Edward Said's Orientalism has received both praise and criticism. Among the criticisms leveled is the charge that Said's neglect of German scholarship misses an important part of Orientalism in the West. Robert Irwin, for example, notes that German Biblical scholarship was critically influential as a “motivating force for the study of Islam” and that the “German form-critical techniques” developed to study the Old Testament influence on the way “Western scholars interpret[ed] the Koran and the early Islamic community.” Bernard Lewis claims that Said's neglect of German scholarship calls into question his entire project and likens it to writing a history of European music without a discussion of the German contribution. See Robert Erwin, “Writing about Islam and the Arabs,” Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (1981–82), 108–9; Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108. More generally, critics have noted that the presence of an influential Orientalist scholarship in Germany, as well as the absence of any significant Germany colonies in the Orient, calls into question Said's claim that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in Orientalist discourse. Neither critics nor supporters, on the other hand, have given much attention to Said's claim that there is a similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism. Said states this in his introduction, where he notes that in “addition and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism, and as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch Orientalism resemble each other is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood” (1978:27–28). Elsewhere, Said has faulted critics of his work on Orientalism for seeing “in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism . . . and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism,” instead of giving attention to the similarity “between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” (1985:9).