Orientalists fabricated ethnographic details to fit a timeless-and-declining Orient narrative

Evidence

The assumption of timelessness coexisted, for Renan and most other orientalists, paradoxically with the presumption that the Orient was in decline. Renan follows the above passage with a report, most likely based on a personal investigation during his visit of Nazareth, that the fountain at which Mary and the other women of the town used to gather in “gaiety” no longer exists. Nevertheless, the “broken channels” of the town still contain a “muddy stream” and the women meet there in the evening. … Almost certainly Renan is referring to the open sewers running down the streets. It is hard to see why women would gather in the evening at a muddy stream. One has to suspect that we have here a figment of orientalist imagination rather than an excerpt from Renan’s travel notes. The author included it to make a link between the present and the past, as well as to point, through the imagined drying up of Mary’s well, to an overall desiccation of the environment: where there was a fountain yesterday, there is today but a muddy stream. The geological barrenness of the landscape of course dovetails with its imagined cultural barrenness, and that was something that Renan associated with the Semitic character. (Renan declared that the Semites were monotheistic because—to put it with only a touch of oversimplification—they lacked the imagination to invent more than one god.) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 195

Categorization

• SEED: A strong essay angle: how a scholar’s theoretical commitments made him manufacture a plausible-sounding observation against the visible evidence (gathering at an open sewer).
• DEEPTHINKING: The parallel collapse of geological and cultural barrenness into one ‘Semitic character’ is a dense, nuanced point about how environmental determinism and racist anthropology fused.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis about the West constructing the Orient, and to environmental determinism claims common in colonial discourse. — connects to: A 1985 ethnography uncritically accepted orientalist golden-age narratives — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1997; The decline-of-Islamic-science narrative is a Eurocentric fabrication.