Orientalism collapsed Jew and Arab into one religious Semitic figure

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

Categorization

• XREF: Directly synthesizes Said’s Orientalism and the Semites concept — connects to the reader’s interest in how enemy categories are socially constructed.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘Semite’ as a secularist-invention figure — how the belief that one’s own century is secularized enables merging previously distinct peoples into one racial-religious category.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that equating Jew and Arab required a self-consciously ‘secularized’ century is genuinely counterintuitive — religio-political distance as a precondition for a racist-racial merger.