Eighteenth-century climate theory claimed Oriental peoples could never assimilate into European nations.

Evidence

Another key figure in this story is the Enlightenment writer John David Michaelis, who argued that the southern climate in which Jews evolved made assimilation impossible. As he put it, Jews were an “unmixed race [ ungemischte Race] of a more southern people” that “even in ten generations” could not become German. According to this view, Jews were a product of the Orient and should be deported to a “southern” climate with the “cruel heat” they were used to. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 401

Categorization

• XREF: A pre-echo of the racialized ‘inassimilable Semite’ logic that the reader will recognize in later orientalist fantasy and colonial policy.