This study considers the relationship between an academic elite and its political socio-cultural context, in the case of ‘mizraḥanut’ in Israel. That is, a field, a network and a Hebrew discourse that produce knowledge about a vague conflation of the Middle East, Arabs, ‘Arabness,’ Islam, and ‘Islamness,’ an object that I call ‘the Arab/Muslim,’ and which mirrors the ethno-lingual-national-religious bind that Zionism advocates for Jews. Where other studies focus on either orientalist criticism or everyday academic capitalism, I argue that this field manifests an overdetermination of both ideologies, as it is poised at the junction of academia, orientalism and Zionism. The study looks at the way that the cultural import of ‘mizraḥanut’ in Jewish-Israeli society manifests through resourceful agencies of power-knowledge in and out of academia. At the same time, the field’s ties with, and dependency on, local and global (particularly American) academia are also significant to its discourse and praxis, and the trends there often pull in different political and philosophical directions. The academics in the field try to settle these potentially conflicting influences and work despite their tensions. The study draws on multiple scholarly traditions and offers new evidence for, and insights in, the various historical and cultural-discursive discussions with which it engages. From contributions to methodology and the different understandings of orientalism, through cultural-historical arguments about the origins and evolution of the local field and its colonial entanglements, to inferring the presupposed and the unsaid, this multi-layered anthropological study draws on, and develops the understanding of, broader political conditions, such as colonialism and neoliberalism.