Modern Semites could never outdistance the claims of their primitive origins

Evidence

In the 19th century Jews and Muslims were jointly conceived as Semites, bound by a linguistic and racial heritage as well as by Abrahamic monotheism. Arabs were Jews on horseback, as Disraeli wrote. It was only in the 20th century, Renton argues, following the alliance in 1917 between the British Empire and Zionism, that European notions of Muslims and Jews entered a new period in which Jews ceased to be ‘Oriental’ and Islam was reconceived as a political problem — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 699 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Latent Orientalism denies the Orient any possibility of development or transformation; Orientalism’s ontological rigidity makes its fantasies nearly impossible to dismantle; Orientalism’s coherence depends on the permanence of its object (+2 more)

Related

• European Jews and Muslims were jointly racialized as Semites until 1917 (similarity 0.86)
• Pre-1914 Europeans saw the Arab as frozen outside contemporary history (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism collapsed Jew and Arab into one religious Semitic figure (similarity 0.84)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists denied the Orient modernity by casting it as ancient and Semitic. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism imagined Muslims as a monolithic Arab or Middle Eastern racial bloc. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism invented the Semite as a merged Jew-Arab defined by abstract religion (similarity 0.83)
• Europe’s image of the Semitic Orient emerged only as Ottoman power declined (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism’s core doctrine asserts the Semite’s arrested development and inherent weakness (similarity 0.82)
• Contemporary Islamophobia extends Orientalist blame onto all Muslims, not just Arabs (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism defines the Orient as innately resistant to change and modernity (similarity 0.82)
• The ‘Semitic’ field reduced individual people to signs within a scholarly construct (similarity 0.82)
• The category of Semite lumped Jews and Muslims together as unassimilable Orientals (similarity 0.81)
• Latent Orientalism denies the Orient any possibility of development or transformation (similarity 0.81)
• Nineteenth-century Orientalism portrayed Islam as a monolithic, fixed, inferior essence. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism presents Arabs as static types rather than historical agents (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Latent Orientalism denies the Orient any possibility of development or transformation #expands (0.85)
• Orientalism’s ontological rigidity makes its fantasies nearly impossible to dismantle #expands (0.82)
• European Jews and Muslims were jointly racialized as Semites until 1917 #expands (0.80) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 699
• Orientalism’s coherence depends on the permanence of its object #expands (0.78)
• Assimilation never threatened Jewish survival because outsiders always perceived their Jewishness #expands (0.75)