Orientalists treated contemporary Palestinians as living fossils revealing biblical history

Evidence

Renan followed typical nineteenth-century practice: he believed that the Orient today would reveal what the Orient had always been. This belief resulted logically from the proposition that at least some Arabs carried the unchanging, fossilized Semitic spirit that infused the contemporaries of Jesus. It mattered little that they were Arabs and not Jews; both were Semites and their differences today were at any rate conceived of largely as due to the degenerative influences of postbiblical history, with the Jews much more “corrupted” in this sense, according to Renan, than the pure Bedouin. On this premise, to a person interested in biblical history the Palestinians were an archive in flesh and blood, and Renan made a personal voyage to the Orient. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 193

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the methodological premise that orientalism held: present Orient equals the eternal Orient.
• SEED: The ‘Palestinians as an archive in flesh and blood’ idea could anchor an essay on how colonial science weaponized ethnographic timelessness against colonized peoples.