Encountering new continents forced Europe to reclassify all humanity.

Evidence

With the discovery of the American continent in 1492 and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope a few years later, Europe was obliged to expand its sense of an essentially binary European-Mediterranean world to include a new and undiscovered Africa as well as a new and distant American occident that kept moving west as the years went on. Anxieties about how to define the other in such new circumstances led to a new interest in questions of origin and language among others. The discovery of these new and in some cases unsuspected lands can be seen as heralding European modernity. It literally opened up new horizons for Europeans: “virgin territories” were to be possessed and exploited; “different” realities were absorbed, surveyed, and described; “strange” peoples were to be understood, integrated into existing categories, and subjected to European needs. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 305