Colonial and scholarly competition substituted new Oriental origins for the Hebrew Edenic origin

Evidence

But some writers shrewdly commented on how it was that Sanskrit and things Indian in general simply took the place of Hebrew and the Edenic fallacy. As early as 1804 Benjamin Constant noted in his Journal intime that he was not about to discuss India in his De la religion because the English who owned the place and the Germans who studied it indefatigably had made India the fons et origo of everything; and then there were the French who had decided after Napoleon and Champollion that everything originated in Egypt and the new Orient. These teleological enthusiasms were fueled after 1808 by Friedrich Schlegel’s celebrated Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, which seemed to confirm his own pronouncement made in 1800 about the Orient being the purest form of Romanticism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 362

Categorization

• XREF: The pattern of imperial possession (England owning India) determining which ‘origin’ intellectuals valorize parallels Said’s central argument that Orientalist knowledge is inseparable from colonial power.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the substitution of Sanskrit for Hebrew as ‘origin language’ mark a secularization of philology or merely a transfer of sacred prestige to a new object?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 362