Nineteenth-century Jewish pride framed Jews and Arabs as a shared favored race.

Evidence

Disraeli’s view of the Jews was that the Jews were an “Arabian tribe,” and the Arabs, “only Jews upon horseback.” Together, Arab and Jew are depicted as a favored race destined to receive divine revelation. When a character in Disraeli’s Tancred (published in 1844) says, with the author’s obvious approval, that “God never spoke except to an Arab,” he means of course that Moses, the Prophets of Israel, Jesus, and Mohammed were all Arabs. Disraeli fancied himself a descendant of what, certainly in God’s mind, was the world’s best stock. A decade before the publication of the Comte de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Races the hero of Tancred declared that “race is all.” … In 1862 Moses Hess, Marx’s collaborator on the Neue rhenische Zeitung, stood his colleague’s teachings on their head and claimed that “the race struggle is primary; the class struggle is secondary.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 125

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in race theory and identity claims, and prefigures the same dynamics in the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s cross-cultural identity signaling theme.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘God never spoke except to an Arab’ — the pre-Zionist, pre-antisemitic moment when Jews claimed kinship with Arabs as racial pride, before antisemitism weaponized the same linkage.