Renan’s racial theory held that civilisation could override race

Evidence

Renan was clear that he was concerned with making ‘judgements about races’. Yet as Robert D. Priest has argued, Renan’s understanding of race was much more nuanced and difficult to pin down than many scholars have given credit. In his Histoire générale, Renan argued for the limitations of the influence of race, and pointed to the example of contemporary ‘Israelites’ who had surpassed their Semitic heritage thanks to the effects of ‘civilisation’: [T]he primordial influence of race, as immense a part that it plays in the dynamics of human affairs, is offset by a crowd of other influences, which sometimes seem to overcome or even smother [étouffer] entirely that of blood. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 643

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later distinctions between antisemitism and Islamophobia as racial vs cultural/religious categories, and to broader debates about the racialisation of Jews in nineteenth-century Europe. — connects to: Renan attributed medieval Islamic science to Aryans, not Arabs, to preserve his racial hierarchy. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 347