Renan built a distinct Semitic philology modeled on Bopp’s Indo-European science

Evidence

The edifice was nothing less than “la science historique de l’esprit humain,” now in the process of being built stone by stone. Just as Quatremère was not of this age, so Renan in his work was determined to be of it. Moreover, if the Orient had been hitherto identified exclusively and indiscriminately with India and China, Renan’s ambition was to carve out a new Oriental province for himself, in this case the Semitic Orient. He had no doubt remarked the casual, and surely current, confusion of Arabic with Sanskrit (as in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, where the fateful talisman’s Arabic script is described as Sanskrit), and he made it his job accordingly to do for the Semitic languages what Bopp had done for the Indo-European: so he said in the 1855 preface to the comparative Semitic treatise. Therefore Renan’s plans were to bring the Semitic languages into sharp and glamorous focus à la Bopp, and in addition to elevate the study of these neglected inferior languages to the level of a passionate new science of mind à la Louis Lambert. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 366

Categorization

• XREF: The carving out of a separate ‘Semitic Orient’ as its own province prefigures the racialized division of peoples that later critical race theory and Islamophobia scholarship build on.
• QUESTION: Renan calls the Semitic languages ‘neglected inferior languages’ — worth tracing how his philology encodes racial hierarchy even as it elevates their study.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 366