From the early 1930s, Steiner embraced the idea, a commonplace of the 18th century and theorised in the work of the sociologist Werner Sombart, that Jewish character was oriental, and held the view that he himself was "an oriental born in the West". Though this perception reflected aspects of his own search for his Jewish identity, it had wider implications. The critique he developed of the imperial cast of Western anthropological writing, and his sympathy for hermeneutic techniques that would recover native terms for the way non-Westerners experienced their world, are grounded in this premise. The approach he propounded allows him to be claimed now as an early theoretical precursor of that mode of critical analysis of ethnographic reports which identified in Orientalism a structure of cognitive prejudice framing Western interpretations of the Other. Indeed, he considered Western civilisation as "fundamentally predatory, in terms both territorial and epistemic, upon civilisations that differ from it."
