Pre-1914 Europeans saw the Arab as frozen outside contemporary history

Evidence

The imbalance within the idea of the Semites meant that it possessed an inherent fragility. If European notions of Jews and Arabs were pulled in different directions, they could be prised apart. Before the First World War, however, the Semitic held fast as the frame for understanding the origins and substance of Western Asia. Although the European antisemitism movement had no concern with the Arab/Muslim, the link between the Jew and the Orient served a useful function, as already mentioned. Hence, antisemitic and Orientalist ideas of the Semite could and did co-­ exist. Prior to 1914, European societies did not evince a significant active interest in the contemporary Arab/Muslim that might problematise the relationship with the Jew. For all of the interest of Orientalist scholars in the Arab/Muslim by the end of the nineteenth century, many of whom had moved far away from the explicitly theological concerns of Michaelis and Herder to an ethnographic interest, most saw a figure frozen in time, outside of contemporary history. This conception was shared in wider Western European intellectual culture, and in society at large, where, in sharp contrast to the Jew, the Western Asian Arab hardly registered as a contemporary subject. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 652

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how the Semitic category functioned asymmetrically in European thought.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 652