetic, wide-ranging study of ways in which such fundamental matters as language, child rearing, and religion have created a typical Arab personality quite divergent from a typical Western personality."
Is our father's book a bible of the "neocons", as Hersh claims he was told? We don't know. What we do know is that it is a valuable and fair-minded guide to Arab culture, and it inspired Raphael Patai, a few years later, to write a companion volume entitled THE JEWISH MIND.
Scholarly research can be used or misused in ways the author never intended and would never have condoned. As author, he is no more responsible for the perverse purposes his book might be made to serve than the discoverer of fire would be responsible for arson.
### Jennifer Patai Schneider is a physician and writer in Tucson, Arizona. Daphne Patai is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.