European interest in Semites was driven by the Jews, not the Arabs

Evidence

The continuing decline of the Ottoman Empire was probably not the only reason for the Semitic Arabs replacing the Turks as Europe’s chief oriental interest. Preoccupation with the European Semites may have been another. There can be no doubt that the Semitic race was of concern to many Western people mainly because they were interested in either the Jews of the Bible or the Jews of their own time, rather than the Arabs. At the time the place of the Jews in Europe was hotly debated by both themselves and their friends and enemies. Identifying the Jews as Semites gave a scientific sheen to the discussion—especially in the beginning and the middle of the century, when colonial expansion was still in its infancy. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 123

Categorization

• XREF: This inverts the usual Said-derived assumption that orientalism was about colonizing Arabs — connects to how antisemitism and orientalism intersect in the European imagination.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Europe’s ‘Semitic’ discourse was fundamentally about its own Jews — domestic anxieties about Jewish emancipation — rather than about the Arab colonies inverts the standard orientalism narrative and repositions a whole body of scholarship.