Renan defined Semitic geographically as desert nomadism, not as race

Evidence

Renan did not like the term Semitic, which he attributed to Eichhorn. He argued that some of the peoples who had spoken ‘Semitic’ languages, such as Phoenicians and certain Arab tribes, were not descendants of Sem, as set out in Genesis chapter 10. And others who did belong to that lineage spoke non-‘Semitic’ languages, he claimed. Instead of Semitic, Renan preferred the appellation ‘syro-arabes’, but he used Semitic nonetheless because, for all of his reservations, it was a simple and conventional term. Semitic had become by the middle of the nineteenth century part of the terminological furniture of Orientalism. Yet despite his scepticism about the label of Sem, his analysis was deeply influenced by the Genesis framework—‘this precious document’. For Renan, the sense of that text and the name Sem was ultimately geographical: it referred to ‘the middle zone of the earth, without distinction of race’. Geography was absolutely central to his explanation of the Semitic religious achievement of Abrahamic monotheism. The isolated nomadic tribal life of the tent, of the desert, in Western Asia produced, he argued, the culture of simplicity and purification that enabled the birth of Judaism and then Islam. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 649

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that the ‘Semitic’ category in 19th-century Orientalism was understood by Renan as a geographical/desert-nomad concept despite the Biblical genealogical label.
• XREF: Connects to Orientalism scholarship (Said) and to how racial categories get naturalized as science while remaining theological in origin.