A Jewish scholar’s orientalism directly opposed Renan’s Aryan-Semite hierarchy

Evidence

Rather than view orientalism as a homogenous Christian cultural enterprise, we should note that Goldziher’s views on Islam and cultural transmission in general were profoundly shaped by his Jewishness and his intense disagreement with Ernest Renan, the most significant scholar of the French school of orientalism. Renan’s delineation of Aryan and Semitic peoples—he claimed that the latter were creatively and imaginatively barren compared to the former—led Goldziher to assert the adaptability of ancient Hebrew culture and the extent to which ancient Israelites borrowed elements of culture from surrounding peoples to create something entirely new. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 397

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism argument that orientalism is not monolithic; Jewish orientalists formed a distinct counter-tradition, which also connects to the book’s broader thesis about Jewish-Semitist scholarship. — connects to: Renan attributed medieval Islamic science to Aryans, not Arabs, to preserve his racial hierarchy. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 347
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Renan’s Aryan-Semite racial schema influence later antisemitic and anti-Arab ideologies differently?