Renan’s philology of Semitic languages legitimated harsh claims about Jews and Muslims.

Evidence

Semitic was the scientific study to which Renan turned right after the loss of his Christian faith; I described above how he came to see the study of Semitic as replacing his faith and enabling a critical future relation with it. … In intention, if not perhaps in achievement—interestingly, few of the standard or contemporary works in either linguistic history or the history of Orientalism cite Renan with anything more than cursory attention44—his Semitic opus was proposed as a philological breakthrough, from which in later years he was always to draw retrospective authority for his positions (almost always bad ones) on religion, race, and nationalism. Whenever Renan wished to make a statement about either the Jews or the Muslims, for example, it was always with his remarkably harsh (and unfounded, except according to the science he was practicing) strictures on the Semites in mind. … Furthermore, Renan’s Semitic was meant as a contribution both to the development of Indo-European linguistics and to the differentiation of Orientalisms. To the former Semitic was a degraded form, degraded in both the moral and the biological sense, whereas to the latter Semitic was a—if not the—stable form of cultural decadence. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 368

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to later Islamophobia readings: the ‘Semite’ as a racialized category constructed through philology, anticipating the racialization of Muslims/antisemitism the field studies. — connects to: Renan attributed medieval Islamic science to Aryans, not Arabs, to preserve his racial hierarchy. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 347
• SEED: Angle: how a ‘scientific’ discipline (philology) retro-authorized racial and nationalist positions — the epistemology of how scholarly prestige launders prejudice.
• DEFINE: Illustrates Said’s claim that Orientalist scholarship is a ‘fiction invented in the philological laboratory’ — the construction of the Semite as an object of knowledge.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 368