Politicizing the Semite category caused the concept to unravel

Evidence

But as soon as Sykes attempted to transform the Semitic into a political category, the tension at the heart of the idea—the sharp division between Christian Europe’s relationships with Judaism and Islam—started to come to the fore. From the start, the political Semite was bedevilled with opposition: among Zionists, Arabs and agents of the British and French imperial states. And once the new global public sphere, embodied in the League of Nations, was presented with the figure of the anti-Zionist Arab, the Semitic category ceased to make sense and began to unravel. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 705

Categorization

• QUESTION: Could explore how the ‘anti-Zionist Arab’ figure in the League of Nations public sphere compares with present-day discourse about Jews and Arabs as ‘Semites’.
• XREF: connects to: Successful métissage dissolves the very category once realized; Officials’ generalization of the NLF to a category obscured its reality — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 711