Isidore derived Saracen identity genealogically from Abraham’s son Ishmael

Evidence

This schema allowed Isidore (and his readers) to identify and classify people in an apparently rational and comprehensible framework. He writes in the Chronica, “in the second year after the flood, when Shem was one hundred years old, he begat Arphaxad, from whom the Chaldean people (gens) has sprung.” Isidore uses the genealogies of Genesis 10–11; in Etymologies, he mentions only the names of those men who were founders of peoples: Heber, of the Hebrews, or “Ishmael, son of Abraham, from whom come the Ishmaelites, whose name now has been corrupted into Saracens (Saraceni), as if from Sarah, and Agarenes (Agareni) from Hagar.” — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 121

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the vault’s existing claim that ‘the Saracen’ is constituted as a scriptural/legal category before any empirical encounter — the false-etymology move is the origin-institution.
• DEFINE: Establishes the medieval etymology tying ‘Saracen’ to Sarah/Ishmael and ‘Agarene’ to Hagar — a definitional genealogy at the heart of later Islamophobic trope structure.
• SEED: The fake etymology of ‘Saracen as if from Sarah’ — a medieval name for the enemy derived by assimilation to the wrong matriarchy — could anchor an essay on how false etymology underwrites identity politics both medieval and modern.
• QUESTION: The ‘as if from Sarah’ etymology strips Ishmaelites of Abrahamic legitimacy via his slave-wife Hagar. Worth chasing how this Hagar/Sarah distinction feeds later Christian/European positioning of Islam as the illegitimate, servile branch.