Renan framed Christianity as Judaism’s fulfilled purpose and racial-cultural endpoint

Evidence

Christianity, he argued, ‘is the realisation … [,] the goal, the final cause of Judaism … the masterpiece of Judaism, its glory, the summation of its evolution’. Indeed, Renan judged that it was ‘by Christianity that Judaism truly conquered the world’. There is evidence to suggest that he thought of a Semitic-Aryan/Jewish- Christian symbiosis. He did use the term ‘Judeo-Christianity’. And he contended that Indo-Europeans—the racial basis of white, Christian Europe—sprang from the same space as the Semites: the region of the ‘Belourtag’ or Hindu Kush mountains; Semites and Aryans were thus like twins. They were both white, and together constituted the highest level of racial civilisation. In their reciprocal relationship, they gave the world morality and religion: Aryans developed philosophy and science, and Semites produced religion—that is to say, true religion in the shape of Abrahamic monotheism. Nevertheless, Renan did not view Semites and Aryans as equals, or as inhabiting the same civilisational time frame. He possessed a diachronic and supersessionist conception of racial civilisational development: the Semitic moment ended with the coming of Christianity, which, in the hands of the Aryans, or Indo-Europeans, took up the baton of progress. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 646

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to supersessionist theology debates and to racialized accounts of religious history; echoes the Judaism-as-prerequisite framing seen in Comtean/Nazi racial hierarchy scholarship.
• DEFINE: Clarifies Renan’s core scheme: Aryans = philosophy/science; Semites = religion — a division that does racial work while claiming kinship.