Palestinian Arab elites had absorbed European racial scholarship on the Semitic

Evidence

Deeply interested in European scholarship, members of the Palestinian Arab elite had long embraced the idea of the Semite. The decision not to abandon or ignore the concept at this juncture, but to minimise its significance, indicates the extent of its currency at that time, as does the transcontinental field across which this exchange took place: Palestinian Arabs arguing with a Parisian Jew in Jaffa about the Semitic, reported, with different degrees of emphasis, by French imperial officials to Paris (focused on Eberlin’s pamphlet) and British military intelligence (concentrating on the Palestinian Arab reaction), whose account in a briefing on Palestine was sent on to London. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 696

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s broader argument about how colonial racial categories were adopted by the colonized and renegotiated; parallels postcolonial theory on how the subaltern reworks the master’s taxonomy.