Nineteenth-century Orientalists collapsed the Semite onto the ancient Hebrew

Evidence

Orientalists all but equate Jew and Arab and credit them, the “Semites,” with nothing but the most abstract invention of religion. A people devoid of political history, their cultural sterility akin to a monotheistic desert, the Semites constitute the clearest site of a distinction produced by the only century that genuinely believed itself “secularized.” When religion is thoroughly distanced from politics, the Jew and the Arab can finally merge, one people at last (valued positive, as in Disraeli, or negative, as in Renan). Rereading a history of the enemy from Hegel to Rosenzweig, one could witness this Orientalist invention, first the disappeance-the enemy draws away (“The Orient was almost a European invention … now it was disappearing,” Said, Orienta/ism, r)- then the renewed separation of Arab from Jew, and finally the transformation of the Arab into the Jew’s “creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow” (Said, Orientalism, 286). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 970 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

But some writers shrewdly commented on how it was that Sanskrit and things Indian in general simply took the place of Hebrew and the Edenic fallacy. As early as 1804 Benjamin Constant noted in his Journal intime that he was not about to discuss India in his De la religion because the English who owned the place and the Germans who studied it indefatigably had made India the fons et origo of everything; and then there were the French who had decided after Napoleon and Champollion that everything originated in Egypt and the new Orient. These teleological enthusiasms were fueled after 1808 by Friedrich Schlegel’s celebrated Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, which seemed to confirm his own pronouncement made in 1800 about the Orient being the purest form of Romanticism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 362 (#complicates, via linked claim)

In that book, Lawrence retained Renan’s emphasis on the intrinsic relationship between the Semite and the environment of Western Asia. He also used the term Semite synonymously with his main subject of interest. But unlike Renan, particularly at the end of his career, Lawrence’s principal Semite was the Arab. Indeed, he almost removed the Jew entirely from the picture. Even for Lawrence, this conception marked a big shift from his earlier understanding of the Jew and the Orient. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 699 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ottoman decline enabled the Semitic Orient to displace Turkish orientalism; The Semitic concept emerged from biblical philology rather than secular linguistics.; Orientalism invented the Semite as a merged Jew-Arab defined by abstract religion — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 970 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism collapsed Jew and Arab into one religious Semitic figure #corroborates (0.94) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 970
• Colonial and scholarly competition substituted new Oriental origins for the Hebrew Edenic origin #complicates (0.78) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 362
• Lawrence’s Seven Pillars redefined the Semite as Arab rather than Jew #complicates (0.77) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 699
• The category of Semite lumped Jews and Muslims together as unassimilable Orientals #complicates (0.76) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 401
• Sanskrit scholarship displaced Biblical authority on the origins of civilization and language #complicates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 360